Review: Get Strong by Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo

The good

• Presents a solid, progressive bodyweight routine that will likely work well for most people.

• The routine starts easy enough to work for almost any fitness level and works up to a solid intermediate level.

• It’s a routine that consists of 4 phases, each 4 weeks long, with really nice “tests” to do at the end of each phase to make sure you’re ready to go on to the next one. This creates a clear, unambiguous way to see your progression, which is very motivating.

• The routine includes a good range of upper body, core, and lower body exercises. There are a few items missing, but that’s intentionally done to make the routine rely on as little equipment as possible (i.e., only a pull-up bar) and as accessible as possible (it doesn’t go into advanced exercises). There is a section on supplemental exercises that covers some of the missing pieces if you do have the equipment / ability.

**The not so good

• The routine doesn’t extend into more advanced levels. If you want to push your bodyweight fitness further, Convict Conditioning is probably a better fit.

• The book doesn’t cover how to deal with a lack of equipment and how to creatively use your environment to be able to truly train anywhere. Your Body is Your Gym is stronger in this area.

• I felt like the details on how to do the exercises were a little thin. There are descriptions, and photos, and if you’ve been training for a while, that’s probably enough. But I worry that for beginners, there are a lot of critical tips that are missing: e.g., for most newbies, a full-depth two-legged squat, let alone the one-leg version, is a significant flexibility challenge, and it feels like the book doesn’t spend nearly enough time addressing that, talking about the importance of keeping your heel on the ground (and what to do if it refuses to stay down), properly engaging the posterior chain in the squat, and so on. Similarly, for the pushing exercises, there’s not enough mention of the proper way to position your shoulders to keep the rotator cuff safe. So if you do follow the routine in this book, make sure to go out and watch videos of how to do these exercises to learn how to do them efficiently and safely.

• The routine and supplemental exercises fill only about half of the book. The other half is mostly motivational essays, random thoughts on exercise / mindset / diet, and a bunch of ads for other books at the end. And given that almost every page has huge photos of the Kavaldo brothers, it feels a little bit like filler content: i.e., “well, we wanted to share this great routine with the world, and we did that, but it’s not quite enough for a proper book, so let’s pad it out with random other content.” I’m sure some people will find those essays helpful, but I found myself skipping most of them.**

Rating: 3 stars