Body by Science: A Research Based Program to Get the Results You Want in 12 Minutes a Week [Paperback]

I'm the sort of person who isn't a gym rat, but would love to figure out how to go about increasing my strength and fitness in the most effective way (the less time spent at the gym the better!).
I have a mostly ectomorphic, somewhat mesomorphic build and, before buying this book, was training using a 3 day split routine. Basically 1 or 2 warm up sets, followed by 2 or 3 heavy sets per exercise - never to failure, but not far off. I was spending about 2 or 3 hours a week at the gym.

The book ticks some boxes for me by appearing to take a reasonably scientific approach - and adds a big fat cherry on top by concluding that one 12 minute session a week is all you need to maximise "health" and "fitness".
Bare in mind that "health" and "fitness" are very loosely defined words, the book makes a point of this and so the authors define them for themselves. Their definitions are hard to argue with, but not impossible. For example, the way a modern day athlete trains would not be considered "healthy" by their definition because the extreme exercise is likely to cause joint damage, or other injuries.

The main recommendation made by the book is the superslow, one-set to failure approach - otherwise known as HIT (high intensity training). On top of that, only 5 exercises are performed and each set is timed, rather than counting repetitions.

I tried the approach advocated by this book for 2 months. Here are a few of the difficulties I had with it:
1) Timing sets is not easy without someone (like a trainer) doing it for you. For exercises that require both hands (all but one of them), you find that reaching from the stopwatch to the weights and back again takes an unknown number of seconds, making the timing quite inaccurate.
2) The book suggests a 20 second rep... impossible to time without a helper or a clock in front of your face.
3) The book recommends using special machines that adjust the weight to make up for stronger and weaker points of a movement. My gym doesn't have this so I found I got stuck at weak points every time, perhaps it isn't important, but it's frustrating.

But I'd forgive all of these minor annoyances if it works, of course!
So did it work?
Well I found that I didn't manage to increase my time at all, week on week, nor the weight. Also, should you ever want to switch the order of the exercises, you'll find your timing gets all messed up due to the different level of exhaustion at the start of the exercise.
12 minutes for the big 5 exercises? Nope, more like half an hour at least, unless you happen to have a trainer doing your timing and a gym with all the machines lined up next to each other & free.

The nail in the coffin for me was that today I decided to go back to my old routine to check if I was still capable of doing it. Only just, if anything I was slightly weaker, so it seems to have just about done the job of maintenance.
My weight didn't increase, neither did any measurements that mattered. Whereas I'd been seeing regular increases in both using my old routine.

Conclusion: For me, it didn't do what it seems to claim, but is useful for maintaining if for some reason only one gym session a week is possible. It's possible that I happened to have reached a natural road block just before switching to HIT, but the book claims that a persons genetic peak is reached about 2 years after starting to train in this way - I have been training for less than 1.
If you are untrained, it may well help. But don't think that 12 minutes a week (more likely half an hour) using this approach is going to be easy. The session is extremely difficult and requires that you ignore every part of your body that is screaming to stop. If you don't have very strong will power, a trainer might be required.

For me, the search goes on.

*** UPDATE ***
I went back to my old routine after trying the methods in this book as described above. A couple of weeks in and I was gaining again faster than ever and have been since then (a month in total). I guess that means I wasn't hitting a natural road block, but just that the HIT routine wasn't working for me.
Seems to be a fantastic maintenance/rest-period workout though. =)

If you are looking for the usual steroid enhanced (loaded) bodybuilder photos training schedules etc. this is not the book for you.
However if you are looking for solid research based information, some of which you may at first have difficulty accepting, especially if you are somewhat addicted to the gym, then this book is a great resource.
You will surely be surprised at how little but how hard you really need to exercise But any one prepared for the challenge will certainly maximize his gains.

I learned about high intensity training only recently by reading a couple of books by Mike Mentzer and experimenting with this way of training.

Many of the principles explained in this book are exactly the same exposed in Mentzer's books, and I suspect the whole HIT technique can be summarized in a few paragraphs, but the authors of this book also explain the many health benefits of this form of training.

I think this book is really about achieving a better health through exercise. While Mentzer's book are mainly targeted at bodybuilding enthusiasts, this book can be valuable for everyone, from the 16 to the 60 years old.

At times the medical explanation in this book does get a tad tedious, but you can easily skip a paragraph or two looking for the plain English explanation that invariably follows.

As stated in the title: best book on HIT I've read so far.