Real Fitness for Real Women: A Unique Workout Program for the Plus-Size Woman

"Women don't have to be thin to be fit," writes Rochelle Rice. Fitness is not about weight, but about the body, mind, and spirit. Her exercise program, designed for the physical and psychological needs of plus-size women, aims to empower women to get active and reclaim the joy of movement. Real Fitness for Real Women emphasizes exercising for the health and psychological benefits--and the pleasure of it!--rather than for weight loss.

Most exercise books, videos, and gyms, frankly, are demoralizing for large-size women. They usually emphasize the goal of slimness, with impossibly slender women demonstrating exercise routines that would be uncomfortable, even risky, for large women. Rice, instead, studied the biomechanics of large women and developed a six-week, 25-exercise program based on their particular needs.

Everything you need is here: step-by-step warm-up, aerobic dance (starting with just five minutes), strength training (without weights), stretching, and meditation. Each exercise is explained clearly and most are illustrated by photographs of plus-size women. Unfortunately, the aerobic moves are not illustrated, which can make them confusing to novice exercisers. (An accompanying video would be wonderful.)

Besides the exercise program, Rice emphasizes the emotional and spiritual components: getting motivated, creating support, and battling binges, illustrated using stories about other large women. Rice is a certified fitness trainer with a master's degree in plus-size exercise. --Joan Price

Real Fitness for Real Women: A Unique Workout Program for the Plus-Size Woman is A breakthrough exercise solution that thousands of plus-size women are talking about. In just one session a week, certified fitness instructor Rochelle Rice takes you through a series of special routines that can boost your metabolism, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, and make your body more firmno matter what you weigh. You will feel empowered, not pressured energized, not exhausted.


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Nutrition for Health, Fitness and Sport

Melvin Williams has written a nice book on sports nutrition. He takes a chapter to cover every nutrient including supplementation and athletic performance in regards to that nutrient. He also covers fluid and electrolytes. He also includes weight loss, weight gain chapters that are very useful for any athlete of any level.
This fitness book might serve the purpose of an athlete, but may not be good for a typical student or non-student.
It has cited too many references, as if it is for a student pursuing a research program. An average undergraduate student has no time to scan through piles of references cited in this nutrition book.


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Principles and Labs for Fitness and Wellness

Principles and Labs for Fitness and Wellness is the best new fitness book if you wanna develop an enjoyable physical fitness and wellness programs. This fitness book was released on February 19,2009. This book offers the necessary motivation and techniques for health and fitness, from sports nutrition and stress management to flexibility and strength. Featuring over 150 pieces of engaging art, this book has perforated laboratory worksheets at the end of each chapter help users analyze and understand concepts, and move to the next state of behavioral modification. With Hoeger/Hoeger, users learn how to take control of their personal health and lifestyle habits so they can make a constant and deliberate effort to stay healthy and realize their potential for well being.


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5-Factor Fitness: The Diet and Fitness Secret of Hollywood's A-List

5 Factor Fitness is almost, but not all, of our favorite fitness book. Pasternak has done a good job in setting a realistic and concise fitness and diet regimen. There are a number of positives to recommend good, and some of the negative we find in other books. This is a thin 182 pages, including index. Most sections have really useful content. Some other books are needlessly fluffed have decided to punt upset your gourd dipper from the last page is mercifully when reached. In BFL for Women comes to mind.

Pasternak exercise routine is very short, only 25 minutes from 30 minutes a day, in our opinion, it defines the exercise routine is very good. It is based on free weights and a weight bench. This can be done in the gym or at home with a relatively modest investment (this is a big plus for us). No gimmicks, no fads, no colorful bouncy or stretchy thingies, no thousand dollar pec-decks, etc. Just 5 minutes cardio, 10 minutes strength training, 5 minutes core, and 5 minutes of cardio. Some tidbits that ring true to us: The dropout rate in the diet (and exercise?) Programs is surprisingly high, because the rigor of the program outweighs the benefits. The author is considering the development of balanced muscle development and muscle development that fits your body type is best. He thinks treadmills are the best cardio machine.


Similar meeting you exercise regimen, Pasternak's diet recommendations are also good, realistic, and free mode: "quality protein," reduced fat, raising the glycemic index, sugar-free drinks (of course he believes in the wisdom of sugar blood to maintain stable), not to count, 1 cheat day. The overall strategy is a short but complete exercise 5 days a week, low food, improving your metabolism, and work toward increasing your rat-to-vet ratio. We really don't think you can get much better advice than this opinion.




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Age Defying Fitness: Making the Most of Your Body for the Rest of Your Life

Everybody wanna fight with aging. Everybody need antidote to aging. What antidote which effectively fight against aging? Activity is an antidote to aging. But, what kind of activity do you need to fight against aging? "Age Defying Fitness: Making the Most of Your Body for the Rest of Your Life" can answer this question.

To answer this question, this fitness book begins by fitness assessment to evaluate your physical performance so you can identify those areas that you need the most work in. Thus, you complete five tests that assess your posture, strength, balance, flexibility, and endurance- or what the book calls "the five domains."

After finishing these tests, you should have a pretty good idea of what areas you need the most work on. From there, you just go to the posture chapter or the balance chapter, or the strength chapter and so on- whatever chapters you need the most.

Each chapter contains additional "tests" for the reader to do to further hone in on problem areas. These are kinda neat and very easy for just about anybody to do. After these specific tests, easy-to-do exercises are provided. For instance, the posture chapter contains a lot of stretching exercises. the strengthening exercises use a theraband which comes with the book, the balance exercises (there are eight) are simple i.e. stand on one leg, flexibility exercises which cover your neck area down to your legs, and endurance exercises such as walking, jumping rope, cycling or using treadmill.

The book ends with a brief chapter called "Putting It All Together" which ties up loose ends such as coping with soreness and staying consitent with exercise.


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The Rider's Fitness Program

Here is the perfect book for beginning Riders, the muscles they knew they had before, advanced Riders want to stay on top form (especially when they get older), and weather-bound Riders not to During the winter but want to get to the source.

The onset of Health Program Details Fun and six week program that strengthens the muscles Riders use while improving overall balance, flexibility and coordination. The fitness book offers more than 85 exercises designed to provide new drivers about the disease started and experienced Riders sharpen their skills and techniques and avoid injuries. The final goal is, of course, to achieve "unity" in the horse.

The work is flexible, so individuals who may need them for workout jumping, dressage, reining, endurance, polo, or rodeo. The exercises are step-by-step photos showing how the various proposals are properly (with emphasis on safety). The exercises are progressive, from basic to advanced, and for the Riders at all levels of fitness.

The author also provides basic information about nutrition, health and safety, and what clothes and equipment are needed.

The onset of Health Program is a comprehensive guide for Riders of all experience levels, with workout routines for every type of riding discipline.


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30-Day Diet and Fitness Plan for the Strongest, Sexiest You

Making the Cut: The 30-Day Diet and Fitness Plan for the Strongest, Sexiest You is written by Jillian Michaels. She is a trainer on NBC's The Biggest Loser.

Jillian pushes to get us in "the best and sexiest body shape of our life." Assuming we are already in fairly decent shape, if we have 20 or less pounds to shed and are willing to make the commitment, Jillian Michaels promises to have readers "feeling comfortable running in a bikini." Determining body fat percentage and taking a "fit test" is par for the course in this sort of book. What separates Jillian Michaels' program is that she bases the diet on whether a person is a "slow oxidizer, balanced oxidizer, or fast oxidizer." The idea is that slow oxidizers require more carbohidrats, while fast oxidizers need higher percentages of protein. Michaels provides three different sets of menus and recipes (she claims that there is sound science behind this, but do not expect to see helpful footnotes quoting clinical studies). The majority of this fitness plan book is list-like and not invigorating to read. A glut of trainer-driven fitness books seem to be hitting stands lately; this one only stands out if you accept her notion of oxidizing.

Jillian goes on to explain that the recipes make up to 10 - 12 servings for the following reasons: Most women do not want to make separate meals for their families. Also, the fitness book allots each reader with and individualized calorie allowance. As some of the recipes are very low calorie, some people doing the plan will require up to 5 servings of each recipe. Last, if we always on the run and finding it difficult to cook every night this fitness book will solve our problem. This way we will have healthy food prepared when you are pressed for time. All that said, she specifically mentions in the fitness book that if we want to make less food we can simply cut the ingredients in half and the meal will still come out perfectly making half the servings.

With regard to the workouts: There are over 100 separate exercises in the fitness book and less then 10 of them require gym equipment. The workouts seem predominantly designed to utilize body weight exercises (no gym required).

The workouts do seem tough, that is for sure. However, we can easily modify the exercises to accomodate our fitness level. Jillian offers over 8 variations of plank exercise, 11 different variations of lunges, 8 variations of push ups, and 8 variations of squats just to name a few. For those that do not have a treadmill accessible she offers up over 10 different types of cardio workout intervals that require no equipment like mountain climbers, butt kicks, squat jacks etc.

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