How To Get Strong For Life
$6$10
This is a complete guide to building muscle and keeping hold of it as you get older, written for somebody with no background in medicine or sport, with every movement explained properly and a month's-worth of training already laid out for you.
What you get:
78 pages across four parts
37 movements in full, for home and for the gym
How to perform each one, the common mistake, and how to progress it
Three complete programmes, including a joint-friendly one
A ten minute self test for day zero and day thirty
A printable thirty day tracker and session log
Six drills for the quality that fades faster than strength
How much protein, and what thirty grams looks like on a plate
Adaptations for nine different situations
Safety notes placed where each piece of advice appears
Ten myths I'd like to put down
A one page summary to stick where you train
A full reference list so you can check anything for yourself
Why I wrote it
I've worked in emergency medicine in the NHS for around a decade (as I'm sure you've heard many times before), and a large share of what comes through the doors traces back to strength that slipped away over twenty years with nobody watching. Falls, fractured hips, people arriving on a trolley having lost their independence in a single afternoon. The conversation I'd want to have with those patients is one that needed to happen decades earlier, and the back of an ambulance is a terrible place to start it. Muscle is also the largest place your body puts blood sugar, it pulls on your bones and keeps them dense, and it behaves like an organ in its own right, sending signals that reach your brain, your gut and your blood vessels. Very few people are ever told any of that.
What's actually inside
Part one is the science, and it answers the question almost everybody raises, which is whether it's too late. There's a trial done in a Boston nursing home with a hundred residents whose average age was eighty seven, most of them using a stick or a frame, and the results are worth reading in full, including the part where one of the four groups achieved essentially nothing.
Part two is the dose, and it explains why somebody can attend the same class every week for a year and finish it no stronger than they started. There's one question to ask yourself at the end of every set that corrects the most common mistake in home training, and six ways to make a movement harder when you own no equipment at all.
Part three is the movement library, built around six patterns rather than a long list of exercises, including the one pattern that training at home nearly always misses and two ways to solve it with a towel and a table.
Honest about the awkward bits
There's a section on losing fat without losing the muscle you're trying to build, including where the weight loss injections fit and why this book becomes more important if you're taking one. There's a straight assessment of supplements, with the one that has real trial evidence behind it and the reasons the effect is smaller than the marketing suggests. There's my position on alcohol. And there's a note on what I've deliberately left out, because aerobic fitness is trained differently and protects you in different ways, and that sits in a separate guide of its own.
Built to be used, not admired
Every movement is written so you could follow it standing in your kitchen, and chapter twenty asks you to write down ten physical things you want to still be doing in your eighties, then works backwards to what trains each one. The test I'd most like you to take costs nothing and takes thirty seconds, and if you only ever do that one thing twice a year, you'll spot trouble coming a decade before it arrives.