Definitely recommended for anyone wishing to step up their martial arts, this is also a good book for someone looking for ideas on how to add some spice to their everyday training, or wanting a practical guide to sports nutrition.
Authors Christensen and Demeere have clearly been round the block a time or two, once or twice on their knees, and they share with their readers their experiences, good and bad, of different training regimes and nutritional mixes. There's nothing cranky or foody about the content - no shamen or charlatans, no Atkins or F-plans here. There's lots of very practical advice on how and how not to train and eat, when you can afford to rest or transgress, and what's downright dangerous.
There are sections dealing with how to train and eat in order to lose, hold or gain weight, how to build strength, stamina and speed, and a particularly welcome introduction to High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). The only criticism I have of the section on HIIT, as with many of the sections, is its concentration on striking techniques (punching and kicking, bagwork and so on) at the expense of throwing or grappling techniques. As a judoka who has also studied karate, aikido and t'ai chi, I'm reasonably familiar and comfortable with the whole range of techniques, and still incorporate bagwork in my training regime (even more now), but for those who really specialise in judo or want to do some serious cross-training it might have been useful to show how, say, uchi komi could be used in an HIIT context.
The authors also seem to have a somewhat idealised view of the level of control most of us have over our working day - the ability to eat your pre-training snack at 4 pm in readiness for your 6 pm training session is nothing but a fleeting dream for most of us, I would suppose, as is eight hours' sleep a night.
But that's just to cavil about a book which has, in a short while, had a definite impact on the way I train. Most useful for me, I guess, has been the information on exactly what it is the protein, carbs, fats, vits and other supplements are doing and can do. It's some credit to the authors that even a non-foodie like me has actually recently been seen reading the nutritional information on labels!