I am not going to lie; I very often buy books used. It is not really about lack of money, but a love of a good bargain. I love the thrill of getting something cheaper than it is meant to be. I went to my local used bookstore one day and passed by New Rules Of Lifting by Lou Schuler and Alywn Cosgrove. I had heard good talk of it, had been meaning to get it, and got really excited for my bargain find.

I went home, cracked it open and literally the next day I went up to Borders and bout the two copies they had available to give as gifts. That is how good I thought this material was, and I think I still got a bargain It was insightful, intelligent, unique, had solid programming but above all, it was fun to read. Most books on physiology really just aren’t a fun read.

To make things worse if you take a look at exercise guides written for women it is either the same material but just with “for women” at the end or it is a water downed version of solid material to feed into the preconceived notions and fears that women have about resistance training.

You can imagine my happiness when I found out that there was a New Rules of Lifting For Women on the way. Now I don’t know about you, but being a woman myself I can’t wait to see what is in store in this material. I couldn’t wait so much that I decided to bug Lou Schuler, one of the creators and author of New Rules Of Lifting, for a little preview.

Leigh P: NROL has become the one stop shop for all your lifting needs. I truly think much of that has to do with not only the quality of the programming but the ease and fun of how it is laid out.

All I do is read book after book on nutrition, programming, health, etc. The trend I find for most of them is really they are boring and not fun to read at all. I remember when reading NROL you found a way to make talking about concentric and eccentric movements fun, truly the Mr. Wizard of the lifting world.

Can we expect the same kind of flow and movement in NROL4W?

Lou Schuler: I hope so! My biggest goal with NROL4W was to make two emphatic arguments:

1. Women need to push themselves in the weight room to get the results they want.
2. Women have to ignore the message that all of them need to cut calories.

Just on the latter point, imagine how hard it is to write an entertaining passage using the word “amenorrhea,” which is one of the extreme consequences of cutting too many calories for too long while remaining active. Even now, it’s hard to even talk about this topic without going into climb-on-a-soapbox mode.

That said, emphatic arguments don’t have to be boring, and there’s no rule that they can’t be entertaining to read. So even when I’m not trying to be funny, I’m always aware that the key to making a successful argument is holding the readers’ attention. The audience has the final vote on whether I’ve succeeded or failed. All I can say with certainty is that I wrote each sentence with the readers’ best interests in mind, including their interest in reading something that doesn’t suck.

Leigh P: I take it since you are discussing amenorrhea that you are getting into the hormonal aspect of fat loss for women. This is an area I take a high interest in and feel it is often overlooked. I remember you saying before when this issue was being discussed “Missing periods and becoming infertile (however temporarily) is about as definitive a sign of a poor health outcome as you can find.”

How deep does NROL4W dive into this area?

Lou Schuler: I devote all of chapter 4 to the argument against calorie restriction that’s before I get into macronutrients or nutrient timing or any of the fun stuff. The section on nutrition and hormones is about 750 words, and covers estrogen, luteinizing hormone, leptin, thyroid hormones, and cortisol. I could’ve gone farther and written about growth hormone and insulin as well, but I didn’t want to show off.

(That was a joke.)

Actually, all this was new to me. Cassandra Forsythe, my coauthor, showed me the studies, particularly the work of Anne Loucks at the University of Ohio. I don’t say this often, but I was shocked by what I learned.

My first book was called The Testosterone Advantage Plan, so I’ve been interested in how hormones affect physique and performance for a few years now. The argument my coauthors and I made in TAP is that it makes no sense to have your diet and workout plan out of synch with the hormones that will determine the success of that workout plan. If you want muscles, you need to work with your anabolic hormones, which means a higher-fat diet and a workout plan that emphasizes strength training over endurance
exercise.

I had never thought about these issues as they affect women’s hormones. When I went to sports-science or strength and conditioning conferences, I’d walk right past the rooms where they were talking about female athletes’ nutritional needs. I know this is a confession of my own willful ignorance, but as a journalist, I just didn’t have a need to know about how exercise combined with inadequate nutrition affects estrogen. Still, when I started learning about these issues, what blew me away wasn’t the information about estrogen, even though it was scary – if too much exercise with too few calories shuts down estrogen production to the point that periods stop, the damage to bones might be permanent.

What really got my attention was the mention of thyroid hormones, which are linked to metabolic rate. Anne Loucks’ research showed lower T3 levels in undereating female athletes. (T3 is the most powerful thyroid hormone.) Being a vain and shallow person by nature, the implications of this hit me right in the gut: If you have lower levels of thyroid hormones, you have a slower metabolism, which means you’re more likely to put on body fat and less likely to put on muscle mass.

I know it’s more complicated than that, and that estrogen is far more important to a woman’s long-term health. But that information’s been out there for a long time, and recent history has shown that a lot of women are ignoring it. They’d rather be skinny now than healthy later. But when we start talking about thyroid hormones, we’re talking about metabolism. And when someone tells you that the exercise you’re doing to increase your metabolic rate is actually slowing down your metabolism because you aren’t eating enough, that should get your attention.

So now, knowing that, I had in my mind a framework to discuss nutrition and exercise for women in the same way I’d approached it for men. That is, if you’re going to put in the time and energy required to speed up your metabolism, why in the world would you negate the effects of your exercise program by following the wrong diet? It’s like that famous line from a recent presidential candidate: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Putting your workouts and your diet at cross-purposes means you’re voting for a faster metabolism while simultaneously voting against it. You can’t win.

Leigh P: Just incredibly put Lou and I couldn’t agree more. It will be nice to have more sources to point to on this issue when trying to explain the proper pairing of nutrition and exercise with women.

Far to often we find S&C coaches pushing their female athletes harder to make a weight, when instead we need to feed them harder. People don’t like to challenge the law of thermodynamics, but I always say, hell have no fury like estrogen scorned.

NROL skimmed over nutrition enough to give a base guideline, does NROL4W take it further on the areas of nutrition? Do we get more detailed guidelines this time?

Lou Schuler: When you try to write about nutrition, you have to make this series of decisions about which lines you want to cross, because each decision you make impacts every other decision you make in that book, not to mention what you’ll say in subsequent books. (For example, it would’ve been kinda weird to back off the big arguments my coauthors and I made in TAP. Fortunately, the science in favor of our approach has only gotten stronger.)

One crucial decision is whether or not you’re going to talk about calories in any kind of detail that actually might help your readers. It’s not a requirement; you can just talk about macronutrient ratios or which foods have magical fat-stripping and artery-cleansing powers and which will turn you into a 400-pound diabetic driving an electric cart through the aisles of the local discount superstore.

But if you decide to talk about calories, then you have to come up with some way to help readers estimate an optimal daily intake. There’s no shortage of metabolic formulae out there. (Cass recommended the Owen equation, which looks like the best choice for most women. But someone who’s exceptionally lean would be better served with a different system, and a woman with a high percentage of body fat would need yet another formula.)

Even after you choose a formula, and show readers how to estimate caloric intake, you have to explain all the caveats. And it’s hard to do that without sounding wishy-washy. Readers are used to straightforward, authoritative pronouncements on what to do and what not to do. Certainty is easy for an author. Nuance is hard.

This is where the authors who aren’t talking about calories and aren’t recommending a specific way to calculate your own metabolic needs get off kind of easy. They can just put together a meal plan with 1,200 or 1,500 calories a day. The readers who can stick to it lose a lot of weight, since the women are probably used to almost 2,000 calories a day, with men eating in the neighborhood of 3,000. If you never tell the readers how many calories they’re eating, they don’t know that they’re starving themselves, and that starvation is never sustainable. In fact, as every health and fitness professional knows, starvation diets often result in a higher body weight and worse body composition, since your body is making metabolic and hormonal adjustments to the sudden drop in energy that guarantee more fat storage down the line.

So now you’ve made the decision to talk about calories, to show readers how to estimate their present needs, and gotten into some of the fine print. The next decision is the hardest — or at least it was for Cass and me: What are you going to tell your readers to do with that information?

Our recommendation is not to do anything until you’ve done Alwyn’s workouts for a month — a full menstrual cycle. Just eat what the estimation says you should eat. If the workouts alone produce fat loss, measured in pounds or inches, then there’s no need to cut calories. If you gain weight, then the estimation was clearly too high, and you need to adjust it downward. We also have a list of signs that the diet and workouts are working, not working, or working too well — sleep patterns, mood, energy levels, etc.

And then we get to the hardest step of all: How in the world do you design a meal plan after showing readers how to estimate their ideal energy intake?

What we came up with was a modular system. Cass created dozens of meals
–breakfasts, snacks, lunches, dinners, post-workout shakes — with a range of calories. So readers can mix and match to come up with the right amount of total calories in any given day. We also have sample daily meal plans with three different calorie totals, but our hope is that our readers will find the system intuitive enough that they can create their own plans in under a minute. You just need a calculator.

In doing that, we made a choice not to harp too much on macronutrients. (Cass included enough protein in the meals that you’d have to try pretty hard to undershoot your needs.) Even in the sample meal plans Cass pulled together, there’s a range of macronutrient ratios. Nothing comes out as neat as 40-30-30.

To me, that makes the modular system more like the real world. In general, balanced macros make more sense to me than the extreme high- or low-fat diets. But I’d be the last person to say that your health will be somehow compromised if you don’t hit that ratio on the nose every day of your life.

The really fun stuff in the nutrition sections is in the sidebars. Just to pick one example, I wrote a sidebar on how wine glasses have gone from elegant crystal to fishbowls in the past two generations. A four-ounce serving of wine looked just right in the wine glasses my parents used. But today, in bigger glasses, four ounces looks like the waiter drank half of it between the bar and your table. So that’s something you have to be aware of if you’re trying to stick close to a particular calorie level. Ultimately, it’s trivia, but it was fun to research. My wife and I have some old wine glasses, as well as newer ones, and I filled different ones with four ounces of water, just to see how different it looked from one glass to the next.

By the way, this is an important clue into what’s really involved in writing a book like this. I mean, if filling glasses with water is your idea of a fun break in your routine, you know you’re working pretty damned hard

Leigh P: I don’t know Lou there is a lot to be said about the fun that can be had with putting your face up to a unnecessarily large glass filled with water.

You mentioned the sidebars, those little throw-ins can really liven up the material even more and was something I enjoyed a lot about NROL. When it comes to structure and layout of the book itself, does it follow a similar format to NROL? Was it meant to be a “NROL2” when you guys started on this?

Lou Schuler: No, no, it was never meant to be NROL2. We changed the title a couple months after I’d turned in the original manuscript. The title throughout the process was Lift Like a Man, which some of us loved and some of us hated. But it was always the driving concept of the book. I used that title in my first email to my editor, when I described this new idea I’d come up with. It’s on my proposal, on the contract, and on every version of the book until just a few weeks ago.

We changed it for several reasons, the most compelling of which is this: Back in January 2006, right after NROL came out, women had asked why NROL was a book for men. Where was NROL for women?

As an author, I think it’s smart to pay attention when people tell you without prompting what they want. This book came about because readers said, “We want NROL for women.”

So even though I set out to write a stand-alone title, it made sense to go back to that original impetus. Why make it harder for the readers to find what they’re requested?

It was surprisingly easy to retrofit Lift Like a Man and make it NROL or Women. I discovered that I’d written a book that was similar to NROL in terms of structure, even though I never set out to do that. The “rules” were easy to write, and fit right into the book’s existing structure. In some cases, chapter titles were written as rules. One chapter was called “Calorie restriction is the worst idea ever.” That’s now New Rule #12. (I changed the title of the chapter, although I can’t remember what I changed it to.)

You asked about sidebars. I don’t know if NROL for Women has more, fewer, or the same number. But if the structure is similar to NROL, I’d guess it has about as many sidebars.

Leigh P: I can see how “Lift Like a Man” would turn some heads. I personally like the title.

When it comes to lifting that seems often to be the make or break point for most women in their training For the training techniques in NROL4W, do you find it to be largely different from the original?

Lou Schuler: We went with a different type of periodization than we used in NROL.

NROL starts with standard linear periodization — in the Break-In Program, Fat Loss I and Fat Loss II, you progress to heavier weights with fewer reps in the usual way.

As you know, this type of periodization is considered old news by most strength coaches, and I see the point when it comes to well-trained athletes. My hunch, though, is that most people have never done any kind of periodization. The first time they try linear periodization, it’s such a radical departure from what they’ve been doing that they’ll make fast, even startling gains.

The Hypertrophy programs in NROL use undulating periodization, which (as you
know) means you do each set of exercises with multiple ranges of sets and reps. In Hypertrophy II, for example, you have three different workouts –
A, B, C — which you do once each week. (A on Monday, B on Wednesday, C on
Friday, usually.) But you have four different combinations of sets and
reps– 6 x 3, 2 x 25, 3 x 12, 5 x 6 — which gives you a total of 12 different
workouts. In other words, you’ll do workout A on four consecutive Mondays
with different combinations of sets and reps each time. You don’t repeat a workout until the fifth week.

NROL’s programs are modular, which means the reader chooses the best sequence of programs. Everyone does the Break-In Program, but after that the reader chooses what to do next, and for how long.

In NROL for Women, we went with a single program that should take about six months to complete.

Stage 1 is like NROL’s Break-In and Fat Loss progression — basic linear periodization, working your way down from 2 sets of 15 reps to 3 sets of 8.

The next four stages use alternating periodization. You have two workouts in each stage — A and B — which you’ll alternate. But you’ll do the same sets and reps in each workout of each stage, striving to work with more weight on each exercise of each workout. You do A and B four times each, so each of these stages has a total of eight workouts.

In Stage 2, you’ll do 2 sets of 10. In Stage 3, it’s 2-3 sets of 6. Then the reps go up again in Stage 4, and down again in Stage 5. You’re also doing intervals and complexes in here for body composition.

You’re working with heavy weights and low reps by the end of Stage 5, which sets up the optional Stage 6. This is a serious strength-focused program, with the goal of getting readers to the point at which they can do at least one unassisted chin-up. Since a lot of guys in a typical gym can’t do a chin-up, readers who choose to do Stage 6 will probably end up stronger, pound for pound, than the guys working out next to them.

Finally, there’s Stage 7, which Alwyn calls “The Final Cut.” This is an intense fat-loss program, with the metabolism-boosting emphasis you’d expect from Alwyn. It’s also optional, so readers who aren’t primarily concerned with fat loss don’t have to subject themselves to it.

As I’ve said, our biggest goal with the training programs is to get women to push themselves in the weight room as hard as they push themselves in Spinning or yoga or triathlons, or whatever it is they do. It’s not just heavier weights for the sake of using heavier weights. The emphasis is on using heavier weights as a tool to achieve better strength and body composition, and by extension a longer and healthier life.

It seems to me that women who exercise regularly are more likely than men to push themselves, to explore their limits. Much as I hate to generalize about anybody, it seems to me that most men in gyms feel that they got all that max-effort stuff out of the way in high school and college, and that they’ll never be stronger or leaner or faster than they were in their glory days.

But I almost never meet women who feel they’ve had any glory days to put behind them. They tend to see athletic achievement as something that’s out on the horizon, and all they have to do is push themselves progressively harder to achieve something they haven’t yet done.

The focus, unfortunately, tends to be on endurance sports, and you and I both know why: There’s a myth in fitness culture that endurance training equals less body weight and better body composition. We both know how flawed that assumption is, which is why we try to get women to pursue that goal in the weight room.

All of us involved in NROL were surprised at how many women picked the book up and enjoyed the workouts. So the last thing I wanted to do with NROL for Women is repeat what we did in the original. That’s why I wanted a different and uniquely challenging workout system, including a different type of periodization. I don’t know how many women have done the NROL workouts, but I didn’t want to leave any of them out. So within a unique training system — workouts and techniques their bodies haven’t yet adapted to.

To me, that was as important as getting new readers hooked on lifting. I don’t like to leave anybody out, especially the women who inspired the creation of this book in the first place.

Leigh P: Jesus Lou, talk about a preview to the material. I love the basic take home thought of really pushing yourself. Women far to often are guilty of doing reps for the sake of reps. Lacking the understanding of what their ultimate purpose is for in a program design aspect. Even in a high rep area, I don’t know many women who should be doing full squats with 5 lbs in each hand, even for 15 reps.

I think, and you really hit on it, that women need to understand how much proper lifting can get them back into THEIR style of glory days. A high bum, “toned” arms, flexibility, and fitting into the “skinny” jeans. They are always on the quest for this type of return but never think to try and find a solution in the sweaty men zone but perhaps now they will. Perhaps now women will find a joy not only in the raising of their butt in their jeans, but the raise of their 1RM on their squats.

I have just one more question Lou, and again I can’t thank you enough for such a detailed insight into this book. I know a lot of women are going to be reading this saying “no, I lifted heavy and I just bulked up and that isn’t what I want.” Is it safe to say that NROL4W will offer them…

-How NOT to get bulky lifting weights if that isn’t your desire
-How NOT to be the one lost in the free weight section
-How TO build the body you want using free weights
-How TO protect your body and eat for your goals
-How TO eat more food because it supports such a solid training program

…and isn’t just an exercise book like any other that talks the same talk but just takes the pictures with women instead?

Lou Schuler: That’s one long question! The grammarian inside me isn’t sure if the answer should be “yes” or “no.” It isn’t a book just like all the others. It talks directly, specifically, and incisively about how strength training works for women.

But I’m not sure if it tells women how not to bulk up, since one of our core premises is that it’s really hard for anyone to bulk up. For a man to accumulate muscle mass that’s measurable and visible to disinterested strangers, it takes months of heavy lifting, if not years, and systematic overeating.

And that’s with all the advantages nature confers upon the human male.

I’m nobody’s idea of a eunuch, but I was stuck at a skinny 165 pounds for close to 20 years, even though I was trying like hell to big bigger.

I have no idea how a woman could possibly do that by accident. I’m not saying there aren’t women out there with the genetic potential to put on a few pounds of muscle. I just don’t know how they could do it without dedicating their lives to that singular goal.

One of my favorite features of New Rules of Lifting for Women is the way we demonstrate the benefits of putting on just a pound or two of muscle. If a reader can do that in five or six months, while taking off four or five pounds of fat, she’s going to see a dramatic difference in the way she looks and the way she feels.

Plus, she’ll be a lot stronger, which of course is the reason we’re lifting weights in the first place. I hope our book puts the “strength” back in “strength training” for women, just as NROL tried to do for men. A stronger body is a healthier body, and if you follow our programs, that stronger, healthier body can also be leaner, which is the point at which it all pays off.

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You can pre-order New Rules Of Lifting here at Amazon.com –New Rules of Lifting For Women

You can find out more about Lou Schuler by checking out his site http://www.louschuler.com/ or his blog http://www.malepatternfitness.com/