The New Rules of Lifting Supercharged: Ten All-New Muscle-Building Programs for Men and Women

by Lou Schuler, Alwyn Cosgrove

Overview

This supercharged new edition of The New Rules of Lifting features all-new workouts to build maximum muscle in both men and women.
 
Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove’s The New Rules of Lifting, The New Rules of Lifting for Women, and The New Rules of Lifting for Abs have revolutionized how people lift weights. The New Rules of Lifting Supercharged is a total reboot of the weightlifting workout book that launched the series in 2006, packing even more power on every page.
 
Featuring ten completely new workouts for both women and men, Supercharged emphasizes four major movements that do the most to change the way your body looks, feels, and performs: squat, deadlift, push, and pull. In addition, Cosgrove’s updated total-body workout program improves core strength, mobility, flexibility, balance, endurance, and athleticism . . . all in just three hours a week of exercise.
 
Another big change from the original New Rules of Lifting is a self-customized workout system. Readers can choose their own exercises from a menu for each movement category, allowing beginner and advanced lifters to get tremendous results from the same basic plan. Each workout ends with a “finisher”—five to ten minutes of fun but high-effort drills such as complexes, intervals, and density training, with the choice of the reader’s favorite exercises. The ultimate guide to total-body strengthening, this supercharged edition of The New Rules of Lifting will lift readers to stratospheric results.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583335369
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/31/2013
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lou Schuler is a National Magazine Award–winning journalist, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, and the author of many top-selling fitness books. He lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
 
Alwyn Cosgrove is a veteran trainer and strength coach. He co-owns Results Fitness in Newhall, California.
 

Read an Excerpt

In the beginning, Alwyn Cosgrove and I wrote a book called The New Rules of Lifting. And it was good. Readers liked it, and they got outstanding results from Alwyn’s training programs. You wouldn’t be reading the fifth book in the series if the first one hadn’t helped lifters like you reach your goals.

But here’s the thing: Most lifters like you haven’t heard of Alwyn, or me, or the NROL series. Millions of men and women lift weights, either at home or in commercial gyms, but it’s hard to see much evidence to suggest they’re getting what they want from it, or what they could get from it.

Instead, I see all the same behaviors and practices that inspired us to launch the series in the first place.

I see paunchy middle-aged men block the dumbbell rack as they grind through set after set of every biceps exercise they remember from Flex magazine circa 1995, while avoiding the exercises that use the body’s biggest muscles in coordinated action, the movements that would do the most to build muscle, burn fat, and turn back the clock to the days when they looked more like a page from Men’s Health than Cigar Aficionado.

I see apparently healthy women doing the beneficial exercises the men avoid—the squats, deadlifts, and rows—but with weights that wouldn’t challenge someone twice their age, with half their strength.

I see young lifters doing exercises that will turn them into old lifters, the moves most likely to cause injury and least likely to offer much benefit. I see older lifters doing half-baked versions of programs designed for young athletes or bodybuilders, only without any apparent sense of the mechanisms that would make such a program work.

It’s like they’ve all gotten the first half of the memo about the importance of strength training for health, fitness, and appearance. But somehow the rest of the memo—the part that explains what you need to do to get the results you want—got deleted. So, in a way, the NROL series is the second half of that memo.

Take the first New Rule of Lifting: “The best muscle-building exercises are the ones that use your muscles the way they’re designed to work.”

Or the third: “To build size, you must build strength.”

Or the twenty-third: “Results come from hard work.”

Or the forty-third: “You can’t protect your spine by doing exercises that damage it.”

Or the sixty-third: “You’re not a kid anymore. Don’t train like one.”

See what I mean?

The readers who found and implemented the original New Rules of Lifting (along with the ones who read NROL for Women, for Abs, and for Life) know what it means to train. They know how to lift in a way that allows them to get progressively stronger, to add more muscle, to reduce fat, to work with their bodies rather than against them. They’re the ones who walk past the machines in their health club and pick up free weights. They’re the ones who get stronger over time, at any age, despite roadblocks or limitations. They’re the ones who look like they know what they’re doing. They move with purpose. They sweat, they grimace, and every now and then they actually grunt.

Does that describe you?

If so, great. You’re either a satisfied NROL reader, coming back for the newest information and most up-to-date programs, or you’re a target reader, someone who’s ready to do what it takes to get leaner, stronger, and more athletic.

Not you? Pull up a chair, and let’s talk.

Table of Contents

Introduction: NROL 5.0 xiii

Part 1 Welcome to the Club

1 Membership Has Its Drawbacks 3

2 The Six Movements You Need to Master 11

3 All Fitness Is Muscular Fitness 12

Part 2 Your Muscles, Yourself

4 Bigger Is Better 33

5 The Care, and Feeding of Your Muscles 42

6 Let's Get Small 51

Part 3 The System

7 How the Workouts Work 63

8 Squat 80

9 Hinge 94

10 Push 109

11 Pull 128

12 Lunge 146

13 Single-Leg Stance 160

14 Core Training 172

15 Combination and Power Exercises 209

16 Metabolic Training 224

17 RAMP It Up, Tone It Down 240

Part 4 The Programs

18 How to Train 259

19 Basic Training 269

20 Hypertrophy 277

21 Strength & Power 286

22 Sample Workouts 298

Part 5 The Postcsame

23 You Know You Want to Ask 311

Appendix: The Rules 319

Notes 325

Index 333