The Female Body Breakthrough: The Revolutionary Strength-Training Plan for Losing Fat and Getting the Body YouWant Paperback – Illustrated, November 10, 2009

I ended up buying this book for my Kindle because - I didn't have a good phrase for it until now - I'm "skinny fat", as Rachel says. She hit the head on the nail when she said I am slender, don't want to drop any pounds on the scale necessarily, and look good in my clothes, but my arms are mush with a bone in the middle! I run half marathons a couple times a year, do P90X once or twice a week (OK or month), and occasionally do some planks for my abs, but have never achieved the body I want and hate wearing a bathing suit. I am 24 so I figure if I can't get it now I'll never get it, so I purchased her book but didn't have too high of hopes since I thought I knew what I was doing.Boy was I wrong! It was my first fitness book purchase and everything I was previously worried about in following a fitness program like this isn't an issue here. For example, I don't want to start a program that lasts a few months and then leaves you with no long-term plan, and I don't want to count every single calorie, and I better be able to drink on the weekends and eat cake on my friends' birthdays. I also don't want to have to think too much about what workout to do on what day, like "Did I lift my biceps last time, or my chest?". And I am a grad student planning a wedding so I also want to use my time efficiently.Her book gave me all this and more! Granted I'm only a couple weeks into it, but if I don't succeed it won't be because she didn't give me all the tools I needed, it will be because I got lazy or something. The rules for eating are very straightforward - I don't need to pull out her book when I'm at a restaurant because I forgot rule 47 or anything - they make sense and don't require any memorization, just common sense. The workout plans are very detailed and strengthen your body in important, natural ways rather than machines at the gym that focus on one muscle that you probably don't use much anyways, and she takes the guesswork out of which body part to train and when.Overall I recommend this book even for those of you who think you know what you're doing but can't figure out why it doesn't show in the mirror! Not only are all the workout plans very detailed, but she gives great analogies and lessons that alone can motivate you to kick your own butt in the gym. The two most important things I've learned so far are that 1) endurance running trains your body to efficiently run for long periods of time... so I've basically trained my body to not get any more fit! Oops. And 2) even if I see skinny girls in sports bras on the treadmill, they probably already had that body type and all that running to nowhere isn't going to get me the body that I want if I don't have it by now!I hope I can stick to her program because I've wasted hours a week (up to 20!) with excess cardio for half marathon training and never gotten the results I wanted. The only thing I don't care for much is all the BITCH talk, because when I'm in my clothes I'm the BITCH everyone talks about ;) and now when I'm in my swimsuit I will be too!

I found this book because I had recently read "the new rules of lifting for women" which was co-authored by Alwyn Cosgrove. I found this book to have very similar principles to "new rules," which is great because they both just make sense. I agree with almost everything Rachel says in the book, which is rare for a diet/exercise book. The diet plan makes sense, is realistic and doable in real life. The workout plans use all free weights and body weight instead of machines, which makes so much sense to me and really gives you plenty of bang for your buck. Both books advocate against the use of steady state endurance type training, and recommend prioritizing strenght training over cardio, doing cardio only if you have time left in your week after strength training 2-3 times. Even when you do have time for cardio, they emphasize intense short interval training instead of long slow cardio. This book definitely deserves five starts. Now let me nit-pick for a minute. This book would be beyond five stars if it was just a little easier to follow exactly what you supposed to do, on what days, during each phase of the program. Even though Rachel is very specific in her training plans and, in different parts of the book, she does tell you exactly what to do, there is not one specific chart where everything is all put together. Also, the book does not include any worksheets for you to record your information and progress. It would be great if Rachel could come out with an accompanying workbook, with space for you to record your workouts, both strength and metabolic workouts. I found to really follow through with this program, I had to write out in a separate notebook everything I needed to do. Especially confusing are the metabolic interval workouts. Overall, this book had everything I was looking for and I will continue to follow the program. So far, I am in my 4th week and looking forward to progressing through the stages.

First of all, I hate giving 5 stars to any product, so my best is 4 stars. I have read over 20 workout books in the past 6 weeks and I decided to go with this plan b/c it made sense. I also got a hold of her husbands book Afterburn through interlibrary loan (it is really a notebook) and the workouts and nutrition are pretty much the same (she did the nutrition portion of his book), and of course read The New Rules of Lifting for Women (for which her husband did the workouts as well), as well as some advanced books for trainers and coaches. Anyway, I settled on this one and am now on week 5. I checked this book out before I finally bought it and so far I love it! It is so nice to be free of the machines and watch the gym goers looking at what I am doing and trying to copy it later. My physical therapist was also impressed with the exercises and how they are laid out. I have lost 12 pounds in 5 weeks and more inches than that. My body fat has gone down too and I have dropped a dress size. I even purchased a band from rubberbanditz.com so I could do the pull ups without assistance or a machine and it is a truly phenomenal experience. I also met several of my fellow gym goers as they wanted to try the band out too. The personal trainers in my gym don't like that I am using a book and not them, but hey, it works for me!