Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength

Mention the name Bill Phillips to any of the people he's helped transform and you will see their faces light up with appreciation and respect. These people include:

• Hundreds of thousands of men and women who read his magazine for guidance and straightforward information about exercise, nutrition, and living with strength.

• Elite professional athletes, among them John Elway, Karl Malone, Mike Piazza, and Terrell Davis 執ho have turned to Phillips for clear–cut information to enhance their energy and performance.

• People once plagued by obesity, alcoholism, and life–threatening ailments who accepted a personal challenge from Bill Phillips and, with his help, have regained control of their bodies and their lives.

  When you begin to apply the information in this book, you will be proving to yourself that astounding changes are within your grasp too. And, you will discover Body–for–LIFE is much more than a book about physical fitness 埩t's a gateway to a new and better life, a life of rewarding and fulfilling moments, perhaps more spectacular than you've ever dared to dream before.

  Within 12 weeks, you too are going to know 埮ot believe, but know : that the transformation you've created with your body is merely an example of the power you have to transform everything else in your world.

  In language that is vivid and down–to–earth, Bill Phillips guides you, step by step, through the integrated Body–for–LIFE Program, which reveals:

• How to lose fat and increase your strength by exercising less, not more;

• How to tap into an endless source of energy by living with the Power Mindset^TM;

• How to create more time for everything meaningful in your life;

• How to trade hours of aerobics for minutes of weight training 執ith dramatic results;

• How to make continual progress by using the High–Point Technique^TM;

• How to feed your muscles while starving fat with the Nutrition–for–LIFE Method^TM;

• How thousands of ordinary people have now become extraordinary and how you can, too;

• How to gain control of your body and life, once and for all.

  The principles of the Body–for–LIFE Program are surprisingly simple but remarkably powerful. So allow yourself to experience the force of the information in this book, allow yourself to take your mind, your body, your life to a higher point than you may have ever dreamed you could. All in as little as 12 weeks.

The three-times-a-week weightlifting program in Body for Life is deceptively simple. If you've spent any time in the gym, you've already done all the exercises. But Phillips includes a couple of high-intensity sets at the end of each exercise that should compound the training effect on each muscle group. Same goes for the cardiovascular exercise he recommends: just 20 minutes, three times a week. But those 20 minutes are spent jacking the intensity up and down, accomplishing more in less time.

Phillips arranges all this into a 12-week program, along with nutritional and motivational tips. Be warned that the nutritional advice gets a little spacey. For example, he puts "carbohydrates" and "vegetables" into separate categories, and recommends three daily doses of a nutritional supplement called Myoplex, which his company manufactures. (Fortunately, he gives tips on how to make each dose taste different, such as by adding drops of peppermint extract.) Despite this strangeness, Body for Life still motivates because so many others have achieved astounding results in similar 12-week windows, and the pictures and testimonials are here as evidence. --Lou Schuler

Amazon.com Audiobook Review
Bill Phillips is many things to the people who listen to this audiotape: personal trainer, motivational guru, nutrition consultant, personal-success coach. As he reads his bestselling book, he inspires, cajoles, instructs, and sometimes gives listeners a kick in the gluteals. The goal is for the listener to transform his or her body in 12 weeks, and in the process learn that changing one's physique can help one make other changes. The audiobook is spiced up with the comments and testimonials of those who've already done it. The effect is something like an infomercial, except that you've already bought the product, and you don't have to listen to a hired audience clapping. If you follow Phillips' program, you're your own audience. And, if you like your performance, the applause is what you feel inside. (Running time: 2 hours, 2 cassettes) --Lou Schuler

---

All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I have a BS in Health Science., 2008-07-02
I have a BS in Health Science and was curious to read this book to see if it was quacky. Pretty much everything in the book is true to what my professors in health, nutrition, and physiology explained. I didn't have any classes on weight training, but my spouse is an athlete and agreed with the methods Bill Phillips recommends. It sounds like a good program if you're really ready for a lifestyle change. Go for it!


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength, 2008-06-25
Worth the money. I met one of the people who successfully completed his program and found it was what I need. It has everything you need to do to be successful in the book.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

works if you do it!, 2008-06-24
This is a great program.

First of all and most importantly, you DON'T have to buy his supplements!! He never says that in the book! It is true that if you use, for example, a protein shake it will help you lose weight and build muscle, but you don't have to and the workouts will still work! Even Slim Fast sells a high protein shake, just use that if you want something.

The workouts are TOUGH. I had for months been spending 8 hours per week in the gym with little to no results. These BFL workouts make maximum use of your gym time and teach you how it feels to make your workouts work! (not painful, just not a walk in the park). I jog and the cardio workouts blew me away, the interval training is hard! I thought "no way 20 minutes will be enough!" because I had been running for 45 minutes 4x a week. Well, they do work! My metabolism is totally made over and my 20 lbs finally came off!

Diet: In a nutshell he teaches you how to eat small healthy balanced meals throughout your day. It's not gimmicky or "low carb or whatever", it's plain healthy eating to fuel your tough workouts.

It's true he doesn't go into th much nutrition basics, like why you should eat such and such. As he says in the beginning, this book is for people who know what they should be doing but they just aren't doing it. Motivation! Most people learn the basics just by picking things up on the news and/or in magazines.

I totally recommend this program. Just try it for a month if you're intimidated. Change your life! Like anything else, you have to commit to doing it. If you do it WILL work!


4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

I've benefited from BFL yet recommend SFL even more highly, 2008-06-01
I've benefited immensely from Bill Phillips' 1999 mega-bestseller, Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength (BFL). It dramatically helped to rekindle my passion for fitness.

Using the BFL approach, by combining dreaming; goal-setting; planning; tracking; frequent small meals; weight training and brief but intense aerobic training, 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.

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.

With time, I also learned and put into practice other fitness strategies. (These others included a 12 week transformation using a BFL-similar program from the 2002 book, ABSolution: The Practical Solution for Building Your Best Abs, written by Bill Phillips' brother, Shawn Phillips.) In the process, I learned volumes about the impact of training and nutrition on my mind and body.

I also found value in Bill Phillips' other books, the 2002 Body for Life Success Journal (BFL-SJ) and the 2003 Eating For Life (EFL). BFL-SJ further emphasizes and assists with planning and tracking, while EFL can help clarify and vastly expand healthy eating options. In the form of success stories and related tips, both books offer additional inspiration.

Much more recently, however, I finished my first reading of Shawn Phillips' new (2008) 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, SFL now stands as my favorite. G. Porter Freeman and Lynn Lingenfelter - whose physique and life transformations Bill Phillips dramatically profiled in the BFL book - both have enthusiastically endorsed SFL. To read their words, I recommend visiting the Amazon page for SFL.

In an email message that he widely distributed on May 1, 2008, even Bill Phillips recommended Strength for Life, calling it "very smart," "positive and powerful."

SFL looks at BFL's limitations and in my opinion makes clear how to surpass them. To find out much more about why I recommend SFL, I suggest reading my review of it, which also appears on Amazon's SFL pages.

As a complement to any fitness program, 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 EBC will provide additional tools for dealing with "failures" in compassionate, self-accepting and insight-producing ways. I predict such ways will dramatically help a person to cultivate inner peace, growth and further progress.

A person could draw inspiration and information from all the Bill and Shawn Phillips books. I know I have. Even if a person did, though - or if one chose only one book - I'd still recommend Strength for Life to frame whatever else one did.

One might ask about supplements. All the Bill and Shawn Phillips books recommend some supplements. Even so, all such books admit that each of their programs can be done without supplements. I've done 12 week transformations sometimes with more supplements, sometimes with hardly any. Either way, I've felt deeply satisfied with my results. I remain convinced that nothing fuels the body like real, healthy food. So I heartily recommend making such food the centerpiece of any nutritional strategy.

In short, I'll remain forever grateful for Body for Life. Now, though, I even more highly recommend Strength for Life.



0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

**IRON MAN MARKETING MACHINE**GOOD LUCK CHUCK AT LONG TERM, 2008-05-06
His ability to market is LEGEND...Does his program work long-term for all? I wish it did. Is it one of the best books every written on fitness? It's certainly one of the most helpful and widely read, if not applied. If you have never seen it before, it may just blow you away. Will it be your long term solution? Lot's of good, solid, advice; difficult to follow long-term.

Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.