My friends are perplexed. They’re trying to help me spread the word about The New Rules of Lifting for Abs, but there’s a problem: How do you explain it quickly, concisely, and cogently, so the listener instantly gets the concept?

It was easier with my past books.

Testosterone Advantage Plan: If you want to lose fat and look good, skip the cardio, and forget the low-fat diet. Lift weights, eat protein, cut carbs.

Home Workout Bible: The body you want, with the equipment you have.

New Rules of Lifting: Master six basic movement patterns to get bigger, stronger, and leaner.

New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift like a man, look like a goddess. (I know it’s the subhead, but I’ve always liked that line.)

NROL for Abs? It defies…

Tags: Tags: core training, home workout bible, Media, new rules for women, new rules of lifting, nrol for abs, radio, self-promotion, testosterone advantage plan

The news about my mother gets more disturbing all the time. At Thanksgiving dinner, I was told, she referred to her daughter-in-law with a vile epithet … even though she was in that daughter-in-law’s home, and the insulted person had just cooked dinner for 11 members of our family.

I’m sorry to be vague about what was said; it would be a much more interesting and powerful story if I just repeated the insult, especially if I described the context. But because I have filters, I won’t. My family would never forgive me, and I wouldn’t expect them to.

The open question is whether my mother was always thinking such nasty thoughts about the people around her, and we only know it now because dementia has removed her filters.

If that’s the case, all I can say is, thank goodness for filters.

So here’s a question: How many times a day do your filters…

Tags: Tags: adhd, dementia, family, filters, Media, trends

According to the New York Times, the “coolios” among us — the first movers, the Influentials, the ones who get their fashion tips from celestial sources and force the less favored among us to play perpetual catch-up — are fat.

Not obese, mind you. Just skinny at the ends and round in the middle. In the words of a magazine editor, the hipsters are “proudly rocking a gut.”

The author, Guy Trebay, quotes his own trainer for this passage:

[A]s lean muscle and functionality become the new gym mantras, hypertrophied He-Men with grapefruit biceps and blister-pack abs have come to resemble specimens from a diorama of “A Vanished World.”

“When do you ever see that guy, anyway?” Mr. Morea asked, referring to those legendary Men’s Health cover models, with their rippling torsos and famished smiles. “The only time you really see that guy, he’s standing in front of an Abercrombie & Fitch…

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Tags: Tags: fashion, fitness, Media, skinny-fat, trends

I don’t always answer my email promptly, a character flaw that I’d like to correct but probably won’t anytime soon. However, I did answer a couple of random questions sent by readers this weekend, and thought I’d share the answers here. If this is something you’d like to see here, I’ll do it more often.

And if you disagree with my replies to those readers, please let me know where I’m wrong and how I should’ve answered. With both questions, I’ve done some slight editing for the usual reasons (grammar, punctuation, clarity) and to protect the correspondent’s anonymity.

I’m a newbie personal trainer working in a local gym. Whenever I try to talk to my fellow trainers about functional training and training the body as a unit vs. body-parts style, they think I’m stupid and new and just don’t get it.

I’m intimidated to train my clients in…

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Tags: Tags: careers, email, fitness, journalism, magazines, Media, personal training

I’ve been resisting the temptation to write about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers for the past several weeks. But every time I sit down to work on something else, my mind goes back to that book. More specifically, I start thinking about the book’s second chapter, “The 10,000 Hour Rule.” Even more specifically, I come back to the idea that not all hours are created equal.

The book, as you know, is the nation’s #1 nonfiction bestseller at this moment. I think everyone I work with in the fitness business has read it. TC, editor in chief at Testosterone Muscle, wrote about it in his Atomic Dog column more than a month ago. Chad Waterbury recommended it to me even before that, and finally sent me a copy as an early birthday present when I mentioned in early January that I still hadn’t gotten…

Tags: Tags: books, journalism, Media, outliers, publishing, writing

I spent my Saturday with friends and former colleagues in the publishing biz. When we talked business, the conversations traveled a familiar path: advertising is down, budgets are tight, jobs are imperiled. 

None of which is surprising to the graybeards in our group. This is the fourth recession of my publishing career.

I went to J school in the late ’70s, when the evening newspapers were going out of business. The experts told us that there were currently more journalism students than there were jobs in journalism — not job openings, but total jobs. 

It took me nine months to get my first job, which was at a start-up alternative newsweekly in St. Louis that paid me $120 a week. My duties included driving a truck 150 miles to the printer’s every Tuesday afternoon. I’d play pinball until the papers started coming off the press, then I’d load…

Tags: Tags: economy, magazines, Media, newspapers

For me, this holiday season was more exhausting and stressful than usual, for reasons that are ultimately positive.

I was busy with work, which is great. I love my new(ish) job at Testosterone Muscle, a magazine I admired for 10 years before I finally joined the team this summer.

Kimberly and I were driven like parental sled dogs this December, but I can’t complain about that either. I love the fact our children do things that weren’t available to us when we were growing up. When I was a kid, I got a few karate lessons and could only play sports if my parents didn’t have to drive me back and forth. Kimberly got to do even less. Yeah, it’s a pain to shuttle Harrison to karate twice a week, and Annie to ballet, and Meredith to all the things she’s involved in,…

Tags: Tags: books, Media, personal, publishing

Following up on my post the other day about plagiarism, it’s worth noting that the publisher of young novelist Kaavya Viswanathan is pulling her book for good:

The announcement was made on the same day that new allegations of plagiarism were reported about Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, including one report that she had copied from famed author Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie himself weighed in with an interesting thought:

[S]peaking on India’s CNN-IBN news channel, Rushdie, who was also born in India, said similarities between the books could not have been accidental.

He said: “The passages are too many and the similarities are too extensive. And I’m sorry that this young girl, pushed by the needs of a publishing machine and, no doubt, by her own ambition, should have fallen into this trap so early in her career.”

I say it’s “interesting”…

Tags: Tags: Media

You’ve probably heard something about the latest plagiarism scandal. This one involves a young Harvard student named Kaavya Viswanathan, who always seemed too good to be true — $500,000 advance for her first two novels, a movie deal, a best-seller her first time out, all before she was old enough to drink legally.

Turns out, it was too good to be true. Her best-seller, a chick-lit ditty with an 11-word title, contains at least 40 passages that were lifted from the work of another author, Megan F. McCafferty.

I’ve always been bewildered by plagiarism. I understand how you can be influenced by other writers in ways you don’t realize right away — after reading Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, I found myself putting exclamation points in places where I never had before — but how can any writer just take someone else’s work and stick it into the…

Tags: Tags: Media

My friend Pete Williams, host of The Fitness Buff radio show every Friday afternoon, has a new weblog here.

Pete’s a terrific writer; working with him and Mark Verstegen on Core Performance was one of my best experiences as an editor. And I’ve been on his radio show twice, which was a lot of fun.

So give the man some eyeballs!…

Tags: Tags: Media