If you like lifting weights, if you want to learn more about strength training - you will love this book. Powerlifting is a sport that tests your constitution, discipline, dedication, and pushes your body to its limits while yielding great physical results at the same time. Powerlifting is helping athletes of today reach new heights and shatter records previously believed untouchable. In this brand new one-of-a-kind book you will discover the secrets to the world’s strongest sport. This 486 page tome includes information on how to perform and train each of the competitive lifts. It provides extensive nutritional information to be healthy, strong, and fit and it will teach you how to make weight for the weigh-ins. You will learn how to warm-up in the gym and for a competition. Athletes for all sports will benefit from the information contained within. It also includes detailed interviews with some of the strongest men and women ever to walk the planet. This book is like a combination of Rippetoe’s Starting Strength and Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding all wrapped into one. If you like to lift and you are serious about strength training, this is the book for you.

Having now finished the utterly exhaustive and exhausting Categories of Weight Training series, I want to dial things back a notch and give folks a break from dense walls of text with badly drawn graphic (and incorrect physics).
And since I haven’t done any product reviews in a while (let’s face it, for a while there I didn’t do any new content) and have actually read a few BOOKS OF late so it seemed as good a time as any to remedy that. And while I’m tempted to stretch this out into three separate articles, I’m honestly not sure I can come up with enough to write about each of the three books I want to talk about for that.
So today I want to look at three books I recently read which ranged in quality from a written atrocity to interesting (for a select group) to an almost must have purchase. And I’m going to review them in that order.
The Olympian Manual for Strength and Size: Blue Print
from the World’s Greatest Coach
The Olympian Manual by Anatoly BondarchukDepending on your background, you may or may not know who Anatoly Bondarchuk is. In brief he’s arguably the greatest hammer throwing coach of all time for whatever that may actually be worth. If you don’t know what hammer throwing is, click here for a short video demonstrating it.
Much of Bondarchuk’s work hasn’t been translated but what has is mostly from a company called Ultimate Athlete Concepts which has done a lot of translated Eastern European texts.
I’ve read several of them, Bondarchuk’s first BOOK on Transfer was an unintelligible mess, Volume II was better by degrees. Vladimir Issurin released two excellent books through them, the first on Block Training and the second related to general training principles. I can actually recommend the two Issurin books.
So when Bondarchuk’s new BOOK was annouced, after much toing and froing, I was interested enough to read it (The Sickness as I call it, the obsessive drive to read all of this stuff, is strong in me sometimes). The title alone suggested that it might contain greatness. Short version, it did not.
To be honest, I have rarely seen such an appallingly bad book and I’ve read some real corkers (Ian King’s book Get Buffed comes to mind as an unreadable mess but Australia and America seem to be two countries divided by the same language). But back to Bondarchuk’s new book. The introduction states that THE BOOK was translated by someone getting their bachelor’s in exercise physiology who also happens to speak Bondarchuk’s native languages.