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December 22, 2007The New Rules of Lifting for WomenPosted by LouSchuler at 07:17 AM | Comments (2)
September 24, 2007Cup CheckMy friend Joe Stankowski gave me a nice write-up over at his blog, Morning Cup of Joe. And just because this is my lucky month, I'm quoted in this story from the October issue of Women's Health, which is on newsstands now. Posted by LouSchuler at 03:57 PM | Comments (2)
July 14, 2007My Favorite SubjectLeigh Peele just posted a detailed and very flattering interview with me on her blog. It's the first time I've gone into this kind of detail about the content of New Rules of Lifting for Women, and I get into the book's backstory as well. I'll be referring to this one often in the months leading up to the book's release on December 27. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:07 AM | Comments (1)
July 08, 2007NROL for Women Available for Pre-OrderThe Amazon pre-order page is up for New Rules of Lifting for Women, which is scheduled for a December 27 release. It's never too early to surprise that special someone with the perfect post-Christmas, pre-New Year ... Okay, I can't think of any compelling reason to pre-order NROL for Women so many months before its release. So I'll just quote my role model: "It'd be a lot cooler if you did." By the way, if you came here looking for my new, improved, fully networked and interactive and optimized blog, just click here. Posted by LouSchuler at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2007Listen to ThisI'll be on the Fitness Buff radio show with Pete and Sabrina this afternoon. (I'm very precisely scheduled for 5:23 to 5:27.) It's always a lot of fun, and you can hear it live. Speaking of me and my big mouth, I did a new Internet show, Big Butt Radio, earlier this month. You can find the hour-long program here. I was on third, following Donnie Osmond and boxing trainer Rob Pilger. I give it high marks for entertainment value, as the conversation veered to MILFs, breast implants, Jack Nicholson, and ab training. If listening to me isn't enough, be sure to check out the new and technologically functional Male Pattern Fitness here. Posted by LouSchuler at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007See You in the Rock!I'm off to Little Rock for the fifth annual JP Fitness Summit from Thursday through Sunday. Last I heard, there were still a few seats left. So if anyone just happens to be in Little Rock on Friday or Saturday and wants to drop in to hear some very smart folks talk about our favorite subjects, you could still make it. Unfortunately, if you get there by 9 a.m. on Friday, you'll have to listen to me before the smart people begin speaking. But after that it's nothing but the best and brightest. Posted by LouSchuler at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2007A Whole New BlogAnd now the news: I've started a new blog, which like this one is called Male Pattern Fitness. Why a new MPF? As many of you know, I've been unsatisfied with this site from the get-go. I was frustrated with the blog's inability to accept comments from readers (except those Dan Brown fans who'd figured out how to crack the comment-posting code), the site's lack of connectivity to the greater blogosphere, and the expense involved in making even the most minor modifications to the site. I can't say when I reached the tipping point, but I do know that in the past year or so I've started telling friends and colleagues that I really needed two sites: one for promoting my books, articles, interviews, and appearances, and one for blogging. This site works just fine for promoting my work, so what I really needed was a new place to blog. Most of you know that I'm a pretty serious seamhead. I occasionally post on baseball message boards. (Please don't share that fact with my wife or any of my former employers.) In fact, I got the idea for starting a fitness message board at menshealth.com from my clandestine experience with online sports argumentation. For the past few months, my favorite baseball site has been Viva El Birdos, which is part of Sports Blog Nation. SB Nation, just to take things full circle, is run by Tyler Bleszinski, a former colleague of mine at Men's Health. So I asked Tyler if I could join his blogging collective, and I guess I caught him on a good day, because he agreed. His folks designed the very cool site, and I should soon be blogging away on the new and (vastly) improved MPF. Meanwhile, I'll continue to update this site when I do something worth promoting, and of course you can find me for at least a few minutes a day over at JP Fitness. Thanks for your time and attention here, and I look forward to continuing our conversation over there. And this time, you should find it easy and fun to hold up your end of that conversation. Posted by LouSchuler at 04:03 PM | Comments (2)
April 04, 2007Major Announcement Coming SoonHate to be cryptic, but ... well, in this case I can't really avoid it. Posted by LouSchuler at 09:51 AM | Comments (4)
February 19, 2007Bald Ambition TourI apologize for being so post-averse the past few days. I promise you this: It'll get worse before it gets better. I'm on deadline for my next book, with photo shoots all day Tuesday and Wednesday, the 20th and 21st. I'll be a much better blogger after March 1. By then I'll either hit my deadline or give myself an aneurysm trying. Either way, I should have plenty of time on my hands. So this is as good a time as any to talk about the fifth annual JP Fitness Summit April 12-15 in Little Rock, Arkansas. This will be my fourth summit, and I can say honestly that it's the highlight of my spring. I have more fun each year, and at the end of each summit I immediately start looking forward to the next. Jean-Paul Francoeur -- the JP of JP Fitness -- is a terrific host, and each year brings in speakers who offer a fresh perspective on the subjects I write about. I've met some of the smartest people I know in the fitness biz at these summits, including Bill Hartman and Chad Waterbury. Both guys will be back with new presentations this year. They'll be joined by, among others, Alwyn Cosgrove, Robert Dos Remedios, and Charles Staley. But the information-rich lectures are only part of the attraction. The best part, for me, is hanging out with my fellow gym rats for a weekend. Little Rock's a fun place, and, as I said, JP is a great host. I hope to see a bunch of you there this year. Posted by LouSchuler at 03:29 PM | Comments (2)
January 30, 2007Exploiting My Own ChildrenThis essay in Fit Pregnancy magazine is the last piece I wrote for a print magazine before taking my ongoing sabbatical. The title, "Not So Great Expectations," refers to pre-fatherhood fears; the story is about one very pleasant surprise of fatherhood -- my older daughter's love of sports. (It would be kind of weird to write about an unpleasant surprise of parenthood in a magazine for expectant mothers.) It also completes my trifecta of child exploitation -- I wrote about my son here, and about my younger daughter here. I figure it was a pretty good way to bow out of freelance magazine writing. Now that I've completed the entire set, what's left for me to do? Posted by LouSchuler at 05:24 PM | Comments (1)
January 23, 2007Allentown Five-OhI turn 50 today, which is only noteworthy if you consider the alternative. As I mentioned in my last post, my pre-birthday festivities included driving to St. Louis to empty my mother's house of 36 years' worth of stuff and get it cleaned and ready for sale. My siblings and I finished the job a day early, which is why I'm sitting here at my desk in Allentown on Tuesday. If I've given any thought to turning 50, it's been to laugh about it. Fifty is kind of cool when you're in decent shape and settled into a life you enjoy. Otherwise, it's just a two-digit number divisible by ten. My father, by contrast, was completely broken down by this age, swimming in his own corpulence and consumed by his vices. He had a "bad back," which became his excuse for avoiding all physical activity beyond whatever effort was involved in throwing more chips onto the table. (If he'd been a successful gambler, he could've doubled his exercise volume by raking them back in.) What I didn't realize until this weekend is that his problems started long before middle age. We had a trove of family pictures to go through, starting with baby pictures of my older sister, dating back to 1953. Dad was only 28, but already looked bad and behaved worse, according to family stories I heard for the first time. The funny thing about the photos, though, is that they showed a guy who seemed to enjoy being a father. Sometimes I think we modern dads try a little too hard to give the illusion that we're more enthusiastic about the program than we really are, while repressing whatever nostalgia we have for the type of fatherhood our fathers enjoyed. Admit it, dads -- the idea of coming home from work with dinner on the table and the kids under strict orders to let Daddy "relax" after "a hard day" has some primordial appeal. So my first thought is that anyone would look happy in photos if their sole parental responsibilities involved bringing home a paycheck and doling out corporeal punishment. My second thought is that I shouldn't judge him or his life one way or the other. He was an only child raised by a single mom through the Depression, joined the marines at 16, served in two wars, and went straight from the Korean War to marriage and fatherhood. If I'd been through all that, I might've indulged the same dark impulses in the same ways -- gambling, whoring, escaping the constraints of middle-class life whenever and however I could. Still, life is about the choices we make. The darker our desires, the harder we have to work to keep them under house arrest. It's breathtaking to look back and consider the choices he made. He turned 50 in 1975, the year I graduated from high school. His mother died two or three years later, leaving our family with an inheritance that must've seemed like all the money in the world to a guy whose financial expectations had never exceeded his next paycheck. When I say "our family," I mean that literally. His stepfather had been a lifelong saver and investor, and passed to his mother a substantial portfolio of stocks and other assets when he died in the early 1970s. My brothers and I have guessed that the assets were worth at least $100,000 in the mid-'70s, which would be just under $400,000 in today's dollars. But the amounts don't matter. The key is that my grandparents seem to have recognized my father's proclivities, and made sure that all the bank and brokerage accounts were in both my parents' names. Probably the best sign of my grandfather's intentions was the fact he bought adjacent cemetary plots for all of us. We weren't related to him biologically, but we were still his family. This could've been the turning point in my father's life. After five decades of poverty, war, and family responsibilities, he could've enjoyed financial security for the first time in his life. And I think he did ... for a year or two. He and my mother made improvements to our home, took the family on an expensive vacation, and enjoyed some nice dinners at good restaurants. By 1979, the year I graduated from college, it was over. Dad had succumbed to the beast, forging my mother's name on all their joint securities and gambling and whoring the money away in Las Vegas. He'd even sold the cemetary plots, as I noted in an essay I wrote for Men's Fitness magazine a decade ago. My parents separated that year and divorced soon after. He spent the rest of his life squabbling over alimony and child support. (My youngest brother was still in elementary school when they divorced.) Dad died in 1994, alone, three months shy of his 70th birthday. To his children, though, he was gone long before that. To his grandchildren, he was just a guy who showed up in old photographs of badly dressed relatives, looking at least a decade older than he actually was. If you didn't know us, and saw the pictures, you'd assume he was our grandfather. I've spent a lot of time thinking about him since then, and the choices he made. I've diagnosed him as having a variety of psychiatric and psychological afflictions (ADD, narcissistic personality disorder, perhaps some bipolar tendencies). I try not to judge, and I don't pretend he (or anyone else) needs my forgiveness, or that I need any sort of closure to move on with my life. The greatest gifts he gave me -- beyond life itself -- are my memories of him, which I've spent the past few days organizing, clarifying, and correlating with my siblings' memories. In all those memories is one simple lesson: Don't be him. Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal. Don't take on responsibilities you don't want, but don't skip out on the ones you've assumed. It's okay to allow yourself some indulgences, as long as you allow your family the same. But don't put more value on those indulgences than they deserve. The moment food or alcohol or sex or gambling becomes more important than work and family, that's the moment you know you have a problem. I like to think I've accumulated some wisdom in 50 years, most of it mundane. (For example: "A website will never be finished when the designer says it will. Whatever date he promises, add at least three to six months. And that's just for the beta version.") But what I learned from my father is more than wisdom. Not being him is the foundation of my existence. Not being him makes turning 50 a laughably minor milestone. Now, if I can make it to 100 by not being him, I'll consider that an accomplishment. And I hope you'll celebrate it with me. I'll buy the first round. Posted by LouSchuler at 09:19 AM | Comments (6)
January 17, 2007The Lou DownI'm going to be out of commission for the next week, helping my siblings clear out our mother's house and get it ready for sale. (No bad news -- she finally decided to downsize, and moved into an apartment last month.) Since our family moved into that house in 1971, you can imagine how much stuff there is to go through, and how many minor repairs are needed, and how much cleaning we'll have to do. I just hope my brothers and sisters are up to the task, and respond well to my supervision. If not, I may actually have to pitch in. See you back here next Wednesday. Posted by LouSchuler at 04:17 PM | Comments (2)
January 05, 2007Naked People Talking About FitnessI confess that when I first started appearing on The Fitness Buff radio show, hosted by my friend Pete Williams, I had no idea that Pete and his co-host, Sabrina Vizzari, were actually naked while they did they show. (By the way, the link to Sabrina's web page, although perfectly tasteful, is NSFW.) I knew they were broadcasting from a nudist resort, but it never occurred to me that they were participants. I mean, we journalists are mostly observers, right? Especially when it comes to naked people. The weekly show runs from 4 to 5 p.m. Eastern on Fridays; I'll be on this afternoon, starting about 4:20. You can listen in here. I'll the one wearing clothes.
Also, Jeff O'Connell is co-author of LL Cool J's Platinum Workout. Jeff and I go all the way back to Weider, where he started as a writer at Flex when I was still a copy editor at Men's Fitness. He moved up through the ranks at Weider to become editor in chief at Muscle & Fitness before taking his current gig as executive writer at Men's Health. And as long as I'm in full shout-out mode, I have to mention Muscle Revolution, Chad Waterbury's extraordinary strength-training guide. If nobody gave it to you for Christmas, buy it for yourself as a New Year's incentive to get more out of your workouts this year. You can purchase it here (scroll down). Posted by LouSchuler at 08:21 AM | Comments (1)
December 30, 2006High FiveThere's a game bloggers play -- one of them gets "tagged" to reveal five little-known facts about him or herself, and then he or she tags five more people. I got tagged by Regina Wilshire, author of a terrific blog called The Weight of the Evidence. This is a tough assignment for me, since I tend to give up so much personal info anyway. But I'll give it a shot.
Another odd similarity: We both married our spouses in the same year we started dating. George and Laura met at a backyard barbecue and were married three months later, in November. They were both 31. My wife and I met at a party and got married eight months later, in November. I was 36, she was 31. And this is the strangest thing we have in common: His father was head of the CIA at the time they got married, and my father ... okay, I guess the parallels kind of peter out at that point.
If you're ever going to be five miles from the epicenter of a semi-major earthquake, that's the time to do it: when your stuff is all packed and ready for a move. The only thing that broke was a small glass vase. Everything else that could've broken was wrapped and boxed. But none of that was on my mind when the earthquake hit. I later told friends and family that it was like a malevolent giant had picked up the apartment building and was shaking it like a piggy bank. I'd been through earthquakes before, but the shaking had been back-and-forth, which was kind of fun, like surfing in your living room. This was up and down, and I thought my wife and I were goners. When we not only didn't die, but learned that my wife's apartment building wasn't even damaged, I developed an appreciation for building codes in Southern California. Here's my message to all those anti-government types who want to do away with "intrusive" regulations: Go through an earthquake, then tell me why you think we don't need governments to make rules that ensure public safety. A postscript: When I got a chance to get LASIK surgery for a story in Men's Health four years later, one of the reasons I jumped on it was my memory of the earthquake. Having to crawl around in the dark on your hands and knees trying to find your glasses, with your heart pounding so hard you think your ribs will break, all the while wondering how your building managed to stay intact and why you weren't buried in rubble ... let's just say 20/20 vision was pretty appealing after all that.
At the time, I didn't know much about the real-life case upon which the novel is based: the murder of Martha Moxley. The more I learned, the less I felt I knew. Did Michael Skakel do it? I used to think so, until I read Robert F. Kennedy's Jr.'s defense of his cousin in the Atlantic Monthly. Now I don't know what to think. All I know is that Harrison, the hero of Dunne's novel, is a fictional character. So I'm pretty sure he didn't do it.
I always said I'd never do that to my own kids. We moved to our current house when my son was two, so he has no memory of living anywhere else. Both daughters were born while we lived here. We've had the same address and phone number for 8 1/2 years, which is a record for me. My work has changed, neighbors have died or moved, my kids have different friends in each grade -- all the real-life stuff that happens to everybody. But I like the fact that my kids have at least one constant in their lives. I got the idea of one home for my kids from Bob Costas, strangely enough. He started his career in St. Louis, and was still a local broadcaster when I started my journalism career, so I bumped into him a few times in the early '80s before he moved on to NBC. A few years later -- 1990, I think -- I got an assignment to interview him. I knew he still had a place in St. Louis, but I didn't know he considered it home. Since he was from New York, and worked for a company based in New York, I figured he'd raise his family there. But he told me something that caught me by surprise: He said his own father had moved his family around so much when he was a kid that he'd vowed he'd never do that to his own kids. He and his wife had decided to plant roots in St. Louis. He would travel to wherever he had to go to do his job, but he'd never uproot the family. I figured that if Costas could do it, I could. The postscript is that Costas got divorced and remarried, and I have no idea where he lives now, or how often he sees his kids. But it sure seemed like a good idea when I heard him say it.
But when I mentioned that to a classmate, he said, "That's a shame. You're too good a writer." I was a senior, and I believe that was the first time anyone had used the words "good" and "writer" in the same sentence to describe me. I hadn't even been picked by my classmates to work on our high school yearbook. I won't say I decided then and there to change my future college major; I also began to realize I wasn't particularly gifted as an actor, and the idea of nonstop auditions with no guaranteed payoff was unappealing as well. But I know that conversation planted the seed. When I got to journalism school, I was almost comically unprepared. Most of my classmates had at least worked on high school newspapers and yearbooks, and some had worked on campus or local newspapers before they got to J-school. All I had going for me was that I knew how to read and write and had some natural instincts for putting sentences together. When I met my wife many years later, she was surprised that I hadn't decided to be a writer until my senior year in high school. She said she'd known since she was a kid that she wanted to write. I'm still amazed when I meet or hear about young people who have their shit together in high school and are already preparing for their future careers. When my youngest daughter, who's six, talks about how she's going to be a dentist, I just assume she'll get over it. (Although I'm sure she'd make a fine dentist if she sticks to her plans.) If I had a motto in life, it would be "better late than never." But there's nothing wrong with starting early, either. I just don't know how people do it. That's it for me. Now, to continue the game, I need to tag five more bloggers. Any suggestions? Posted by LouSchuler at 07:21 AM | Comments (1)
December 24, 2006A Sincere Wish ...... for a safe, relaxing, and fun holiday season for all of you. And I have a hunch 2007 will kick ass. Posted by LouSchuler at 06:58 AM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2006I'm a Lumberjack and I'm Okay ...I don't normally talk about my bowel movements on this blog, and I'm not really talking about them now. It's just that the story about the bruise on my head starts in the bathroom: Saturday morning, I've just sat down and opened the sports page, the doorbell rings. It's my neighbor, telling us that one of our trees fell into his yard during the storm the previous night. As it happened, I didn't have a chance to get up to his yard to work on the tree until yesterday afternoon. (It's not the kind of thing you want to do in the dark.) I started at the small end, sawing off branches and hauling them down to the woodpile in my yard. I should say that this is harder than it sounds. My yard is pretty big, about an acre, and the woodpile is about as far from the neighbor's yard as it can be. My point is that it was late, close to dark, and I was getting tired. I don't mean that as an excuse, just an explanation of why I didn't realize that the branch I was sawing was all that was holding the bulk of the tree off the ground. And once I'd sawed through it, a few hundred pounds of tree came down on top of me, including a good-sized branch that caught me on the side of the head. The resulting abrasion is about the size of an egg, and I can't help but wonder what it would've looked like had I not been wearing my Mike Nesmith hat. I often think about what I should've learned in my youth that would help me now. Today I'm thinking a lot about basic physics, or whatever subject teaches you to think about the way things fit together. But maybe what I really lack is what can't be taught in school, that thing we used to call "common sense," before it became so uncommon. And I still don't really know why I'm putting all this on my blog. My wife and I have started to joke that our lives, some days, are like a parody of suburbia, with three kids who sometimes have to be three different places at any given hour. And there I am up in my neighbor's yard, sprawled on the ground beneath hundreds of pounds of dead tree, wondering when I turned into a sitcom dad, and why I hadn't noticed it before now. That's when I thought back to Saturday morning, sitting on the toilet with my sports page, when my world seemed a lot less comic. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:10 AM | Comments (2)
October 18, 2006A Man Can DreamAfter my adventures in air travel this weekend, I couldn't help but let my jaw hit the floor upon reading this:
This is not about the presumed titans of the private jet universe like the mighty Gulfstream G5’s or Global Expresses, whose occupants can leap continents and oceans at high speed and in plush comfort, without all the inconveniences of commercial airports, airline schedules and, well, strangers.
The idea of having a jet that big all to myself ... cripes, what would I do with it? Once there's room for me and my family or guests to stretch out and take a nap, what would we do with the rest? Run windsprints? Play flag football? So I began to sort through my actual fantasies, and came up with a pretty short list:
2. I'd like to become such a dynamic speaker that whoever's paying me to come out to their event springs for a first-class ticket. 3. Just once, even if it's only for a single week, I want to see one of my books on a bestseller list. I say this knowing that you can be very successful in my little niche of the publishing world without any of your books becoming bestsellers. And, more to the point of why this is a "fantasy" instead of a realistic aspiration, the only authors in my niche who've reached that status were TV personalities or magazine editors who could promote their books relentlessly, despite the fact they were too busy with their day jobs to actually write the books in the first place. (Actually doing the work is for suckers; the real players get someone else to write their books, voluntarily or otherwise, and stick to the important stuff, like taking full credit for whatever it is their underlings put together.) Still, the dream remains, and I suspect everyone who's ever put words on paper shares it. 4. Free shoes. For some reason, I've always fantasized about getting a shoe contract from Nike or Reebok or Adidas, and getting new shoes whenever I ask. I can't think of a single reason why any company would give me such a deal, but every time I go to the gym with scuffed shoes I think about it.
Posted by LouSchuler at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2006... and Boy, Are My Arms Tired!I spent something like 16 of the 48 weekend hours either in transit to Phoenix or returning, and I'm just getting my brain back in working order. I went there to give a presentation at Charles Staley's annual training summit, which was an absolute blast. Getting there and back, though, was more adventuresome than it needed to be. It started with airport security in Allentown confiscating my toothpaste. I'd thought I was doing the right thing by switching out my regular one for one of those tiny little travel-size tubes, but it turns out I was only halfway in compliance. Because I had put the tube into my shaving kit, rather than in a clear plastic Ziploc bag, America is now safe from my Aquafresh. Never mind that the airport screener had my actual toothpaste in his hand and could tell it posed no threat to freedom or democracy. But rules are rules, dental hygiene be damned. The worst part is imagining what they'll do to that poor little tube once it reaches Guantanemo. The clash of civilizations at the Allentown airport had an unexpected consequence: At some point in the screening process, I misplaced my printed travel itinerary. I didn't realize it was missing until Sunday morning, when I was trying to figure out why Continental didn't have me registered to fly out of Phoenix. I remembered that the flight was at 6 a.m., but couldn't remember anything else about it. So, with time running out, I called home and got my wife to look up the itinerary on her computer. (You never realize how slow a Dell boots up until you're standing in an airport in a panic over missing a flight.) The problem was that I was scheduled to fly out on a different airline, which was in an entirely different terminal. Even that wouldn't have been a problem, except for the fact that the hotel's shuttle driver hadn't shown up for work that morning, leaving me and four other early morning travelers to wait for cabs instead of getting the ride we'd expected. Had anyone even suggested that the hotel's hourly shuttle might not be reliable, I would've scheduled a cab on my own and gotten to the airport much earlier. I ended up making my flight, although I had to do an O.J. Simpson running-through-the-airport thing to get there. They had already closed the doors when I got to the gate, but reopened them to let me take the last seat on the plane. I'm not exaggerating when I say I was within a minute of missing my flight and having to wait for the next one on standby. All for a tube of Aquafresh. (By the way, props to the woman at the Northwest ticket counter who called up to the gate to tell them I was on the way. If she hadn't done that, they wouldn't have let me on the plane. Whoever she is, I hope she gets a promotion soon.) So please forgive my non-blogging this morning; I'll be back on my regular schedule tomorrow. Posted by LouSchuler at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2006This Is the Life We've ChosenI don't often get into the public-figure part of my life on this blog. There's not much to it, beyond my books and occasional appearances at fitness events. But, because I have a lot of material out there (I'm up to 269,000 hits on Google), I'm occasionally confronted with the unpleasant truth that I really piss some people off. I'm not talking about people who disagree with me or raise legitimate questions about my work; those debates are invigorating and necessary. They keep me honest. It's the crazy shit that throws me off. I don't get a lot of it -- I'm not prominent enough for that -- but when I do, it's unnerving, especially if it involves a review of one of my books. Take a recent Amazon reader review of Book of Muscle, for example. The reviewer gives it one star, headlines his review "Are You Kidding?", and then says this:
When referencing select muscle groups like shoulders, this book lists EVERY exercise that effects the muscle group and not the exercises that have a direct impact. For example, for shoulder exercises it lists Bench Press. The primary muscle group for Bench Press is the CHEST with the Shoulders being indirectly affected. The Bench Press should not even be in this category. This happens over and over whne discussing various muscle groups and it can lead a beginning weight lifter to have a strong misunderstaing of strength training.
Put another way, what Ian King and I were deliberately and pointedly trying to avoid was classifying exercises according to "body parts." Lots of workout books have chapters filled with "chest" exercises. Ian and I were trying to change the conversation. My critic clearly didn't want the conversation changed, and that would be a fair point, if he'd raised it. Instead, he ripped into the book for doing exactly what it set out to do. I got a similar slam from a reader of New Rules of Lifting, who headlined his two-star review "Not so hot." His complaint:
Page 13. of the book, "when I conceived this book I had a brilliant premise: I would take every excersive in the gym and look at it in terms of possible role in human movemement." Then later goes on on to list the moves they think are important, even debating what should be included. There is no scientific method to this, only apparently two individuals conceiving an idea for a book. I'm sure there strength books are good, but this a "me too" book on core performance.
I'm going to make a horrible confession about my own ignorance.
There's nothing you can do about these reviews, other than hope that the positive reviews from people who actually read and understood the book will marginalize the bad ones. And, indeed, it's worked out that way so far. But there's another type of comment that some people in the fitness biz get, a comment that's highly personal and extraordinarily deranged, that crosses the line from infuriating to funny. Eric Cressey, one of the really bright young guys in the fitness world, got one of those recently, and decided to deconstruct it in his newsletter. I couldn't do justice to it by pulling out any particular passage. So if you want a good laugh, click through and read the entire thing.
She saw the most recent cover of this magazine, and went off:
This girl looks like she starved herself for weeks before her photo shoot, and has never touched a weight (unless it was pink, and weighed less than five pounds) in her life. To make matters worse, one of the titles on the front of the mag says, “Get hips and thighs like these!” and points to this model.
Cass's righteous fury reminds me of the skinny-fashion-model tangent I went off on a few weeks ago. I don't want to speak for her, but I think our points dovetail into this thought: If the fashion industry wants to sell its products with paperweight models, that's their business. But when those models with that degree of emaciation cross over into our business, we have to push back. Muscles are healthy and look good on women as well as men. To promote a starved, unmuscled physique on the cover of a fitness magazine is an abomination. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:51 AM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2006We Now Pause for a Word from Our SponsorOnce again, I've gotten backed up in answering questions from readers about my books. I enjoy answering the questions, but I always end up with the same problem: I spend way too much time answering the first couple of questions, and then never get around to answering the next five or six in my mailbox. I'm not choosing favorites or anything like that; I usually just pick a question or two at random, give a detailed answer, and then realize I'm behind on everything else I'd planned to do that morning or afternoon. Some days I wish I could be short-winded, but it's just not the way my brain works. My problem is hardly unique among those who write about fitness and nutrition. Some authors put out newsletters, in which they answer two or three questions a week. Some create a system of premium memberships, in which those who pay a monthly fee get forum time and individualized advice from the author. Neither of those solutions would work for me. I don't really have anything to offer that would be worth a monthly fee, and I've done newsletters in the past and just don't have any interest in doing them again. But there is a simple and easy way to get questions answered: Over at JP Fitness, we have a special forum set up to answer questions regarding New Rules of Lifting. You can scan through the FAQs and other forum topics, and probably find the answer to whatever question you have. If you have a truly unique question, you can start a new topic and probably get an answer in less than an hour. I don't jump in on every topic, but there are plenty of regular posters who've read the book and done the programs, and they've been extraordinarily helpful to their fellow enthusiasts. It's really a great community over there. If you have a question related to another one of my books -- Book of Muscle, Home Workout Bible, or Testosterone Advantage Plan -- you can try the general training discussion or nutrition forum. Also, if you're going to purchase one of my books online -- which, of course, is very much appreciated -- please use the links on the right. (They're the same as the ones I used in this post.) I get small commissions for each book sold via those links, and that's how I pay the bills for this site. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blogging. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2006Cross My Legs ...You ever have one of those periods where you feel nervous and apprehensive, and you're not exactly sure why? I went through one this weekend and, unfortunately, something actually happened that justified my apprehension. I knew at least one reason for feeling a little uneasy: My friend Rob Duffield is battling testicular cancer, and got his left one liberated on Friday. In an email exchange before his surgery, I offered to refrain from scratching my left nut, in solidarity to his cause. Rob generously suggested I should go ahead and scratch lefty as a reminder of how fortunate I am to have a matching set. But then something else happened on Saturday: An acquaintance -- the husband of a friend and former coworker -- was in a catastrophic cycling accident. He slid on a wet road, going down a steep hill, and was run over by a truck. He's a serious rider, and was out with a group of riders who knew what to do, so the situation was handled as well as it could've been handled, and he's now in the hospital, in stable condition but facing a very long convalescence. His femur (the long leg bone) and pelvis are broken on his left side, and all the ribs on that side are broken as well, with his left lung punctured. His urethra is severed and there may be some kidney damage. But the good news is that there appears to be no spinal damage, his heart is working fine, and, because he was wearing a helmet, he suffered no head injuries. (A day after the accident, he was helping the nurses do the math on his meds.) He's looking at six weeks of immobility, minimum, to allow his pelvis and ribs to heal. And then, when he starts his rehab, he's dealing with the damage of the accident along with the muscle and bone atrophy from those weeks in bed. Still, at least he was wearing a helmet. I'll think of him every time I see a cyclist or biker riding without one. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:03 AM | Comments (0)
August 22, 2006Baby Remember My NameRemember that scene in Back to the Future, when Marty McFly goes back in time to the moment his parents fell in love, and finds his future father up in a tree with a pair of binoculars, watching his future mother get undressed? Great line: "He's a peeping Tom!" I recently learned an odd detail about my own father's life -- nothing as embarrassing as catching him up in a tree with binoculars, but still not what I expected. My brothers and I were going through a crate of things my father had saved, which were mostly things his mother had saved. We found a front-page article from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, cira 1943. It was about a young marine from St. Louis who had met and struck up a friendship with a starlet in Hollywood, and who had corresponded with her in between battles in the Pacific. I forget the name of the starlet -- I'd never heard of her before -- but the name of the marine was familiar: It was our father. He'd told us all kind of stories about his youth, most of which, we later surmised, were utter bullshit. Here was one that was apparently true, and he'd never shared it. But even stranger than learning about this episode of our father's life from an old newspaper clipping was the idea that someone in his family had actually taken his letters from this starlet and brought them to a newspaper so they could write the story. Who would do such a thing, and why? The "who" is easy enough to narrow down -- three people were quoted in the story: my father, who seems unlikely to have contacted a reporter at a St. Louis newspaper while fighting the Japanese many thousands of miles away; his mother; and someone I'd never heard of before, who was identified as my father's grandmother. We assume she was the mother of Frederick Schuler, our paternal grandfather, but she had a different last name. That side of our family is mostly a mystery to us. All we know is that our grandmother, our dad's mother, had Frederick, her husband, put away in a mental hospital in the 1930s. He stayed there until he died in the 1960s. You'd think that would create some tension between our grandmother and her mother-in-law. If my wife had me locked up, I can guarantee my mom would take it badly. So the idea of the two of them collaborating to make a minor and momentary celebrity out of our father is one of the oddest parts of a story that was soaring off the oddmeter to begin with. That brings me to the question of why they'd do such a thing. Were they trying to shore up wartime morale at a time when the war was still a bloody slog with no clear resolution in sight? Knowing my grandmother, that seems unlikely. I don't think I've met anyone who was more focused on her own accomplishments. She did an extraordinary amount of volunteer work, but also expended an extraordinary amount of energy trying to publicize it. It's a shame she didn't live in this generation, when she could trumpet everything she did across the World Wide Web. (If there's such a thing as a blogger gene, I'm sure I get it from her.) She wanted to be famous at a time when there were few paths to glory, especially for women. Why some people work so damned hard to get recognition from strangers is the subject of this story in today's New York Times by Benedict Carey:
People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown.
Therapists and researchers, including Dr. Brim, have traced longing for renown to lingering feelings of rejection or neglect. After all, celebrity is the ultimate high school in-group, writ large. It appears a perfect balm for the sting of social exclusion, or neglect by emotionally or physically absent parents.
There's also a second category of fame-seeking:
Another factor may also be at work in many people who are preoccupied with becoming famous, one linked to a subconscious but acute appreciation of mortality. In recent experiments, psychologists have shown that, when reminded that they will one day die, people fixate on attributes they consider central to their self-worth.
We were driving somewhere, and were nearly hit by another car. She chuckled and said something like, "Can you imagine the headline in tomorrow's paper? 'Well-known lecturer dies in traffic accident.'" Then she chuckled again at the absurdity of going out that way. My older brother and I looked at each other, having the same thought: Headline? "Well-known lecturer"? When she actually died, it was in a nursing home, and it did merit an obituary in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which had published several of her letters to the editor over the years and occasionally covered her volunteer projects. But there was some irony in the fact she merited an obit. At her funeral service, the presiding minister, who had never met her and had no idea who she was, used that obituary as the entire basis for his sermon. He never talked to anybody who knew her before the service, and nobody who actually knew her got up and spoke. That, I concluded when I thought about it years later, is what a quest for fame gets you: the illusion that a few paragraphs of newsprint sums up everything about you that's worth knowing.
Posted by LouSchuler at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2006Thinking Too Hard About BaseballIt's 11:15, and I haven't yet come across a news story that inspires me to blog. So this is a perfect time to link to this article I wrote about the Cardinals, and how their struggles this season bring back unwelcome memories of another Cardinal team on the decline. Posted by LouSchuler at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2006Back to Live ActionI'm back from vacation in St. Louis, my hometown, and just starting to get caught up on things. First, though, a few notes on the trip: My sibs and I try to get together every summer with our mother. But since there are seven of us, a number that's multiplied by spouses and our 18 offspring (some of whom are themselves married), we stay in a Comfort Inn near our mother's house. I hadn't been to that hotel in two years (last year's get-together was at a niece's wedding in a different city), and was just shocked by how badly it had deteriorated. There were holes in walls, trash in the hallways, exit doors propped open for reasons we didn't want to contemplate, a weird maintenance guy who seemed to live in the hotel but was never spotted doing actual maintenance ... I could go on (lingering cigarette fumes in rooms that were sold to us as "non-smoking"; police cruisers circling the parking lot; kids running wild in the hallways in the middle of the night ...), but I'll spare you. I never loved the hotel, but this is the first time I'd felt we might be putting our kids in danger by staying there. And I still can't figure out how a national chain like Comfort Inn could allow one of its franchises to sink to that level. Arnold, Missouri, may not be the most affluent suburb of St. Louis, but it's not exactly a trailer park filled with meth labs, either. The rest of the trip was a mix of good times and small disappointments. The new Busch Stadium, for example, is a perfectly nice ballpark, and if you have to pay $8.75 for a beer, this is as good a setting as any to drink it. But it was hard to separate the venue from the performance, and we had the bad luck to catch the Cards near the bottom end of an eight-game losing streak. Conversely, the St. Louis Zoo is more clean and lushly landscaped than I remembered, and I've been going there since childhood. We had two very minor disappointments -- a newborn elephant wasn't yet allowed into public-viewing areas, and some gorillas on loan from the Columbus Zoo weren't out where we could see them -- but my overall impression is that an already good zoo had remade itself into a great one. Ditto the Missouri Botanical Garden. I haven't spent much time there, but it's better than I remembered. One of the unexpected highlights of the trip was an evening wandering around the University City Loop, which is a small chunk of urban vibrancy between the western border of St. Louis and the Washington University campus. Every other place I visited in the city was different from what I remembered, but the Loop felt the same. There's a lot more there now, including new buildings and generic stuff like Starbucks, but enough of the early-'80s character remains that I was able to say to my wife and kids, "This is where I used to hang." It's hard to describe the sensation of feeling as if I'm simultaneously 25 and 49, and nothing in between. I don't think I've ever felt it before, and probably won't again. Change is good, but there's something to be said for constancy, too.
Conversely, I've always thought Wrigley was overrated. I've only been there once, and maybe it was just the wrong day to visit, but I found the idiot-to-normal-person ratio higher than at any other ballpark I've visited. I don't naturally have a lot of nostalgia for old parks. I was only six when I saw my only game at the first Busch Stadium (originally Sportsman's Park), so I don't have strong memories of anything beyond seeing my first major-league game in person. The second Busch Stadium was fatally flawed -- it was a good football stadium and a lousy place to watch a baseball game. The old Comiskey in Chicago was a craphole, and my one experience at Candlestick Park in San Francisco was miserable. (Even with a coat and a blanket, I was shivering, and then the damned game went into extra innings, which should've been illegal in that place.) Veterans Stadium in Philly was butt-ugly, a sweltering pile of concrete and faded Astroturf. The old stadium in San Diego wasn't ugly so much as boring. (It's hard to build a visual motif around your team's color when that color is brown.) As for Anaheim, I'm not even sure if it's the same stadium as the one I visited in the '80s. All I remember about that one is that it was thoroughly unmemorable. The one now-defunct ballpark I have fond memories of is Tiger Stadium. That place had more character than any other on this list, despite the old-place drawbacks (especially the massive pillars that block sight lines). It's the only time I've visited a ballpark in its dotage and said to myself, "Why the hell are they knocking this place down?" Posted by LouSchuler at 10:26 AM | Comments (3)
July 31, 2006Exit StrategyI'm off to St. Louis for week. I probably won't blog from there, unless I'm so inspired by the new baseball stadium that I can't stop myself. I hope to be back to blogging by Tuesday of next week. Also, I want to apologize for all the recent emails I haven't answered. I try to answer them all, but I have a long backlog right now, for no reason other than my own disorganization. Posted by LouSchuler at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
July 28, 2006Wish You Could've Been ThereI had dinner last night with two friends and former colleagues. All of us have published multiple books about exercise and nutrition, along with countless magazine articles. And our waiter, at one point, tried to give us pointers on weight loss. It was pretty funny. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:23 AM | Comments (2)
July 17, 2006Call Me Mr. ObliviousMy friend Craig Ballantyne emailed this morning to ask me what I thought of the NSCA Conference, from which I just returned. In the course of a series of emails, he asked if I knew he'd started a new blog. Not only did I not know, but in the course of reading it and clicking through some links, I discovered that three other friends and colleagues now have blogs -- Adam Campbell, Bill Hartman, and my coauthor, Alwyn Cosgrove. While I'm on the subject of obliviousness, I apologize for not mentioning The FitCast, a podcast put together by my friends Kevin Larrabee and John Williams. The latest one features an interview with Alwyn, and you can check out the podcast I did with Kevin and John here. If it's not too late to make a New Year's resolution, I swear I'm going to start doing a better job of keeping up with my friends. Posted by LouSchuler at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2006My People!I'm off to the annual National Strength and Conditioning Association national conference. It's in D.C. this year, so I can drive down. (Amazing how much less stressful travel is when you don't have to fly.) I look forward to this all year, since it's the only time when bald-headed weight lifters are in the majority. I'm bringing my computer, so I'll blog if something interesting comes up. Otherwise, I'll be back to feeding this beast on Monday. Posted by LouSchuler at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2006Time Off for Good BehaviorI'm vacationing with the family for the rest of the week. I should be blogging again by the weekend, or Monday at the latest. Posted by LouSchuler at 05:27 AM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2006Hucksterism For DummiesThe other day, I noticed something unusual: My three most recent books all had new reader reviews on Amazon.com. Since I'm active on the JP Fitness message boards, I don't actually get a lot of Amazon reviews. Most people who like the books just email me personally or write questions and comments over at JP's. So reviews of three books in a two-day span is unusual -- and, frankly, a bit of an ego-boost. Unfortunately for my ego, a common theme emerged in the reviews. Here's what my new fan wrote about New Rules of Lifting:
Having been in this industry for a long time, I have read hundreds of forgettable books on weight lifting. Not the case with the New Rules. As a personal trainer and club owner who has hired trainers for years, I have been disappointed with the basic knowledge of applicants. Now I have finally found a resource for my trainers to make sure that we are all philosophically on the same page. It is now required reading at my fitness center. It is the fastest way I know to get someone 'up to my level' in one book. It is very readable, even by a non-professional. Along with being informative, it is also funny at times, and very motivating. It's not just just recommended reading from me... It's required
Caffeine does help you power up your workouts, with no apparent cost to your health or sanity.
Having been in this industry for a long time, I have read hundreds of forgettable books on weight lifting. Not the case with the New Rules.
I decided to check out this anti-caffeine book that my biggest fan has recommended thrice over. Sure enough, the reviewer has attracted some new fans of her own, as this comment makes clear:
In more and more eyes you are nothing but a liar. People avoid them. They do NOT buy from liars and shameless manipulators. Your reputation is everything you have and with your exposed methods you have probably destroyed it and this will doom your probably good book.
Posted by LouSchuler at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2006Where's Baldo?I'm off to Little Rock for the annual JP Fitness Summit. It's a terrific event, originated and hosted by my friend Jean-Paul Francoeur. It's a chance to soak up some cutting-edge fitness information from people who know more than me while sharing some of my own knowledge with JP's dedicated community of enthusiasts, many of whom are regular readers of this-here blog. I'm also leaving my laptop at home and using the three-day weekend as a rare chance to get unwired while spending most of my waking hours in non-virtual conversation with actual human beings. For those who're attending, I look forward to meeting you, or getting reacquainted if you've attended past summits. For those who aren't, I'll be back to my customary blogginess early next week. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:16 AM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2006Song of MyselfIt's been a while since I've used this blog for blatant self-promotion, but it seems like the right time. The highlight: Chris Shugart of T-nation gave New Rules of Lifting a terrific review yesterday:
Okay, honestly, how am I supposed to review this book? I know the authors personally. I like Lou. I like Alwyn. I've had dinners and lunches with these guys. And on top of that, my boss, TC, gives the book two thumbs up on the back cover!
Also, I have a few fitness tips in the April issue of Esquire, which aren't available online. You can find them on page 74. Of the 12 tips, five look like mine, including the first three. And I only disagree with one:
DON'T: Drink protein shakes. The typical American already eats more protein than even elite athletes need.
And here's one that has nothing to do with me: If you can listen to some Internet radio this afternoon, check out Pete Williams' "Fitness Buff" show from 4 to 5 p.m. Eastern. He has Adam Campbell on as one of his three guests. You can listen to it here. Pete's had me on his show twice (okay, so it is about me), and it's always a good time. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 25, 2005Merry Christmas!I wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and, if all else fails, a Fantastic Festivus. I'll be posting sporadically over the holidays, so if you get bored with food, family, and frivolity, I'll help take your mind off all that. Posted by LouSchuler at 06:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 12, 2005Running With BarbellsThe first review of New Rules of Lifting is in and it's from, ironically enough, Runner's World:
New Rules of Lifting
Posted by LouSchuler at 02:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 26, 2005Back to Live ActionI'm back in balmy PA after a few days at Niagara Falls. We tried to do it as cheaply as possible, without making ourselves miserable. We found a cheap but clean motel, did all the usual activities (highlighted by the Maid of the Mist, the boat that takes you as close as you can get to Horseshoe Falls), and all in all had a nice and memorable end-of-summer experience. A few observations:
I didn't mind paying it (I was hungry for box scores), but what rankled me was the store owner's explanation: She said the price of USA Today hadn't risen since the newspaper was started "16 years ago." I assume she had no idea she was talking to a U.S. journalist who knew the price of the 23-year-old paper had gone up to 75 cents in 2004 after staying at 50 cents since 1985. Still, I hate being lied to by anybody, anywhere.
This wasn't a case of someone lying, but like I said, there were no signs posted warning families that the gas station/convenience mart had no restrooms. And why would anyone suspect that? I've never stopped at a gas station with a store attached that didn't offer a place to empty your bladder. So the owner of that station clearly made a choice not to provide restrooms, and not to warn customers -- who, like us, have every reason to believe that the place will have them. Whoever he is, he's a rat bastard, and I hope something really bad happens to him, if it hasn't happened already. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:16 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 26, 2005Back to WorkHow much sun, surf, and hedonistic pleasure can a man take? In my case, about five days' worth. We hit the beach on Saturday, and by Thursday I found myself watching the cable news channels every chance I got, composing blog entries and pieces of book proposals in my head, and reading everything I could get my hands on. I loved playing in the waves with my kids the first few days, but by Thursday I had had enough. I was tired of sunscreen and sand, and fed up with feeling simultaneously scorched by the sun and raked by the wind. Interestingly, my son felt the same way. He couldn't wait to leave. "I just want to get back to my regular routine," he said, and I found I agreed with him completely. Vacations are nice, but my limit seems to be about five days. I guess I like my actual life too much to need more than that. Posted by LouSchuler at 06:39 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 22, 2005Body SurfingIn keeping with my many crimes of technical imcompetence, I managed to book a house at the Shore that has no working phone line. I'm logging on from the local library this morning. I'll be back in the swim by Monday ... unless something else comes up. Thanks for checking in, and I promise (really! this time I mean it!) I'll get this blog going and keep it going. Posted by LouSchuler at 11:22 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 15, 2005While I Was AwayYou ever have a feeling that your personal world is spinning off its axis? That everything that can break is breaking all at once? That's the way it's been with me the past couple of weeks. It started when my weblog crashed because of a server issue involving words I'd never heard before -- "CGI" or "BTU" or "STD" or something like that. Then my laptop began spontaneously shutting down, with no warning, causing me to lose whatever I was working on at the time. I theorized that it had something to do with heat and humidity, since the computer's fan would sound like it was working the midday shift in the seventh level of hell at some point before it shut down. But I still figured there must be something inside the computer that was causing it to work so hard when it was running basic programs like Word, Outlook, and Explorer. The computer is only about 15 months old, with power to spare. I've long suspected it was jammed up with some serious spyware, especially given the fact that every time I try to do something new online, I get pummeled by spam related to that subject. When I tried to register online with the company that administers my meager retirement accounts (I can't bring myself to use a word like "brokerage," since only the first five letters would apply to my situation), I got inundated with financial spam. After buying software online, I got slammed with computer-equipment spam. I hate to think what I'd get if I ever tried online dating. (Aside from divorce-lawyer spam, I mean.) But the guy who does my IT, and who still has my computer in his shop, says I didn't have much spyware in there, that it's just a flaw in the design of Dell laptops -- they tend to overheat easily, especially when a little dust gets into the fan. So now I have to remember not to snort cocaine anywhere near the computer. Meanwhile, I'm almost finished with the final revisions of my book, The New Rules of Lifting, which is scheduled for release in December. But I can't close the deal because of the computer problems. It all should work out fine; the blog is working again (although I have weeks' worth of comment-spam to clean out; curiously, 90 percent of it is for online poker, something I've never even been remotely tempted to try); the computer should be back in my sweaty hands sometime this morning; and the book should be finished by tomorrow. Still, I can't shake this odd feeling that another electronic gremlin is waiting just around the corner. Posted by LouSchuler at 06:45 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 14, 2005Just My Luck ...Now that I have the blog working again, I don't have a computer -- I'm posting from my wife's while mine is in the shop getting all the viruses and spyware and decaying insects cleaned out. So ... when I do have my computer back, and assuming that the blog is fixed fixed (as in, it'll still be working this time tomorrow), what should I write about? What stories have come up in the past three weeks that made you wonder, "What the heck is Lou going to say about that?" As Ross Perot once said, I'm all ears. Posted by LouSchuler at 01:37 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 16, 2005Big RockI'm back from my three-day trip to Little Rock for Jean-Paul Francoeur's third annual fitness retreat. Although the main point of the retreat is to allow the lifting enthusiasts who congregate on JP's message boards to get together and learn more about our favorite subject, the preponderance of fitness professionals who showed up this year made it a great chance to talk shop and brainstorm some future co-productions. The featured speaker was Chad Waterbury, who walked us through the ideas he presents in his "anti-bodybuilding" articles on T-nation. But we also had the two Dr. Johns, John Berardi and John Williams, co-authors of Gourmet Nutrition, along with Don Hoskyns of fitnessinsite.com. On the beta version of this weblog, I talked about my impressions of Little Rock after last year's retreat. They're about the same this year: great town, friendly people, terrific nightlife, beautiful women ... and enough cigarette smoke to take a year off the life expectancy of any nonsmoker who ventures into the place for a weekend. Participants in our conference excluded, I got the impression that 100 percent of the population of Little Rock smokes. And, like I said, even the nonsmokers smoke. You can't step into any bar or restaurant -- or even walk down the street -- without taking at least a pack's worth into your lungs. This time, I was curious to see if Arkansas really has a bigger-than-average smoking problem. The answer, according to this, is yes, although the situation seems to be improving:
Since 1999, the Arkansas youth smoking prevalence dropped to 35 percent in 2001, compared to 28 percent nationally. In 2003, Arkansas observed an additional decline in youth smoking to 29 percent, nearing the national figures.
(In fairness to Arkansas, that stat is from 1998, whereas the other information is more recent.) The Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, is a very fit guy, thanks in large part to my friend JP, who was his personal trainer. I have to wonder why someone like that, who aggressively promotes healthy living, can't use all his popularity and his inspiring personal history (he lost more than 100 pounds) to get smoking out of public places in Arkansas. I know restaurant owners fight like hell to stop that kind of legislation, believing they're bad for business. But the restaurant owners are wrong, so fuck them. Do what's best for the employees of those business and the citizens who use them. Come on, Arkansas: Clear the air so I don't have to write all this again when I go back next year. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:01 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 18, 2005People Get ReadyJust turned in my book manuscript, and I'm heading off to the gym for some much-deserved muscular microtrauma. When I come back, I'm openin' up a whole can o' blog-ass. It's been building, let me tell you ... Posted by LouSchuler at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 31, 2005Spam Spam Spam Spam ...I bought my laptop a little over a year ago. It came with one year of MacAfee virus protection, including a firewall. That stuff works just fine. But when I had to renew my prescription, the best deal included a spam blocker. I enabled it, and for a few weeks, it seemed to attract more spam then I'd ever had before -- every day, more and more ended up in my inbox. Then all of a sudden, for no reason I could figure out, the spam blocker captured my email. All of it! After a couple days without receiving anything from anybody, I figured out where it was all going. And then I couldn't get it out of there; even when I transferred it to the "accepted" category, I couldn't move it away from the spam-blocker holding pen. I couldn't reply to it without cutting and pasting onto new email messages. I couldn't save any of it without cutting and pasting onto new messages and sending them to myself. So I disabled the whole spam-blocker apparatus, which I'm sure is good news to the profoundly evil people who ask me to send them my personal bank-account information so they can "verify" it. Does anybody know what's up with all this? Is there any middle ground between the spam blocker capturing everything and being disabled? Posted by LouSchuler at 07:38 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 25, 2005How You Like Me Now?Welcome to my new, improved Male Pattern Fitness.
Posted by LouSchuler at 11:27 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
January 09, 2005LostI spent most of yesterday organizing our family photos. In our 11 years of marriage, Kimberly and I had never done it -- had never even thought to do it -- so we had packets of photos stuck in boxes, drawers, and corners of closets in no order whatsoever. I commandeered the family room, and started looking at our life. It was a fun job (that's the great thing about being Dad; when I'm not cleaning gutters or unclogging toilets, I get to assign myself chores like looking at pictures all day), but by the end of it I had one overwhelming feeling: You sure do lose a lot of people in the course of a life. I'm not talking about death -- we've been lucky that way. I just mean the friendships and marriages that end while ours, for some strange reason, keeps going.
One great thing about wedding photos is you see friends from one part of your life talking to friends from another part. You don't realize this is going on at the time -- you're too busy getting wedded and received -- but it's fun to see photographic evidence of it afterwards. When I came home for Christmas, he was always around my mother's house, and was welcome and expected at family meals. Soon he was as close to my four brothers as he was to me. But something happened during the trip out to L.A. For reasons no one could fathom, he started in on my mother, making snide remarks, then escalating to outright insults. Those who heard the remarks couldn't believe it; it was not only out of line, it seemed completely out of character. And that was that. He tried apologizing, but my mother wouldn't have it. He had come to her house, he had eaten her food, and then he'd shown her disrespect. Since he wasn't welcome at our house anymore, there was no natural place where we'd ever cross paths. And he didn't seem to have any interest in doing so. We've emailed a few times over the years, keeping it bland, talking about work and sports. But he never mentioned trying to get together, and the one time I mentioned it, he never replied. How do you just lose a friendship like that? I still don't know. I didn't witness any of the unpleasantness. And I don't mourn the friendship; I've learned since that Tommy had made some outrageously out-of-line comments to other family members that no one had told me about at the time. So I concluded that there was some dark side of Tommy that my family brought out in him. Maybe it explained why he spent so much time with us. I'll never know. But it is strange to see him in so many wedding photos. He was always there when my family gathered, and then he wasn't.
At that same wedding, we had pictures of a sister-in-law who's since divorced my wife's brother, and the wife of a friend who since ended the marriage. I didn't like either of them, so sometimes losses are net gains. At pictures of family Christmas gatherings, there were two brothers-in-law who h | ||||||||||||||||||||||
