INTRODUCTION

The most precious commodity in our lives is time. Once spent it is irretrievable, impossible to get back. Each of our lives is made up of a finite amount of time that invariably ends. Some people have the luxury of having lots of what is called “spare time” and are consumed with looking for ways to fill it, but most of us are hard-pressed to do what we need to do within the modest allotment of time that we have. Our lives are more complicated these days; some of us work more than two jobs, and some of us have children who require what little time we have away from work.

Exercise is considered to be important to many of us for the purpose of staying healthy enough and capable enough to carry on with what we need to do in our lives. But are we doing enough of it? Should we be making sacrifices in other areas of our lives in order to free up more valuable time in order to ensure that we are doing everything that we should in order to stay fit and healthy—even if we only have time to apply these health and fitness rewards to our work and in tending to our relationship commitments? Would it surprise you to learn that this author believes that we’re already spending way too much time exercising, and that we could free up most of the time that we are devoting to exercise right now and probably be fitter, healthier, and a hell of a lot happier as a result? I don’t believe exercise should be the reason for your life, but rather an adjunct to it. Moreover, I don’t believe the evidence supports the need for exercise classes, multiple-day-per-week visits to the gym, or taking out a second mortgage on your home to purchase nutritional supplements. If you’ve been kind of thinking along these same lines yourself, then welcome to the minimalist approach—a movement toward trimming away the unessential things in your life to free up more of that all-too-rare commodity of time.

Those people who presently believe that they require hours and hours of exercise each week in order to be fully functional and healthy have, in my humble opinion, been played for suckers by the commercial interests that have dominated the exercise (and “health”) industry ever since its inception. You may count yourself among them; perhaps you’ve already purchased the $100 yoga pants, the $150 pair of running shoes, the cowhide weightlifting gloves, and the cupboard full of vitamin and herbal supplements. But don’t feel bad, as you’re not alone; most of us have been taken in by fitness hucksterism in one form or another over the years.

In 1887 the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche released a short philosophical novel entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra. It was a powerful little book containing many powerful statements, but one statement in particular has proven to be prophetically true over the past century:

Where the marketplace begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

And while Europe’s great iconoclast never envisioned the goings on within the fitness industry when he penned these words, I’m certain that he would have agreed that the sentiment most readily applies. Indeed, the “great actors” have descended upon the fitness world in the form of celebrities and self-appointed exercise and nutrition gurus, with the result that the exercise marketplace now seems to be constantly abuzz with “poison-flies”; i.e., carriers of erroneous information, with the perhaps not entirely unpredictable result that a contagion has spread in the form of harmful falsehoods.

Every new approach in exercise is brought before the public as being the “ultimate” and each has its adherents that certainly look the part. But if you pull far enough back from the din of the marketplace a pattern begins to emerge and that is that the “ultimate truth” in the health and fitness industry changes before us in kaleidoscopic fashion; one week dietary fat intake is the sole reason our society is obese; the next week it’s the fault of carbohydrates; another week aerobics (steppers, elipiticals, treadmills, running) is the best type of exercise one could perform for his or her health, and the next week it’s yoga. The Internet has only compounded this problem of contradictory information, as almost everyone who posts their views online does so with an air of authority and is quick to decry those methods that differ from their own. The silent majority who earnestly seek simple and truthful answers to their most basic of health and fitness questions are left confused, as the answers they are presented with are anything but simple and seldom truthful.

Then there is the transitory societal standard of how a male and female body should appear, which seems to shift and change with each passing decade like clouds in the sky. As hard as it may be for our youth of today to imagine, it wasn’t always de rigueur to be thin with highly defined muscles. As proof one need only to look to our celebrities from the past. Actors from the 1950s, such as Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, both of whom influenced millions with their physical appearance and were looked upon as representing the ideals of their day in terms of male and female body types, are, by present-day standards, considered to be rather pedestrian in terms of their respective appearances. Even further back, the overflowing ladies of Rubens, the buxom lasses of Rembrandt, and even Raphael’s Madonnas were all rather physically prosperous. Alas, no more. Today our actors have bodies that look like competitive bodybuilders (and many of them are willing to take the steroids and other drugs necessary to achieve that look), while the models who pose for the cameras of corporations such as Victoria Secret and Calvin Klein likewise display a professional bodybuilder’s low level of body fat and are held up as representing the standard of how we should look in our undergarments. Our film stars, models, and elite athletes have both created and continued to fuel a mythology of image that not only has altered our perception of how we think we should look, but that has also spawned a national (indeed, a global) desire to become slimmer and leaner. And the primary (if not sole) beneficiary of all of this attention to muscles and leanness has been the health and fitness industry.

Walk into any health food store or thumb through the pages of any fitness magazine and there on the shelves and pages are products proclaiming transformative (and in many cases spectacularly transformative) properties that can be yours upon purchase. A myriad fitness centers join in the call, beckoning us with the allure of dramatic improvements in our appearance being but the purchase of a gym membership away. A casual stroll through any of these facilities reveals a smorgasbord of programs and high-tech machinery that, we are assured, in themselves, yield the potential to completely transform our bodies and take us from how we look right now to how we want to look. On display are various cardio machines to improve our aerobic health, yoga classes to increase our limberness and flexibility, and barbells and resistance training machines to build up our muscles and make us stronger.

If the whole “gym scene” doesn’t hold appeal, you are told that you needn’t worry—you can still obtain the fantastic results that you desire while training in the comfort of your own home. Many of us have evidently been seduced by this belief, as sales of home exercise equipment, particularly treadmills and resistance training devices such as BowFlex^TM machines, have never been higher. Surprisingly, however, given such an abundance of services, information, and products that are currently available to make us slimmer, more energetic, and more attractive, one statistic has emerged that is rather puzzling—overall we’re fatter, weaker, and less healthy now than at any other point in our species’ history.¹ The question logically follows the statistic: with so many things that are now available for us to take and do to become healthier, stronger, leaner, and more energetic, why aren’t we seeing an increase in the number of people becoming any more of any one of these things? In fact, quite the opposite would appear to be the case; i.e., that most of us are getting fatter, have less energy, and are in poorer health now than we were five years ago. How can this be? This book is an attempt to answer these questions and to suggest a means by which we can build (or at the very least preserve) our health and strength and change our appearances for the better without spending thousands of dollars in the health food store or the bulk of our lives in the gym.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

Like most people who earned their living outside of the fitness industry, I once took as Gospel everything that was printed in the various fitness magazines. The articles were, presumably, written by leading experts and authorities in the field and, by comparison, who was I to question the insights of such highly esteemed authors? But then a terrible thing happened: I was granted entry into the inner sanctum of the industry when I accepted a job offer to write for one of the nation’s top bodybuilding and fitness magazines. This publication (along with several other magazines it released under its masthead) had almost single-handedly shaped the fitness industry that we know today.

I wasn’t at my new job long when it became clear that science, research, and dispensing truth were not particularly welcome guests in a domain where product sales and marketing held sway. Indeed, the only time “science” was brought into an article was when it could be extrapolated to support certain ingredients in a particular supplement that the publisher or one of his advertisers was selling. During my tenure at this publication I saw many articles get into print that contained questionable information and most of them were not even written by the physique champion (in the case of bodybuilding) whose name appeared on the article’s byline. It quickly became apparent that any information that I wished to discover regarding the actual facts of diet and exercise would have to be pursued outside of company hours on my own time.

After four years of working on a daily basis in the fitness industry I left the magazine and began an independent career as an author and fitness researcher, which has continued unabated now for over 23 years. My time at the publication wasn’t entirely unfruitful, however, as apart from revealing the Emperor’s New Clothes of it all, it also opened my eyes to the preponderance of steroids (and other growth drugs) used in the fitness industry. It also made clear to me why any attempt by a normal person to ape the training and diet programs of professional bodybuilders or fitness models would typically end in failure and frustration.

It must be pointed out that exercise is a massive industry. It has been reported that Americans currently spend in excess of 60 billion dollars per year on gym memberships, weight loss products, workout clothing, and exercise equipment.² And while it has taken me over 20 years of daily practical research, I can now say with confidence what actually works, and to what degree, and what doesn’t work. Among the data presented in this book are the following facts:

• Exercise (whether strength training or cardio) can sometimes make certain individuals less healthy and fatter.
• The human body will adapt, and often quite quickly, to any exercise program, which will rapidly diminish any beneficial effect that the exercise program might have yielded. I have labeled this phenomenon the C.E.P. (Conservation of Energy Phenomenon), and it applies not only to exercise, but to all activities (mental and physical).
• Extreme endurance activities such as triathlons and double marathons, rather than helping to increase one’s longevity, can increase an individual’s risk for germ-cell cancers.
• Genetic endowment, which is something that is essentially immutable, is the ultimate determinate of athletic success, and yet fitness professionals (who charge top dollar to young athletes and their parents in order to sell them the dream of making it big in professional sports) largely ignore it.
• It’s almost in our DNA to avoid the very type of physical activity that will do us the most good.
• Taking large doses of food supplements might actually shorten your life and put you at greater risk for disease.
• Running, despite its popularity, is a very high-risk activity and is particularly harmful for women.
• Stretching to become more flexible or to recover more quickly from injury has been found to do neither of these things.
• Exercising for hours each week for cardiovascular health is no longer necessary or desirable.
• Resistance training, once considered to be the weak sister of exercise, is the best form of exercise one can engage in.

The above points are not based on my mere opinion, but rather on an intensive examination of the scientific literature as it applies to human beings and exercise. Apart from the critical analysis indicated above, I also hope with this book to impart something of positive value to the reader in the form of two exercise protocols that have been engineered to dramatically increase the metabolic component of an exercise session, resulting in a far more thorough activation of one’s muscle fibers and metabolic pathways for complete and total fitness. In addition, these two protocols have been designed with an eye toward reducing the forces that most people expose themselves to when exercising, as well as the wear and tear components that typically attend the performance of most forms of physical activity, thus making them a far safer alternative to conventional forms of exercise.

However, before proceeding, I should mention an important fact. In my career as a personal trainer I’ve had clients with a wide array of fitness goals. Some have expressed a desire to become stronger; others have wanted to build bigger, more shapely muscles; still others have wanted to become stronger without building bigger, more shapely muscles, but most have wanted to lose fat, to increase their energy or endurance, and simply wanted to look different than they presently do, and to feel better about themselves. To this end I’ve had medical doctors fly halfway around the world to meet with me to learn of my methods and even had high-profile individuals such as Peak Performance Coach Tony Robbins write a foreword to one of my books and also fly me to Fiji to implement my methods before the cameras of a major national television network. While this may sound impressive to some, I would be remiss if I did not state at the outset that not all of my clients achieve their personal transformation goals. The reason for that, I believe, is that their goals are not based on reality; i.e., they have been oversold on just what exercise can accomplish. Fathers who wish for their sons to gain 30 pounds of solid muscle over the course of a summer of lifting weights in order to play better in their given sport and women who want to lose 25 pounds of body fat over the course of a few weeks in order to look good in their bathing suits for a forthcoming trip will find no words of comfort or encouragement within these pages. What they will find instead is a reality check and a means to better become what they are, rather than what they might wish to be.

I’m certainly aware that truth can often be an unwelcome guest in one’s life when it runs contrary to one’s desires, but it can also be a light that leads us out of the darkened catacombs of an industry that has always placed commerce above reality. Whatever our genetic potential yields from exercise, however great or small that potential may be, it is important for each of us to understand that genetic limits exist with regard to what exercise can accomplish. One who understands this is in large measure protected in advance against the delusions and disillusionments propagated by the fitness industry. Hopefully the minimalist approach outlined within the pages of this book will save the reader from wasting the most valuable commodity that we possess—time. Time that otherwise would be irretrievably lost chasing fitness industry rainbows that only seem to recede further into the ether the closer one gets to touching them.

—John Little