education and training

Let's start out with the good: there are lots of exercises, many of them creative, to give the athlete or coach new tools to use in their program. Michael Boyle brings lots of experience to the table through his involvement at his training facility.

But I was also very dissappointed with this book as it has no research backing and is opinionated. The entire book has only has 7 references, none of them being research articles.

Boyle states that functional training is based on the "latest scientific research" yet there is no research presented in the book at all. He states that he wanted it to be simple and to be able to be read and used by diverse people. I am not sure if he purposely left out research or not but it is research that truly tells me if something works or not. My conclusion with his findings are that he derived them from his experiences and from the books he cites in his references.

Boyle also seems to hold a grudge against exercise physiologists and is in love with physical therapists. He concludes that problems with top amateur and professional athletes' training regimens in the 80's were due to the dumbfounded exercise physiologists that teams employed. Not only is it harsh to generalize to all exercise physiologists, it's also just not right. On the contrary, all throughout the book though he quotes numerous physical therapists about how revolutionary their ideas are.

The book has plenty of pictures of exercises which is great. Unfortunately, photos showing action or movement have this ghost figure overtop of the regular figure that make the whole picture hard to decipher. I have no idea what some of the exercises are because the motion picture obscures the regular photo leaving it useless to me.

On pg. 86, Boyle addresses the problem of when to train abs. He states that some people argue for training abs at the end of the workout because otherwise you would be fatiguing muscles important in stability. He disagrees with this but gives no reason why but continues on with what he believes is the best progression.

Another opinion that is brought up is how athletes focus on "mirror muscles." I guess you can't both look good and perform well.

Overall, I think the book could have been better. I think Boyle pretty much just wrote about his experiences throughout his career without thinking about any backing for his thoughts. Many thoughts are incomplete and opinioned with not much backing. The exercises are great for incorporating into a program for diversity but I was not sold on how great the performance enhancing aspects of functional training are from this book.

If you're a sports athlete, don't train like a bodybuilder. Michael Boyle does an excellent job of explaining the difference and why it's so important. He gives easy to follow instructions to assess your current functional strength and identify your weaknesses. He then describes how to evaluate your sport and consider your strengths and weaknesses so you can develop an individualized training program to improve your sports performance. He gives instructions on how to begin and how to advance, with lots of pictures and detailed instructions on how to do each exercise. Really an excellent book.

Michael Boyle has done a great job with this book. This is the best and most informative book on the market. The exercises and progressions are easy to follow. I strongly recommend this book. It goes nicely with Gray Cook's "Athletic Body in Balance".