I read a ton. About 70-80 books per year. And despite attending tons of seminars/classes/conferences (5-7 per year), I’d say that about 70-80% of my knowledge comes from books. So in this article, I’m going to list 5 of the books that had the greatest impact on my methodology. Do the math: 70-80 books per year, times 12-13 years makes about 850-1000 books. So in here, you’re getting the crème de la crème.
How do I choose what to read about? As I mentioned in my article, A Behind-The-Scenes, All-Access Look at My Professional Development, it starts with client need. The client has a problem, and I don’t know how to solve it – so I go to work reading whatever books, studies, etc. I need to feel like I can competently handle that issue.
Original source: here.
So without further ado, here are the books that have had the largest impact on my methodology (in no particular order):
The Beck Diet Solution by Judith Beck
This is the greatest diet book I’ve ever read. Why? Because it doesn’t tell you what to eat. Wait – what? A diet book that doesn’t talk about what to eat? What does it talk about then? The Beck Diet Solution talks about how to change bad lifelong nutritional habits. After all the “what” to eat part is easy. We know that we should be eating more protein, and more vegetables. Very few diets will disagree on that. Sticking with it for a lifetime is the hard part.
The Beck Diet solution uses extremely simple, but extremely powerful daily exercises that changes a person’s psychology and attitudes when it comes to food.
It addresses “hidden” beliefs like:
- It’s unfair that “skinny Susie” can eat whatever she wants and not gain fat, and I can’t. So I’ll make it fair by eating whatever I want.
- I should eat until I’m full, because I don’t know when I’ll eat again
- Telling yourself that it “won’t matter” if you have just a little bit of something that you’re not supposed to
- Using food for comfort, as opposed to fuel
- If you’ve been good on your diet, but the number on the scale goes up, you abandon it entirely, and maybe go on a binge.
These and others are hidden beliefs that sabotage people’s efforts. And The Beck Diet Solution helps you identify, and overcome them.
The Naked Warrior by Pavel Tsatsouline
This book, by Pavel Tsatsouline has not only had an influence on my clients, but on myself personally, as well. When the title says “naked” warrior, it means without equipment – using only your own body weight. And although the exercises that are outlined in the book are for the more advanced trainees (it goes into one-legged squats, and one-arm pushups), the concepts can be applied across the entire fitness spectrum.
What concepts are those?
- How to increase difficulty when the weight is constant (your own body weight does not change)
- How to generate tension
- How to use breathing to amplify your strength
- And the concept that I myself used in my now-famous video on “Look What I Can Do”: Grease the Groove. How to use frequent training for super human strength improvements with minimal time (dang, that’s a really good line. I like that).
The Naked Warrior also has the rare distinction of being one of the very few books that I’ve read more than once. Most of the time, after one read-through, I feel like I have everything there is to get out of that book. Not the case with the Naked Warrior. I first read it in 2004, and have reviewed it multiple times since then.
Movement by Gray Gook
This is the most complex book of the bunch. It’s intended more for a professional audience, because it uses a lot of technical terms, with no explanation of what they mean.
So I don’t necessarily recommend the layperson reads it, but a personal trainer or physical therapist – absolutely.
What is so helpful about this book is how it helps identify muscular imbalances with great precision. For example, a person might have a bad-looking squat, but this book digs way deeper into why that might be – is it tight calves? Tight hips? Weak core? Weak back muscles? And it has a very logical process of systematically identifying the root causes of imbalances.
After all, if all you do is make assumptions, you’ll be frustrated that sometimes your strategies work, and sometimes they don’t, and when they don’t work, you don’t understand why not. Movement eliminates a lot of this uncertainty, and allows you to have a much higher success rate. The centrepiece of good exercise “prescription” is a proper assessment.
Imagine a doctor that doesn’t make a proper diagnosis – he’ll prescribe the incorrect treatment. And the incorrect treatment with either be ineffective (which wastes time) or worse, harmful. Same thing with exercise. To recommend appropriate exercise, a proper “diagnosis” must be made (although we don’t call it that). No proper assessment, and a trainer may recommend appropriate exercise out of pure luck. But I don’t like to rely on luck – I want certainty. And the concepts I learned in Movement give me that certainty.
The Sixty Second Motivator by Jim Johnson
This one is a short, little book, but very powerful. Although this is intended for a professional audience, there’s no technical jargon in there, so it’s accessible by the layperson as well.
It’s about having the right conversations to get someone to take action. The important lesson is that motivation has 2 components:
- Importance. How important it is to the person you’re trying to motivate.
- Confidence. Does the person have the tools/knowledge to do what they are trying to do.
Both importance and confidence need to be high in order for action to take place. And in this book, the author, Jim Johnson gives simple, yet powerful “diagnostic” questions to help you figure out what’s the weak link – importance and confidence. And once you figure that out (which is a process of only 30 seconds – 2 minutes), you use additional questions to either increase importance, or increase confidence.
And that’s a key here – using questions. Not giving statements, or giving inspirational speeches (those are short-lived, anyway), but questions. When a person tells you the answer it’s more powerful than you giving them the answer.
That’s why I frequently recommend The Sixty Second Motivator when I speak at personal training conferences, when personal trainers ask me what they should read, but it would even apply to parents who just want their kids to eat their vegetables. Or to kids who want their elderly parents to change a habit.
The Diet Cure by Julia Ross
This book is particularly relevant to where my company really shines – addressing the hidden causes of problems with fat loss, like:
- Hormones (insulin, cortisol, thyroid, estrogen, progesterone, etc.)
- Digestion
- Brain chemistry (serotonin, dopamine, etc.)
…and more.
Although it’s intended more for the professional, as it does have a lot of technical jargon, it gives a very good, detailed overview of what’s happening in the body. So it goes into the endocrinology, neurochemistry and more of different issues with fat loss resistance.
There is a self-assessment questionnaire to figure out where a person’s imbalances may be, and specific dietary and supplementation strategies to address them.
As opposed to lots of other diet books that simply say “if you have this (problem), take that (solution)”, this book goes into the nitty gritty of the rationale, the biochemistry, and more behind the recommendations. It appeals to my geeky side.
And that’s why The Diet Cure made my top 5.
Some of you are asking the obvious question: why didn’t I recommend my own books in the top 5, like STOP EXERCISING!, and Unlimited Progress? Just in the interest of staying unbiased. After all, I was the one who wrote them – so you already know they’re good 😉