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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Book Yet on Weight Training, 4 Feb 1999
By A Customer
Here is a good book. "Beyond Brawn" is a book for those who work hard, for those who sweat buckets, and for whom every single fraction of an inch of muscle growth comes hard. "Beyond Brawn" is for those who will NOT give up, and who will accept nothing less than final victory. "Beyond Brawn" injects the much-needed and long absent "something missing" back into bodybuilding That something is nothing less than the original heart and soul of real bodybuilding--for strength, health, aesthetic appearance and, most important of all, for longevity, whether in training or in its literal sense."Beyond Brawn" is entertaining. It is a good read. Though written to inform, motivate and persuade, the flavour is of author Stuart McRobert's personal mission to promote honest and frill-free training, and he is not above some shin kicking and bare-knuckling to get the message across. McRobert--a well published author of many years in the major niche magazines--is no friend of the "sell them another supplement" miracle vendors. And his stark and realistic standards to which those who want to be strong, and sweat blood to become so, continue to spur "ordinary, just like you and me" weight trainers on farther than they ever thought possible. So what commends "Beyond Brawn" over and above the rest of the genre? There is a chapter on the philosophy of the "hard gainer," and on expectations for just how big and strong a hard gainer (someone not genetically gifted with big bones and easy muscle growth) can become. There are chapters on training cycles that actually work and deliver, and on how to equip a home gym. The book deals with exercise selection--the suggestions are guaranteed to annoy some of the conventional "wise" men of exercise. There is a particularly interesting chapter on correcting training injuries through trigger point therapy. The finest summary--the précis of the entire work--is told in story form in Chapter 3, in which McRobert in his clear style describes how a "wise and uncompromising mentor" would have guided a dedicated, devoted and thoroughly misinformed young man safely and most importantly successfully through years of training--years, that in McRobert's words, were largely wasted and actually damaging to the body. By following the mentor's lead, the young man might have achieved in a few quick and hard training years a body of impressive size, filled with power and ready and able to train for a lifetime, rather than having taken more than a decade to actually make mistake after mistake and paying the price in injury and pain. "Beyond Brawn" captures the moment; it expresses and guides the growing thousands of hard gainers who want the power and the muscle--but never knew just how straightforward it was to get there. Every gym has its hundreds who have real desire and true motivation, but they have never achieved their goals because they have bought into the over used, over sold and overly hyped systems and methods that work only for the genetically gifted or chemically enhanced. Most of are not in the "gifted gene" pool, and most hard gainers will not go the chemical route because it is neither natural nor "right." If you like hard work, "Beyond Brawn" is for you. If you have a deep desire to gain, this book is for you. If you wish to finally get to where you thought was never really going to happen, then read, apply and persist with this book, and you will achieve. I did. Dr. Gregory M Steiner
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by Stuart McRobert
by Mike Mentzer
