Bio Fuel

Like the blurb on the main page says, I’m an award-winning journalist, certified strength and conditioning specialist, and author or coauthor of many popular books about diet and strength training.

My latest book with coauthor Alwyn Cosgrove, The New Rules of Lifting for Abs, came out in December 2010. It’s quite a bit different from the first two in the series, The New Rules of Lifting and The New Rules of Lifting for Women.

Alwyn’s butt-kicking workouts emphasize core training, mobility, athleticism, and overall conditioning; you’ll spend less time in the weight room but by the end of the program you’ll look like you’ve spent more. This book is for both genders and all ability levels. Like the others, it’s complex, and if you’re new to this type of training there’s a learning curve involved. (Any and all questions you have can be asked and answered in the NROL forums at JP Fitness.)

My previous books include The Book of Muscle (with Ian King), The Home Workout Bible (with Mike Mejia and many other contributors), and The Testosterone Advantage Plan (with Jeff Volek, Mike Mejia, and Adam Campbell).

I also worked on two recent books published under my coauthors’ names: Built for Show, by Nate Green, and Huge in a Hurry, by Chad Waterbury.

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1957. (Yes, I’m that old.) My parents’ genetic stir-fry gifted me with big dreams and small muscles. I spent much of my childhood dealing with the disappointment of wanting to be good at sports that required more speed, strength, and coordination than I possessed.

As luck would have it, when I was 13 my older brother brought home a weight set from Sears. We had no idea what we were doing — a typical workout consisted of shoulder presses and arm curls — but that didn’t stop us from lifting as much weight as we could as often as we could do it.

I wish I could say that the rusty bar and sand-filled weights instantly changed me from a Mac to a Man, and all the bullies stopped kicking sand in my face. But it wasn’t like that at all. The changes were so gradual I barely noticed them. I got my butt kicked my first two years in high school football, and it wasn’t until my senior year that my strength advanced to the “average” range.

Despite those modest results, I’d discovered a passion for exercise, a pursuit that would change my career path more than 20 years after I picked up my first barbell.

My career in publishing started at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, from which I graduated in 1979. The country was in a recession, and the publishing business was in free fall. Evening newspapers were folding, advertising revenue was hard to come by, and one of our professors told us that there currently were as many journalism students as there were jobs. That’s total jobs, in the entire profession.

In the nine months it took me to land my first full-time gig, I paid the bills with a combination of substitute teaching during the school year and lifeguarding during the summer. I also dabbled in stand-up comedy until I realized that, as a morning person, I had no business trying to make people laugh in nightclubs. If you had heard me joking around with my coworkers at 10:30 a.m., you might have thought I was funny. If you saw me working a microphone at 10:30 p.m., you’d have run for the nearest exit.

I started my journalism career as a feature writer at a struggling weekly newspaper in St. Louis called The Riverfront Times. A couple years later I tried my hand at sportswriting, where I learned a valuable lesson: You need more than a love of sports to be good at writing about them. The first time I tried to build an article around an interview with a monosyllabic high school athlete, it was clear I was working the wrong beat.

In 1984 I moved to L.A. to try my hand at writing screenplays. That really was the extent of my plan: move across the country to a place I’d never even visited, write in a genre I barely understood and had never attempted, and hope for the best. For the next five years I wrote screenplays and novels by day and waited tables at night. I filled file cabinets with my work and burned through one typewriter after another until I finally saved up enough for my first word processor. Then I wore that out as well.

I put my Hollywood dreams on hold in 1989 when I got a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reboot my journalism career. A junk-bond-financed publisher was about to launch a new daily newspaper, the St. Louis Sun, and former colleagues recommended me for a gig as a feature writer.

So I moved back to my hometown and rediscovered the joy of seeing my work in print after five long years of writing unpublished novels and unproduced screenplays. A lot had changed in those five years. For one thing, the economy was booming, for the first time in my adult life. For another, people were increasingly interested in health and fitness. As the one guy on staff who worked out, I got the call whenever we needed an article about weight loss or exercise.

At the time I didn’t think my fitness articles were any more important than the others I cranked out, but I would soon learn otherwise.

The newspaper went under just seven months after it launched, proving that a business plan based on infinite refinancing of junk bonds works a lot better in theory than in practice.

A decade after graduation, I was right back where I’d started as a journalist: unemployed in the middle of a recession.

So I headed back to L.A., this time as a graduate student in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. I never got my degree, but I got two remarkable breaks.

In my first semester, I answered a blind ad in the L.A. Times for an editor at a health and fitness magazine. It didn’t say which magazine, but it didn’t really matter; I’d never heard of Men’s Fitness before I applied for a job there. I didn’t get that job, but my clips from the Sun were good enough to get me some freelance assignments and part-time work editing copy at another Weider magazine, Muscle & Fitness. A few months later, in early 1992, another full-time job opened up at Men’s Fitness, and I’ve been writing about fitness and nutrition ever since.

During my six years at MF, the last three as fitness editor, it grew from a quirky little niche publication to a mainstream newsstand magazine. My MF colleagues and I won a few Maggie Awards, which are given by the Western Publications Association, including one for personal columns and essays. (I wrote two of the three we submitted the year we won, so I can claim a majority of the award.)

The second break I got in grad school was meeting Kimberly Heinrichs, my wife. We got married six months after graduation. (I can say that because she actually graduated; me, I just quit writing checks to USC, and it worked out fine all around.)

By late 1997, it was time to make a move — two moves, actually. Kimberly was pregnant with our second child, and we wanted to get out of L.A. And after six years at Weider, I needed to move up or out.

“Out” won. I got a job as fitness editor at Men’s Health, a magazine with five times the circulation of my former employer, and in 1998 we moved across the country to Pennsylvania.

I stayed at MH for six years, the last three as fitness director. The high point came at the very end, when my colleagues and I won the National Magazine Award in 2004 in the Personal Service Category. My contribution was a feature called “Death by Exercise.”

I contributed to a long list of magazines, including Men’s Journal, Fit Pregnancy, and Better Homes & Gardens. I also put in my time as a blogger, first at the original version of this site, then at Male Pattern Fitness, which is part of the SB Nation network and is now manned by my friend Andrew Heffernan.

After passing MPF over to Andrew, I worked on a year-long contract with T-nation before returning to books and freelance magazine work, primarily with my friends at Men’s Health.

Kimberly and I still live in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with our three children and assorted pets.