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| Strength for Life: The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life | 
 enlarge | Author: Shawn Phillips
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $15.48
You Save: $10.52 (40%)
New (37) Used (11) from $14.58
Avg. Customer Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 21949
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 7.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0345498461
Dewey Decimal Number: 613.7
EAN: 9780345498465
ASIN: 0345498461
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Gets results in both body and mind June 5, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I completed Shawn's two week "reboot" and dropped 6 pounds and an inch around the waist! But aside from the obvious physical benefits are the mental and spiritual benefits you will gain from this book. It's an integral approach to strengthening you as a whole; full strength.
Where is the Kindle version? June 1, 2008
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
I browsed through this book at Borders and was very impressed, but I want a Kindle edition. Is there any chance that one will be available soon?
Strength for Life :The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life June 1, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
Shawn Phillips does an excellent job outlining the steps one should take to enjoy a healthier lifestyle FOREVER! This is an exceptional book that is well written and very inspiring.
Strength for Life: The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life May 29, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Great book! Shawn wrote this book in a way that anyone could relate to the info and it really gets you motivated. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in getting into shape and staying that way.
for me, Strength for Life surpasses even Body for Life May 28, 2008
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
I recently finished my first reading of Shawn Phillips' new book, Strength for Life: The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life (SFL). I'm already reading it again. Even though I've read dozens of books about fitness, this one now stands as my favorite.
For me, like nothing else I've found, SFL unifies consciousness with body, presence with fitness and vision with efficacious action. With SFL, transforming both nutrition and training into deeply enriching, enduring and even meditative practices strikes me as thoroughly achievable.
Yet with what authority can I make such claims?
Many of us benefited immensely from the author's brother's (that is, Bill Phillips') 1999 mega-bestseller. That bestseller was Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength (BFL). Using that system, I personally completed multiple, 12 week transformations. I clarified and achieved goals. I burned fat and grew muscle. My physical strength skyrocketed. Many felt astonished when they saw me in person and when they viewed my before and after photos. Frequently others, even strangers, stopped me for advice.
With time, I also learned and put into practice other fitness strategies. (These others included a 12 week transformation using Shawn Phillips' earlier, BFL-similar, 2002 book, ABSolution: The Practical Solution for Building Your Best Abs.) In the process, I learned volumes about the impact of training and nutrition on my mind and body.
During such journeys I studied, learned and made ongoing progress in my fitness. I reliably kept my body fat low - and I've kept it low. Thanks to patterns of action learned from such practices, even when I've sometimes "drifted," I'm convinced that I've kept nutrition, training and fitness at much higher levels than I ever would have without the influence of BFL.
So I'm not out to knock BFL. It has helped guide me and countless others in a positive direction.
Yet, I've continued to grow in so many ways - including by learning about meditation and mindfulness - and I've increasingly recognized how my needs have exceeded what the original, BFL book alone includes.
Enter Shawn Phillips and his Strength for Life (SFL). The author draws on nearly ten years of experience examining both the short and long term challenges and successes encountered by those putting BFL into practice. In doing so, he acknowledges both the strengths and limitations of BFL.
By my standards - especially within the wider context of a multifaceted and value-rich life (I'm now a parent) - SFL makes the following vivid. In one's fitness efforts, one can enjoy the present moment, relish the journey and yet also make lasting, positive change.
Even so, I'm delighted that while for me, SFL supersedes the older program's limitations, it also harnesses BFL's underlying strengths.
I predict that BFLers will find familiarity - yet also freshness and vast, new depth - in SFL. And I'm betting that newcomers lacking prior, BFL experience will find this program accessible, inspiring, self-contained and remarkably comprehensive. I predict that even veterans will find value in its remarkably holistic approach.
Getting derailed from one's fitness efforts can involve limitations of technique. Yet far more often, I'm convinced, limitations of consciousness lead to such collapse. Given this, I deeply appreciate that SFL emphasizes consciousness as much as the body. With both nutrition and training, SFL clarifies how one can focus positively, deeply and consciously on enjoying the moment while making progress - not only with one's fitness, but also with one's whole life.
For me, SFL incorporates balance in other ways, as well. It does this not only by discussing how to relate to food positively. It also does so by equally valuing exertion and recovery, even during the course of a single workout - and by sensitively addressing the concerns not only of men but also of women.
The SFL book leaves behind the BFL "before" and "after" pictures, and instead includes what for me qualify as beautifully illuminating, illustrative charts. These contribute significantly to my understanding of the book's concepts and its program's content.
The SFL book provides what I regard as the essentials involved not merely in making a major change once, but in sustaining a vitally strong lifestyle thereafter. It considers the cultural assumptions about "health" that so many of us absorb without conscious awareness. It explores our relationship with food and "exercise." It presents the 12 day Base Camp, 12 week Transformation and 12 month Seasons of Strength. And it examines different types of motivation, explaining why some forms have the strength to endure more than others. All the while, with remarkable clarity and brevity, it offers the reasons why it makes its recommendations - which I find crucial since in my fitness and life efforts I want to connect as consciously as I can to "why I do what I do."
I'm especially grateful for the evident effort, care and thoroughness the author brought to this project. For me, these shine through on page after page.
As a complement to SFL, I also highly recommend the concise book, Eat by Choice, Not by Habit: Practical Skills for Creating a Healthy Relationship with Your Body and Food, by Sylvia Haskvitz. By my standards, Eat by Choice, Not by Habit (EBC) wonderfully integrates the consciousness of Marshall Rosenberg's amazingly powerful Nonviolent Communication (NVC) process. I predict that complementary incorporation of EBC in transformation and fitness efforts will further support the harmonious relationship with food, training and life toward which SFL so helpfully points. EBC will facilitate this in part by providing additional tools for dealing with "failures" in compassionate, self-accepting and insight-producing ways. I predict such ways will dramatically help a person cultivate inner peace, growth and further progress.
By my standards, then, this new, SFL approach offers more nuance, clarity, completeness and sustainability than BFL. Moreover, the writing makes it joyfully energizing for me to read. Whether you've previously changed your life with BFL; remain a fitness veteran; want to "get fit" for the first time; or want to make a lasting transformation - I passionately recommend Shawn Phillips' aptly entitled new book, Strength for Life: The Fitness Plan for the Rest of Your Life.
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