If Harry Potter is the greatest selling fiction-book series ever written, and Chicken Soup For The Soul is the greatest selling non-fiction book series ever written, and the Fifty Shade books are the fastest-selling books to ever be written, then the Truth about Abs ebook is the self-published equivalent of those three books!
You see, poor Jon is tired of being fat and out of shape, and wants to get leaner and have a six-pack like all those top fitness male models out there. Will The Truth About Six Pack Abs ebook, written by Mike Geary, help Jon?
Watch the 20 minute video below to see for yourself before you start reading this exclusive review.
Mike Geary currently makes around $1,000,000 a month from selling this ebook. That’s right, one million US dollars a month! But does he deserve it from selling this world famous ebook?
Yes he does. Why? Because Mike Geary speaks the truth when it comes to getting a leaner body and six-pack abs. I have been aware of this ebook for a long, long time. A lot of fitness professionals and top Internet Marketers have mentioned it and, to be honest, as a Trainer/Coach I thought it would be another lame, gimmicky ebook with lots of hype and no substance.
But luckily I have an open, yet skeptical, mind (a good combination to have). So I decided to get hold of it and see what all the fuss is about. I was totally wrong about it having no substance. How do I know this? I have read it (in printed format) from cover to cover, highlighting and marking key points along the way. And of course, I have applied most of what Mike has advised in the ebook.
Not only does he make a lot of money out of it, he also walks the talk, unlike most Personal Trainers/Coaches/Therapists out there. As you can see in the picture below, Mike really does walk the talk, so he is an ethical Trainer and Author. As Paul Chek says: “If you don’t wear it, don’t share it.” Mike definitely wears what he shares.
Essentially, the book is purely about body shape transformation for the “average Joe.” Everybody who goes to the gym goes to improve the way they look. The problem is that most people are going about it in either an incorrect, or least optimal, way.
How are most people trying to get leaner?
Lots of cardio exercises, going on crash/fad diets, using bogus and dangerous fat-burning pills, and starving themselves. This MAY make you lose weight but it will not give you a hard, lean look. What it will do is give you the fat-skinny look due to muscle wastage, and it may make you look and feel unwell.
So what is it that makes you leaner? In a nutshell, it’s a balanced approach to diet and lifestyle, and more anaerobic work. This means more resistance-type training (weight training, kettle bell training, etc) and/or more explosive type activities (sprinting, boxing, medicine ball training and stop-start sports).
Overview of the main chapters
Let’s get into a bit more detail on what the book covers and what could be tweaked, in my professional opinion. Also, throughout this review I will mention the use of Paul Chek’s book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy (and his works in general), in conjunction with the use of this ebook.
Why? Because, again in my professional opinion, Paul Chek is the “king” of health and fitness and, like Mike Geary, he walks the talk, he speaks the truth and his book/work will be a useful adjunct to this ebook.
The Truth About Six Pack Abs does not cover postural considerations, overall stress loading on the body, injuries, bodily infections, leaky gut syndrome and food intolerance’s, etc, like How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy does. If you have any of the above, that could limit your chances of getting a six pack.
This is NOT a problem or “weakness” with Mike’s ebook. As is stated earlier, his book is mainly about a healthy, balanced approach to body shape transformation. Just by applying what Mike asks you to do in his ebook can potentially help any of the problems above.
We as healthcare professionals (and professionals in general) can only work (and write) with the current skills/amount of experience we have. That’s all Mike has done, what Paul Chek has done, and what I am doing now.
Mike does ask you to keep an open mind when reading this book. This is because most won’t believe how simple it is to change their body shape. It’s also due to the mass-media ideas on how to change the body. What are the current ideas being marketed to the masses? Take this pill, use this rubbish ab machine, go on this crappy dogmatic diet, take this fat-burning pill which will do nothing other than burning your adrenal glands out, etc, etc. Mike also boldly states that most of the so-called health/fitness experts know nothing about true health and fitness, yet they are trying to sell their latest gimmick(s) to you.
This ebook is not a gimmick, even though there are ignorant idiots posting blogs, commenting on YouTube and Facebook saying it is. They are completely WRONG!
Mike makes a great point in saying that the best exercises are the best – period. And that the dead lift is the number one best exercise anyone can do (barring any back injuries). I also love this guy’s honesty and integrity. Why? Because he says that the ab exercises in the book are NOT the most important part of the programme. It’s the full overall body exercises that really make the difference (along with good diet and lifestyle choices).
Equipment or no equipment
You do not need loads of equipment to do this programme. Ideally, you need to have access to a few dumbbells, barbells, a weight-lifting bench and a Swiss ball, be it at a gym or in your own home. But you can do all the barbell exercises presented in this ebook with dumbbells.
On a side-note: Paul Chek is the guy who brought the use of a Swiss Ball (stability ball) into the mainstream over 20-years ago.
Mike makes a great observation about all the conflicting (dogmatic) diets out there. Later on in this review I will explain how to overcome that. Mike confidently says that anyone can get leaner, therefore, get six pack abs, by following the programme in this ebook. If you don’t believe me take a look at the dozens of testimonials on his website to see for yourself before continuing with this review …
You’re back? Let’s get going with the main chapters in this book …
RELATIVE LEANNESS OR BODY FAT %
In this chapter Mike talks about what the ideal body fat percentages for men and women are, so that their six pack is visible. What are they? Generally men need to get below 10-11% body fat, and women need to get below 16% to see their abs. It’s not a great idea for women to get under 12-13% body fat as it can alter their hormones and mess up their menstrual cycles, which could lead to infertility.
It’s a good idea to have your body fat measured every couple of weeks with skin callipers or using a bio-electrical impedance machine.
SAFE AND EFFECTIVE ABDOMINAL DEVELOPMENT
In this chapter Mike gives a simple breakdown of the composition of abdominal musculature. In a nutshell your abdominal musculature (core) consist of the Rectus Abdominis (the six pack muscle), the Transverse Abdominis, the internal/external Obliques, the Pelvic Floor and the Diaphragm. He then mentions what each group muscle does, and their effect on the body.
Next, Mike talks about proper body positioning for ab training. He mentions that the typical and incorrect advice of minimizing hip flexor activity can create bad back problems. This is due to the fact that minimizing hip flexor activity will shorten the Psoas muscle. Also, doing the typical ‘rubbish’ ab exercises being promoted out there will do the same thing.
Mike then explains about the frequency and duration of ab training. Again, he makes the point by saying that doing big compound movements like squats, lunges, row, etc burns more calories than just doing ab exercises, therefore, making you leaner and helping you to achieve your six pack.
Mike recommends 2-3 times a week for 5-10 minutes. He then recommends that you do your ab training at the end of your workout or on a separate day, the reason being that if you do your ab exercises at the beginning or during the middle of your workout, you will tire out these core stabilizing muscles. If you then were to do heavy lifts, such as dead lifts or squats, you’d be asking for a back injury!
I would also recommend that you train your lower abs first as they require more co-ordination, then your sides and lastly your upper abs, using repetitions of 8-12 not 50-100+ like most people do. For 3-4 sets.
Why? The abdominal musculature is designed for explosive movement more than long repetitive movement.
Mike then gives you his recommendation on the best abs exercises to do, and the bad exercises to avoid. There are some really nice pictures and descriptions of these great ab exercises. After the pictures and descriptions, Mike gives you six different levels of ab programmes which you can incorporate into your training routine.
If you want a really, really comprehensive overview on how the abdominal musculature works, I highly recommend Paul Chek’s Scientific Core Conditioning DVD series/home study course and his book Awesome Abs.
LEAN BODY MASS AND METABOLIC RATE
Mike correctly states that the most important yet overlooked aspect of getting leaner is increasing your resting metabolic rare (RMR). Your resting metabolic rare is the rate at which you burn calories – which is a unit of energy from food – at rest. Even in this chapter Mike says you don’t have to obsess over the exact amount of calories you consume (which is correct), but he still gives you a basic formula to work out how many calories you need to lose body fat. Later, I will explain why counting calories is not needed at all.
Like I said earlier, we can only work and write with the skills and knowledge we currently have. At the time of writing his ebook I am sure that Mike was not aware of Metabolic Typing. You see when you eat what’s right for you (Metabolic Typing) at any given time, you don’t have to worry about calories at all. Your cells will just use the food you eat for energy.
You can find out more on Metabolic Typing here, or you can work out what your type is in Paul Chek’s book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy (or if you live in or around London you can work with me personally to find out what your type is).
It is also true when Mike says the more lean muscle you have the more calories you burn on a daily basis. This is because muscle tissue is the metabolically active tissue in the body.
METABOLIC EFFECT OF TRAINING
In this chapter Mike makes a controversial point by saying that big exercises such as squats, dead lifts, lunges, pressing and pulling type movements will bring your abs out more so than ab-specific training. This is because these big exercises create huge metabolic changes in your body that assists in lowering your overall body fat.
Next point: Multi-joint vs. single-joint exercises?
Multi-joint (compound) exercises, such as dead lifts, are better as they work lots of large muscle groups at once. Single-joint (isolation) exercises, such as Triceps kick backs, work only one muscle at a time. Also, for the most part, multi-joint exercises are far more functional in our day-to-day environment.
The exercises Mike covers in his book also cover the six primal movement patterns Paul Chek coined over 20-years ago. We all need to be proficient at doing these six patterns in order to survive in our environment. These six patterns are bending, pulling, twisting, lunging, pressing and squatting. You can find out more on these patterns in Paul’s book Movement That Matters.
In regards to big multi-joint vs. single-joint exercises, Mike talks about the quality of work accomplished during training. This point really opened up my eyes!
In a nutshell, what he means is that the amount of work you do in the gym can be calculated using the formula: W=Fd, where F= force/intensity (the amount of weight moved) and d = the distance you move the weight. Multiplying these together equals the amount of work (effort) you put your body through in any given exercise.
Basically, the more weight you lift for a greater distance will be more work on the body, therefore, more calories being burnt. This gives you a better chance of getting a leaner body.
FREE WEIGHTS VS MACHINES
This is a great chapter. What’s best to use when it comes to training? Well, for the most part, free weights. Free weights follow your body’s natural line of motion and force more of the body’s muscles to work in any given exercise, unlike machines.
Also, using machines too often can make you more prone to injury, due to that fact they will shut down your stabilising muscles, and down-regulate your nervous system. The bottom line is this: if you want to get better results stick to free weights most of the time. However, Mike says he’s not anti-machines, and neither am I.
I personally use machines very sparingly, either to work a muscle group harder and/or, out of emergency/variety, when I can’t use the free weight alternative.
For example, there have been a few times in the gym I use when I can’t get on the bench press or weight-lifting benches to do chest work, as the gym is so busy. In that rare case I will use the seated chest press machine, and when I do, I normally do twice the amount of sets as if I were to do the free weight alternative. I do this to get the same effect as using a free weight.
As a rule of thumb, don’t do any more than 20% of your training routine on machines. Also, if you are doing power, free weight, Swiss ball and machine weight training all in the same workout, always do it in this order:
1- Power/Swiss Ball free weight training (doing free weight training on a Swiss ball)
2- Free weight training
3- Machine training
To finish this chapter off, Mike mentions the use of weight belts and how they can be very dangerous. To back this point up, have a read of Paul Chek’s article “Strong Back and Beltless”.
THE PROBLEM WITH CARDIO
Steady-state cardio (aerobic) training is not the best way to lose body fat. It never has been or will be! The best way to become leaner is to focus more of your time in higher intensity (anaerobic) training such free weight and sprint-type training.
The reason for this is that your resting metabolic rate (rate that you burn calories at rest) remains elevated for only a few hours after a cardio training session, but will be elevated for up to 1-2 days or more after an anaerobic weight training/sprint training session, therefore, increasing your chances of getting leaner.
The ebook will give you more details (and scientific research) about why this is.
FREQUENCY AND DURATION OF TRAINING SESSIONS
In this very short chapter Mike gives you some recommendations of how long and how often you should train. As a rule of thumb you will get better results if you train 3-4 x week for 45-60 minutes per workout. Research by Charles Poliquin says that if you up your training sessions to 4 x week you will increase your results by 50 percent!
Our bodies respond to different training times and frequencies due to the differences in our genetics, the type of training we are doing, how much stress our body is under and our level of health, to name but a few.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER INTO AN EFFECTIVE TRAINING ROUTINE
In this much larger chapter – which takes up 32 pages– Mike gives pointers on what to think about when putting your training routine together. He then lists what he thinks are the 24 best exercises to help you become leaner.
Then he gives you pictures and descriptions of the 24 fat burning exercises, so you know what you are doing.
After that, Mike gives you six example training routines from beginner to advanced. You can still tweak them yourself to purely suit you, your time and energy.
THE OVERWHELMING IMPORTANCE OF YOUR DIET
As Mike said: “I’ve saved the most important information for last.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In this part of the book Mike talks about the blood sugar/insulin cycle (process). Basically, when this cycle is out from eating too much sugar, the body will store the excess sugar in the fat cells rather than in the muscles and liver, thereby making you fat.
The only way to keep this cycle balanced is to eat what is right for you (Metabolic Typing), cut back on sugary, refined foods and build up enough lean muscle mass (with the exercises in the ebook) so the muscles can “burn up” any excess sugar.
Next, Mike talks about why you should not go on fad or crash diets. Again this is very TRUE! The reason this is true is because all fad/crash diets will cause malnourishment as they are so restrictive. When you deprive the body of certain nutrients, the body thinks it’s going into starvation mode and slows its metabolic rate accordingly, burning almost no calories. When you come off the diet and start to eat ‘normally’ again, all the weight goes back on plus a little extra. The body does this out of survival.
Eating fat does not make you fat! is what it says in the next section of this chapter. Yet again Mike speaks the truth. The reason most of us think that fats make you fat is due to the fact that food manufacturing advertisers and the medical industry send out mixed and incorrect messages to confuse and miss-inform people.
Mike makes a point that some so-called ‘experts’ say that this or that diet(s) will prevent heart disease, which does nothing except contradict their opinions and cause confusion among the masses. Mike then goes on to say that the Eskimo populations (and other tribal populations) ate diets which were very high in fat and low on carbs and had no heart disease whatsoever. If you get the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price, it backs Mike’s point up perfectly.
This again also backs up Metabolic Typing. Basically people who come from where it is really cold in the world (the Eskimos), which is near the North and South Poles, generally do better on a higher fat/protein and lower carb diet. On the other hand, people who come from a hot climate (near the equator) generally do better with a lower protein/fat and higher carb diet. This is due to the fact that our genetics had to evolve to cope with the environment we lived in (came from).
There is no one diet to suit everyone, and there never will be. Once you learn to eat right for YOU, you will never have to play any more head games with yourself trying to work out what diet/foods are best for you.
As I say to my clients, the only foods you should avoid are:
- The ones you are allergic to (that’s easy).
- The ones you are intolerant to (bit trickier to find out).
- Those that are highly processed (that’s obvious).
- Those that may put your metabolic type out of balance (depends how balanced it is in the first place).
- And, of course, the foods you just don’t like. (If this is a lot of foods then it’s usually a mental reason, from your upbringing. This should be addressed as it can lead to malnutrition).
Mike then gives some advice/tips on balanced, healthy eating. This is a great tip: try and do your food shopping on a full stomach. This will stop you making impulse purchases on unnecessary (and usually unhealthy) foods.
To quote Mike in this section, he says: “I don’t feel there’s any magical dietary composition that promotes fat loss.”
Again, he is right. All you have to do is learn to listen to your body. And again, Metabolic Typing is the starting (observation) point for that. Once you have worked that out, you won’t have to worry about counting calories at all.
Hopefully, if Mike himself reads this review, he will understand the concept of Metabolic Typing, and maybe add it into the next edition of his great ebook.
In the latter part of this chapter, Mike talks about the two hidden evils in our food supply that can derail our chase to become leaner. He also bring up the interesting point that dietary calcium and dairy can help us stay lean. This, unfortunately, does not apply to those who are intolerant to dairy!
Mike then gives “the secret fat-loss benefits of teas.” These teas include green tea, oolong tea, white tea and plain old black tea. Again, in the ebook he backs his points up with sound research.
Mike finishes off this chapter with a summary of dietary strategies, meal plans/examples.
And again, don’t worry about how many calories a meal has. Just learn to listen to your appetite and what your body is asking for from meal to meal. This does take time to do, but it’s worth it!
ADDITIONAL LEAN BODY TIPS
Here Mike basically gives you six additional lean body tips. There are: reduce stress, get adequate sleep, stay well-hydrated, avoid high sodium foods, limit alcohol consumption and eat organic food as much as possible. Funnily enough these tips almost carry over to the top eight health tips here.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS CONCERNING ABS AND BODY FAT
In this final chapter Mike answers 14 common questions when it comes to reducing body fat. Some of the questions include:
“I’ve heard that in order to lose body fat and get lean, I can’t eat after 6 or 7 pm?”
“Is it true that doing morning cardio on an empty stomach is the best way to lose body fat?”
“What’s your take on those electrical stimulation ab belts that have been selling over the last few years? Do they work or not?”
I love FAQ chapters in books or purely FAQ books. It makes the book more dynamic and interesting.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Set yourself specific goals says Mike. Write them down with a specific timeframe, and don’t write down vague statements such as “I want to lose weight.”
Write down something like this: “I am happy and grateful that I am a xxx pound man (woman) at xx% of body fat and it is not yet 31st December 2015.”
My overall ratings of the book:
Value for money: 5/5
Content: 5/5
Accuracy of information: 4/5
Easiness to implement the information: 5/5
Presentation: 5/5
For those people (Internet Marketers) who are interested in how Mike made this book become a worldwide best seller, check out Mikes interview with Tim Ferris at the Four Hour Blog here.
I hoped you enjoyed the review.