Body For Life (BFL) was for many, including me, their introduction to fitness and nutrition. It was, in its time, as popular as P90X or any of the other Beachbody workouts have been, and for the most part, it holds up. It was written by Bill Phillips who, at the time, owned a supplement company called EAS and put out Muscle Media magazine. Phillips had been a competitive bodybuilder back in the 1980s and in the mid-late 90s set up a competition with parameters similar to the BFL plan, in Muscle Media Magazine for real people to do a body transformation with his Lamborghini as the prize to the winner. That competition was chronicled in a film called Body of Work and ultimately became the basis for this book and the Body for Life challenge that was, in the early to mid-2000s, as red hot as anything in fitness has ever been.
The book is basically split into three parts. A background/motivational section that tries to get you into the right mindset for undergoing a transformation like this. A workout section that explains the workouts and gives example exercises, and a nutrition section that details the nutrition plan and has some sample recipes. Throughout the book, there are testimonials by people who have transformed themselves going through a version of Body For Life (mainly by the people who were chronicled in the Body of Work video). Even though those people did not have as regimented a plan as the book sets out, the plan laid out in Muscle Media was similar to what ended up in the book.
For the workouts, you lift weights three days a week (alternating upper body and lower body), then do cardio three days a week, and have one rest day. For the resistance exercises, you choose two exercises per body part. For example, bench press (BP) and chest flys (CF) for a chest exercise. For one of the exercises, you do a circuit of 12, 10, 8, 6, and 12 reps, with one minute in between each set of the circuit. You increase the weight for each circuit through the 6 rep circuit, then you drop the weight down to do the 12 reps, then you do 12 reps of the second exercise, with no rest with a weight heavy enough that you fail at the 12th rep. Then you rest for 2 minutes and go on to the next body part like shoulders, biceps, etc. So, the chest circuits will look something like this:
BP 12 reps 20lbs
1-minute rest
BP 10 reps 25lbs
1-minute rest
BP 8 reps 30lbs
1-minute rest
BP 6 reps 35lb
1-minute rest
BP 12 reps 20lbs
CF 12 reps 15 lbs
3-minute rest
Next circuit
The BFL workout program is one that can be done at home with a good selection of free weights and some kind of cardio equipment. But, even though you can do it at home, it is a bit limited as a purely at-home workout, especially when doing the lower body workouts, because it requires you to lift weights to failure. And, it is hard to find two different hamstring exercises and two different quad exercises that will be easy to do to failure with dumbells. This is especially the case since the program wants you to rotate exercises every four weeks so your body does not plateau. So, it is much easier to do the leg day in a gym, unless you have a pretty good home gym setup with a leg press machine and/or a leg extension machine, which can get quite expensive. You can probably use resistance bands for the upper body workout, but it would be very hard to do the lower body workout with bands. And, as you progress and get fitter and stronger, you will need heavier and heavier weights, which again will be pretty expensive over the course of time. So, even though you can do the workouts at home, it is definitely easier to do them in a gym. That said, there are a lot of example exercises in the workout section of the book that demonstrates free-weight exercises that can be used in the program, so if you have a good home gym setup, or have the money to put one together it is possible to do it 100% from home. And, if you get creative, you can do the cardio simply by walking/running up and down steps or something like that. But, it helps to have a treadmill, elliptical, or the like.
The upper body workout lasts about 45-46 minutes and the lower body workout lasts about 42 assuming you rest between sets for the recommended period of time. The cardio portion of the program has you doing 20 minutes of progressive cardio. Similar to the resistance workouts, you start out at a low intensity like a slow walk, then you start doing a bit more intense and ratchet the intensity up each minute until you go all out, then back the intensity down. So it looks something like this:
Minutes 1-2 intensity level 1 (walk)
Min 3 intensity level 5
Min 4 intensity level 6
Min 5 intensity level 7
Min 6 intensity level 8
Min 7 intensity level 9
Min 8 intensity level 5
....................................
...................................
Min 19 intensity level 10 (sprint)
Min 20 intensity level 1 (walk)
So basically, in minute 19 you go all out for as long as you possibly can (hopefully the whole minute) then you go back to a walking intensity level. Of course, what is a level 1 vs level 10 intensity will vary person-to-person, and for some people, the equivalent of a brisk walk will be a level 10, where for another person that will be their level 5. But, as with the resistance workouts, the idea is that people will progress over time because their intensity level 10 will change as they become more fit.
The nutrition plan is fairly simple. It has you eat a portion of protein (about the size of your palm), a portion of carbs (about the size of your fist), and a veggie for three meals, use a meal replacement shake (the book promotes a nutrition shake called Myoplex which was put out by EAS back in the day) for three meals. Although EAS and the BFL challenge, in general, went the way of the dodo bird (I think mainly when P90x and Beachbody really took off), there are definitely a lot of meal replacement shakes and protein powders out there if you want to go that route. Although, the book stresses that you can eat six solid-food meals a day and get great results. Basically, you just need to eat six times a day, consuming a balance of protein and carbs, and a reasonable amount of fat. Then, one day a week it allows for a cheat/free day in which you can eat anything you want.
The nutrition plan is a bit cookie-cutter. For the people it works well for, it works great. But, for people who cannot get to an adequate caloric deficit with the palm-fist method, are carb sensitive, or for whom the palm-fist method does not result in enough calories per day, it may make you healthier, but probably will not get you ripped or make you look like a fitness model (if that is the look you are going for). It is also a low-fat emphasis plan and does not really differentiate between good fats (like nuts) and bad. So, in that way it was kind of akin to the old food pyramid except it emphasized eating a lot more protein (just very lean protein like grilled chicken breast, and the like).
Overall, I would say it is a good program to try, especially if you are a beginner at working out and following a strict nutrition plan. But, keep in mind, that you may not end up looking like the people photographed in the book even if you follow it to a tee. If that is the case, and what you want, you will probably have to tweak your nutrition plan in order to get to that point. The book does give a lot of very good inspiration and provides a good starting point for some people who want to get in shape and start weight training, but really do not know how to start and don't want to use a personal trainer. For other people, it can be a plan that they can follow for life.
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