Alpha Male Challenge: A 10-Week Plan to Burn Fat, Gain Muscle & Build True Alpha Attitude: The 10-Week Plan to Burn Fat, Gain Muscle & Build True Alpha Attitude - Hardcover

Villepigue, James; Collins, Rick

 
9781594869310: Alpha Male Challenge: A 10-Week Plan to Burn Fat, Gain Muscle & Build True Alpha Attitude: The 10-Week Plan to Burn Fat, Gain Muscle & Build True Alpha Attitude
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1594869316 ISBN 13: 9781594869310
Verlag: Rodale Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Citing dropping rates in male testosterone levels throughout the United States, a ten-week plan for improving one's physical, mental, and social health shares nutritional tips while outlining a user-friendly workout that can be implemented into a busy schedule.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAMES VILLEPIGUE, a certified personal trainer, is the best-selling author of more than 18 books. His flagship book series, the Body Sculpting Bibles, sold more than 850,000 copies. He resides in Oyster Bay, New York.
RICK COLLINS is an attorney, a former certified personal trainer and competitive bodybuilder, and a monthly columnist for Muscular Development magazine. He resides in Westbury, New York.

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CHAPTER ONE

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF MANLINESS

Okay, guys, it's time to take an honest look at yourself. Make sure the shades are down and you have privacy in the house. Stand in front of the mirror in your underwear. Do you like what you see? How does it compare to what you looked like a few years ago, or when you were in your mid 20s? Somewhere in the tornado of stress and obligations, between finishing school and today's hard look in the mirror, your body probably changed. If you're like most guys, tight became loose; hard became soft.

Your body may not only look different but may also perform less impressively as the years go by. Endurance, strength, and power all diminish. The knees, shoulders, and lower back all begin voicing complaints. The kinetic energy you radiated back when you could burn the candle at both ends is increasingly difficult to find. Your engine has stalled. The only thing moving fast and furious may be your hairline.

You've likely changed on the inside, too. Not surprisingly, there's a direct relationship between your appearance and your attitude--how you feel about yourself and your place in the world around you. Are you past your peak or just hitting your stride? Do you have the confident edge of a winner? Are you a strong leader and capable protector of your loved ones? Are you in charge of your life and in control of your destiny?

If you're not at the very top of your game, physically and mentally, you're not alone. Although modern American life is more "comfortable" than it was in generations past, many men are fatter, sicker, more stressed, and less rested than ever before. They're less rugged, less robust, and more likely to have a "muffin-top" spilling over their belts. It doesn't help that we live in a changing social environment in which it's harder than ever to figure out what a man is supposed to be and act like in order to be his best. Men are supposed to be "manly," aren't they? But somewhere along the way, "manliness" went from a virtue to a memory.

You are holding in your hands the key to a revolutionary transformation of your body and mind. Only 70 days from today, you can reclaim the muscular, masculine glory of being the best man you can be. Everything you need you'll find within these pages. The 10-week Challenge that begins on page 126 is the assembly manual for constructing the true Alpha Male--the ideal of masculine excellence.

So much of modern life is a challenge; we face daily struggles of so many kinds. Our use of the term Challenge is both a positive and empowering call to action and a recognition that nothing worthwhile typically occurs without hard work and sacrifice. And so, we challenge you to take control of your life by taking control of your health, your body, and even your thoughts and behaviors.

If you think conventional weight lifting is boring, we agree. That's why few guys stick with it. But we created a program to excite you! If you think "diets" involve bland, tasteless foods, we hear you. But our food plan--the perfect fuel for true Alpha Males--is both nutritious and absolutely mouthwatering! And if you're walking around with the same old attitude as the rest of the empty suits around you, prepare for a shock of inspiration that will change everything! If you accept this Challenge and follow it faithfully with us for the next 10 weeks, we promise you will reach a paradise of rich rewards.

But before we get you there, let's look at how you got where you are now.

NO TIME TO SPARE

Today's society is always on the go, 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. Many of us work long hours, and our schedules are often irregular and unpredictable. We seem to be working harder than ever even though many guys have less and less confidence in their financial forecasts. A good night's sleep is a rare luxury for many guys.

Long work hours don't leave much time for anything else. Add on social expectations within the dating scene, and not much spare time is left for single guys. For married men, shared household responsibilities dip even further into the pool of disposable minutes. Between 1965 and 1995, men's average weekly housework time doubled--from 4.9 to 10 hours--based on a survey of four national studies published in 2000 by University of Maryland researchers. And for guys with families, like us, the joys of parenting are offset by an ever-lengthening list of responsibilities and seemingly impossible time pressures. Each stage of child rearing carries its own unique demands, from the bottle and diaper days to the endless chauffeur duties of the parents of socially active teens.

Our collective pool of available time sometimes seems to have dried to a puddle. Despite ubiquitous television and newspaper reports urging us to get more exercise, less than half of guys age 35 meet the American College of Sports Medicine's recommendation of at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity on most days and preferably on all days. More than 70 percent of guys ages 25 to 34 don't do regular resistance training. If there's any spare time at the end of the day there's no energy left to do anything but vegetate in front of the TV or computer screen. The result? A metabolic and psychological vicious cycle that becomes ever more difficult to break out of with each passing year.

FAST TIMES AT STRESSFUL HIGH

The 24-hour television news cycle provides a never-ending stream of stressful visual and auditory information. Danger and risk, real or imagined, seem to be all around us. It's taking a toll on us. A few years ago, researchers led by an associate professor of psychology at Merrimack College studied the effects of 9/11-linked television viewing on dream content, concluding that each additional hour of viewing raised a viewer's stress level by 6 percent.

Meanwhile, it's not uncommon in many professions to be expected to be available at any and all times. Cell phones and PDAs are nagging, insistent companions demanding our constant attention. Business travel has its own menu of pressures and uncertainties, with canceled flights, lost luggage, and missed appointments. Perhaps even more sadly, we seem to have come to think that this is how life should be, and to expect this kind of lifestyle.

Research shows that stress affects our hormones. Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone and the biological marker for maleness--and manliness--itself. The right amount of it in the womb makes a fetus a boy. A surge of it during adolescence makes a boy a man. For the rest of your life, testosterone has profound effects on both your body and your brain, impacting your performance virtually everywhere--in the gym, on the job, and in the bedroom. We all know that testosterone is essential for building muscles. Higher testosterone levels are associated with more lean muscle. But testosterone also influences psychological factors, including mood, memory, libido, assertiveness, and confidence, and physiological factors, such as cholesterol levels, sperm production, and blood sugar. Healthy testosterone levels are essential to male health, and low testosterone is associated with a number of maladies and decreased quality of life.

In a 2002 article examining stress and hormones, Swedish researchers concluded that repeated exposure to stress can harm a man's testosterone production both in the short term and the long term. The result: depressed spirits and increased fatigue.

GETTING FATTER ...

Many guys feel crushed by the stress and time demands of 21st-century life and start doing away with activities that seem nonessential. Studies show that physical exercise is one of the first things to go. For 2 years, researcher Ethan Hull and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh tracked the habits of 525 physically active subjects. At the start of the study, the childless male subjects...

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Verlag
Rodale Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1594869316
ISBN 13 
9781594869310
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
327
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar