There are plenty of books and DVDs that show women how to exercise with their baby to get back in shape. But what about the poor neglected dad? The truth is, "raising" one's children comes naturally to fathers, and this book provides new dads with a spontaneous, healthy, and fun way to engage with their babies and young children. With funky, retro-cool, full-color illustrations, Baby Barbells not only shows men how to work their biceps and quads, but more importantly provides amusing yet poignant advice on bonding with baby and becoming a great dad. With its soft, subtle humor and meaningful guidance, Baby Barbells combines parenting, fitness, and health into a playful series of exercises--all in a contemporary, appealing package.

High-school teacher Issa McKendrick had plenty of reasons to swear off men. With a baby on the way after a bad breakup, she retreated to her hometown to lick her wounds. Only to have two more men knocking at the door—her delicious landlord, Hutch Kincaid, and his adorable little boy. What was a gal to do but say come in? The widowed former football star had wounds of his own, but Hutch was determined to provide a happy home for his son. Then this achingly shy woman changed everything. At least Hutch could teach the flustered mother-to-be a thing or two about parenting. What he didn't realize is that for extra credit, they were both about to get lessons in love that would last a lifetime.

One of the most versatile and effective forms of equipment, dumbbells have long been part of the training formula for building strength and power and toning the entire body. Now in Dumbbell Training, Second Edition, former NSCA Collegiate Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year Allen Hedrick describes how to use dumbbells as a primary mode of training and shows how dumbbells can be an excellent alternative to traditional barbell workouts for just about anyone. Whether you are an athlete wanting to improve your sport performance or a fitness enthusiast wanting to improve upon your current exercise regime, you can use dumbbells to achieve your goals related to fitness, weight loss, increased muscle mass, or improved athletic performance. Hedrick, the former strength and conditioning coach at the United States Olympic Training Center, guides you through proven exercises and programs based on more than 25 years of experience working with athletes. The book is loaded with more than 110 exercises targeting the core, upper body, lower body, and total body. Exercises feature a variety of variations and are supplemented with photos and concisely written exercise descriptions, making it easy to understand each exercise and implement it on your own. Did You Know? sidebars offer interesting details and tips about the use of dumbbell exercises. You’ll also find 66 ready-to-use programs that target your specific goals. Fitness-oriented plans will help you with fat loss, general fitness, hypertrophy, and strength, while athletes will find plans for increasing power, speed, agility, and balance in eight popular sports: cycling, ice hockey, skiing, soccer, speed skating, swimming, track and field, and wrestling. If you train with dumbbells, or are interested in starting a dumbbell training program, Dumbbell Training will put you on the path to a refined physique or improved performance. Earn continuing education credits/units! A continuing education course and exam that uses this book is also available. It may be purchased separately or as part of a package that includes all the course materials and exam.

Operational athletes are a unique breed. You need to physically perform at an extraordinarily high level in stressful situations. Often in dangerous or unstable environments. As a SWAT operator, combat-arms soldier, or first responder, you have to be a Jack of All Trades. Let's take that a step further. You have to achieve some degree of mastery. You have to be strong, have incredible levels of endurance, and be capable of sustained bursts of intense activity. All while tired, hungry, cold, or worse. You can't train like a bodybuilder. You can't be sore for a week after 'leg' day. You can't afford to specialize like a powerlifter. You have other abilities you need to develop, things like cardiovascular training, work capacity, and occupational skills. Anyone that's operational knows it's a constant juggling act trying to become (and stay) superhuman. Tactical Barbell is a strength training program designed specifically for operational athletes using correct principles and best practices. The objective being to increase maximal-strength and strength-endurance, while taking into account the need to simultaneously train other fitness domains. Periodization based, with a simple progression model that allows for a great degree of customization. You won't find cables, balance boards or medicine balls in this program. What you will get is a reliable, repeatable, cutting edge system to increase your strength dramatically. In a manner that leaves you time and energy to train all those other things you need to be good at. No fluff. No frills. If you live in the arena, you know talk is cheap. The program includes a built in strength testing component. You will know whether or not your strength has increased, and by how much. Simple.

With Men's Health Your Body Is Your Barbell, a reader will have no excuse not to get into the best shape of his or her life—simply, easily, and in just 6 weeks in the convenience of his or her own home. Metabolic training expert BJ Gaddour, CSCS, whom Men's Health magazine calls one of the 100 fittest men of all time, has created a remarkably efficient and effective body-transforming workout and nutrition program based on just a handful of simple moves, the Bodyweight Eight. These no-equipment-required exercises are all one needs to build a strikingly symmetrical, perfectly proportioned, and classically beautiful physique, just like BJ's. Once readers master each legendary fitness feat with perfect form, they will use BJ's scalable, step-by-step progressions to go from ground zero to superhero. From these exercise variations, readers can construct hundreds of personalized workouts. Dozens of sample routines are already demonstrated through big, bold how-to photographs within the book and organized by goal, duration, intensity, and targeted body zone. This is the only book a man or woman needs to achieve the body he or she has always wanted anywhere—and without gear.

Dworkin and Wachs analyze 10 years of health and fitness magazines to uncover how bodies are made in popular culture Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal—not just thin but toned, not just muscular but cut—that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be “fit”? And how is it that having an unfit, or “bad,” body gets conflated with being an unfit, or “bad,” citizen? Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men’s and women’s health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are “made” in today’s culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women’s and men’s bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.

Named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 One of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014 “A West Coast version of Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors...A funny, shocking, generous-hearted book” (Entertainment Weekly) about a boy, his five stepfathers, and the mother who was determined to give her son everything but the truth. When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his immigrant father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live as a Mexican American just because he was born one. With the help of Maria’s ruthless imagination and a hastily penned jailhouse correspondence, the life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the Native American son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin. Through a series of letters to Paul Skyhorse Johnson, a stranger in prison for armed robbery, Maria reinvents herself and her young son as American Indians in the colorful Mexican-American neighborhood of Echo Park, California, where Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth, when a surprise discovery leads him to his biological father at last. From this PEN/Hemingway Award–winning novelist comes an extraordinary literary memoir capturing a mother-son story unlike any other and a boy’s single-minded search for a father, wherever he can find one.