Man 2.0: Engineering the Alpha
I recently read Man 2.0: Engineering the Alpha by Adam Bornstein and John Romaniello.
It’s more than just another diet and exercise book - it covers the whole spectrum of manliness from behaviours and attitudes to diet and exercise, with a distinct focus on hormones.
The premise is that men aren’t manly any more because they’re hormones are all out-of-whack. I agree up to a point, but I find it hard to believe that it’s the source of all the obesity and disease in the world. I feel that “eat food, not too much, mostly plants, and exercise more” would be better advice for the majority of men.
Format
The book kind of rambles on about manliness and hormones for the first 150
pages and it feels like motivational fluff without a lot of substance. The
guys certainly did their research and everything is backed by scientific
studies, but it lacks actionable tasks.
The last 100 pages cover the diet and workout plans in 4 phases.
Diet
The basic dietary guidelines are aligned with how I usually eat - whole foods,
16/8 fasting and the occasional cheat day. More calories and carbs on workout
days, less on non-workout days.
However, I found the calorie and macronutrient calculations very complex and somewhat error-prone because the calculations rely on being able to accurately measure your body fat percentage at each phase. I don’t know about you, but dropping $80 every 4 weeks for a BodPod assessment isn’t something I’m going to do.
I encapsulated all of the diet calculations in a spreadsheet to make the number crunching less complicated. Here’s my Engineering the Alpha: Macronutrient Calculator. Feel free to download and/or copy it and enter your own weight and body fat percentage - it’ll calculate the rest for you.
Workouts
I’m a fan of big, heavy, compound lifts - squats, deadlifts, and presses - and
I was expecting Adam’s workouts to be along these lines. There are definitely
elements of these movements in the workouts but they’re more P90X/Insanity
than Starting Strength.
Nitpicky things
I didn’t like the typography. Long lines of text are always more difficult to
read than shorter ones as outlined in The Elements of Typographic
Style. The book would have been more readable if its text
had been broken up into columns.
And while we’re on the topic of typography, there are large sections of text that use non-standard, italicised fonts, which combined with the line length, make these sections particularly hard to read.
Summary
This is a good book for guys who have “let themselves go” since graduation and
are looking to turn things around. It’s not well suited to anyone that’s
already fit and looking for something new.
The writing was entertaining with plenty of manly f-bombs, humourous anecdotes and real-life stories.
Overall it’s a good book, but it’s not for me.
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