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Tim's Body-for-Life Quick Jumps Tim's Body-For-Life start page Resources: reviewed links Weekly journal: my BFL experiences FAQ, Body-for-Life (mine) Forum Tim's Body-for-Life pages
Weight-loss Resources (Reviewed)
Updated: July 18, 2003NEW! * Forum on my site. * A weight training plan added. A spreadsheet to find your metabolic rate and forecast your fat loss
On this page:
- Resources for weight-loss and also for the EAS Body for Life program. If you are here for general weight-loss and nutrition resources, this should be a useful page.
General weight-loss resources
Websites and books I recommend
Formulas for metabolic rates, calories and fatloss
Healthy recipes: www.mealsforyou.com*****
You can choose the number of servings you need. The nutritional analysis is very comprehensive, and the page design is simple: fast, and it prints nicely.
Men's Fitness ***** This magazine website offers a lot of free content.
American Council of Exercise has a good list of myths and facts here: A.C.E myths and facts.
A good fitness site *****: Fitness Link
See also Cyberpump,*****. Less fancy but with more advanced content.
misc.fitness.weights website ***** Non profit website based on the Usenet group, great links and well worth exploring.
Database of nutritional information *****
grams of protein, carbohydrate and fat per portion size for over 6000 foods. http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl
You can download the database as an Access database, or as text files, or even in Excel format. How cool is that?
Nutrition, calorie usage and metabolic rate calculator
www.dietitian.com (the best I've found on the web) Lots of Q&A, no hype and no selling from a qualified nutritionist. This site is an example of the internet at its best IMHO.
See my pages for more detail on calculating your metabolic rate.
Books"Advanced Fitness Assessment and Exercise Prescription", Dr Vivian Heyward (now in 4th ed )
A serious text for personal trainers, with lots of information on weight loss and muscle gain programs, advanced formulas for caclulating exercise levels, metabolic rates, detailed and practical instructions for skin-fold measurement accuracy, and all scientifically orthodox."Beyond Brawn" and "Handbook on Weight Training Technique" Stuart McRobert, C.S. Publishing Ltd Cyprus. Buy these books. Read the Hardgainer FAQ mentioned below, read the reviews on Amazon, read this:
Across the internet these two companion books are famous. Beyond Brawn answers a lot of practical questions: what type of weight increments should you make? How can you plan a meaningful twice-a-week training schedule? How hard to you push it? How many reps of squats and how many sets? What about the same for the bench press? Beyond Brawn takes a long term view (in McRobert's view, anyone who has been going to the gym for less than two years is a novice), and there is a lot of emphasis on training habits that will let your body go the distance. The Hardgainer crowd scoff at creatine for novices. Apart from that difference, the Body for Life program scores very well on many fronts, particularly on the recommendations for types of exercises and on the short workouts. The overly complicated set/rep routines are not recommended in Beyond Brawn, though. I am very glad I bought these books. My new weight training routine is based heavily on Beyond Brawn.
Hardgainer FAQ: An excellent FAQ in gaining musclehttp://www.faqs.org/faqs/body-building/hardgainer-faq/
Collection of articles : NY Times Obesity Library ****
Overview: A collection of articles about nutrition and obesity, easy to read. Cost? Free.
Conflict of interest warnings: None.
Newsgroup: alt.sport.weightlifting.eas.12week.contest(a Usenet newsgroup) *****
Overview: The most specific Usenet newsgroup for Body-For-Life. If the link above doesn't work, try groups.google.com and search for the news group . Assessment: Usenet is one of my favourite Internet resources. The signal to noise ratio is quite high for a newsgroup (high is good).
Results from my posts: Typically 1 - 5 answers within 24 hours, quite helpful. Low "noise". Over 500 members, and a good database of messages. Also has a good news page. Three stars because the volume is lower than Yahoo. The participants seem more experienced than the two sites above; perhaps because this resource is more obscure.
Cost? Free.
Conflict of interest warnings: None. Occasionally an idiot will post to the newsgroup, but the responses are humorous.
Official Resources
"Official" means provided by EAS.
www.BodyForLife.com*****
Overview: The main site. Assessment: Lots of good resources here. The Guest Book is useless as a forum, since it is not searchable. No links to the very good unofficial support sites mentioned above. The resources earn it four stats; you really need to get familiar with what is on this site. Better links, a FAQ and a searchable guest book would earn this five stars, not to mention a real bulletin board. Sometimes the site is very slow, and sometimes you get errors trying to submit forms; it's a Microsoft site which struggles to keep up with the volume at times. I think the support for beginners could be better: some example training routines from former champions would be very useful, to let us see how much improvement and what weights were used in the first four weeks. I subscribed to the email list a couple of weeks ago, but have not had a single message. Overall, it's a very good site, and I expect it to improve because it is key web real-estate.
The site seems to almost completely ignore people living outside of the US and Canada; this is only occasionally relevant, and is also true of the book (I can't call the 1-800 number from Singapore, and there are no other numbers on this site: try the EAS site for the direct phone number).
Cost? Free.
Free resources:
Conflict of interest warnings: This seems silly a point to assess, since it is an EAS site. There is a front-page link to Myoplex, which goes to the EAS site. It could be a lot worse.
- Quicktime videos on many of the free weight exercises (postage stamp size, but very useful). It is possible to download these to your computer with a little bit of trickery, if you wish (I used Gozilla to do a file leech).
- Templates for the training and nutrition plans, in both PDF (Acrobat) format and Excel format.
- Excellent Q&A in the 28/12 Seminar and on the Q&A link
- A small number of recipes and Myoplex ideas.
- Downloadable competition guidelines.
www.eas.com*****
Overview: EAS's site. Not dedicated to the Body for Life program, but closely related. Assessment: My assessment (three stars) is meant as an assessment of the site's usefulness to people doing the BFL program. As a commercial site, this is another excellent effort. It gets three stars because there is a lot of nutrition information, and some great freely downloadable books.
Cost? Free.
Free resources:
Conflict of interest warnings: Not assessed for this site.
- The Sports Supplement guide is downloadable. This is no big deal for North Americans, since it is free in hardcopy, but in Singapore GNC sells it for SGP $50 (USD $30). Go to the Products area, and choose Special Offers.
- Training tips: some good tips under the Q&A Area.
- Rest of the Q&A area: all very good. Browse it, you won't be sorry.
www. musclemedia.com*****
Overview: The EAS magazine's home on the web. Assessment: Shares content with the EAS site, such as Q&A. There are two or three articles on-line for past editions of the magazine, and they are worth reading. There is considerable free content for more advanced bodybuilders.
Cost? Free.
Free resources:
Conflict of interest warnings: Not assessed for this site.
- Articles from past editions.
Muscle Media Magazine
For a long time, my comments here were "I will make an assessment after reading it for a while". The time has come for that assessment... The magazine has gone through a patch where a lot of the content is more or less repeated in the book. Some long term subscribers are not finding much new in it at the moment. I won't be renewing my subscription, mainly because I am a bit sick and tired of articles about the wonders of supplements. The magazine is without a doubt an excellent source of inspiration, but there are better and far more independent fitness magazines available. I quite like Men's Fitness.
Comments. Page modified: August 11, 2003
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