Review: Stronger

Stronger is a badly written book about an important topic. The book's subtitle promises to tell you everything about muscles and strength training, but then immediately spends an absurd number of pages explaining what the Greeks thought about the human body and what muscles were. Not only were the Greeks absurdly wrong, it has no relevant to the topic of the book. A decent editor would have slashed a good 30% of this book and it would have been a much better book.

The book spends an inordinate amount of time on two characters, Jan Todd (at one point the strongest woman in the world), and Charles Stocking, another record-setting powerlifter. Their stories are perhaps interesting, but to be honest, anecdotal data is worthless for the typical rank and file athlete or normal person trying to live their life.

The book is clearly biased towards considering strength training to be much more important than regular doctors believe. What's surprising to me is how little research there actually is on strength training, and how recent the studies are (the earliest appear to date from the 1990s). There are interesting studies described in the book, including one study that focused on geriatric residents at a nursing home, some of whom could barely raise their hands at the start of the program. The study showed that even at that age it's possible to build muscle, and the effects are awesome --- some residents went from being in a wheel chair to being able to walk around with a walker. Others went from walkers to just a cane, and some went from needing a cane to not needing one. Clearly, strength training is useful at any age and can help folks.

Where the book falls over is that there's no study of injury rates. My experience with weight training (progressive resistance training is the new medical term that the book taught me) is that as you get older, there becomes a very thin line between sufficient stimulus to get stronger, and too much stimulus which leads to injury. The book doesn't talk about it, there are no studies, and pretty much I think you'd have to hire a professional personal trainer to calibrate you properly and walk you through increasing resistance. That's great if you're rich. Not so great if your schedule can't fit in appointments and stuff like that.

The book is convincing in terms of telling you that you need strength training, and that the importance of it increases as you get older, and that it's never too late to do more strength training. It definitely debunks the regular doctor's advice that "walking is sufficient exercise for anyone." It clearly isn't, and the book isn't shy about telling you. But beyond that, the book kinda just fails.

There must be a good book about strength training and how to do it properly at lowest risk of injury, but this one isn't it.