The Three Muscleteers is the story of Gold’s Gym and what’s now known around the world as the fitness industry. Not long ago, athletes of most popular sports — football, basketball, baseball — never lifted weights. Coaches and trainers, even doctors, were against it, especially for women. The film Pumping Iron, which made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, was shot at Gold’s Gym. That, along with the explosion of bodybuilding competitions that followed throughout the ‘80s was a “big bang” moment. Thanks to the trifecta of Joe Weider’s fitness magazines, Arnold’s stardom, and Gold’s Gym, the fitness industry was transformed. As one of the three owners of Gold’s Gym during its golden years, Ed Connors will inspire with his success stories of hundreds of visitors to his home in Venice, CA (only blocks from Gold’s Gym). Visitors he believed were destined for greatness, like action film star and WWE champion John Cena, who helped make Gold’s Gym "the Mecca" and the largest gym chain in the world. Ed believes life is half fate and half what you do with it. The Three Muscleteers amplifies the importance of taking risks, creating the perfect team, and never giving up — inspiring bodybuilders, wrestlers, athletes, actors, architects, CEOs, and anyone willing to take a chance to flex their own muscles.

Finalist for 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Mingling the earthy with the otherworldly, these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek, North Carolina, an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. Shot through with humor and seasoned by inventiveness and maturity, Kenan riffs on appetites of all kinds, on the eerie persistence of history, and on unstoppable lovers and unexpected salvations. If I Had Two Wings is a rich chorus of voices and visions, dreams and prophecies, marked by physicality and spirit. Kenan’s prose is nothing short of wondrous.

Lifting light weights with good form has helped Rick Newcombe look and feel youthful his whole life, especially in his golden years. Told in a lively style in the first person—and illustrated with nearly two hundred photos—Newcombe takes us on his journey, starting with wanting to be a bodybuilder as a thirteen-year-old and resulting in his love affair with lifting weights as an adult. He is passionate about this fantastic hobby because it helps build muscle and maintain fitness. His weightlifting story is one of inspiration, success, failure, frustration, and ultimate success, all while he was building a multimillion-dollar media company, traveling the world, and maintaining a close family life. He calls it magical because he went after one goal—muscles—and received a dozen unexpected and rewarding benefits, such as increased bone density, fat loss, better balance, and increased energy. The author says that working out has helped him to feel youthful with each passing decade, and it is the foundation for energy as a senior citizen. The key is to make exercising fun.

In the depths of the Great Depression a scrawny, dirt-poor Jewish kid with a seventh-grade education picked up a barbell and got hooked on weight training. Building his muscles gave him confidence and hope for a better life. He pledged to make the great, transforming power of strength training available to everyone and to give bodybuilding all the glory it deserved.The kid, Joe Weider, enlisted his younger brother Ben in his quest, and together the Weider brothers accomplished things much bigger than Joe's boyhood dreams. The little muscle magazine Joe started, working at his family's dining room table, grew into a publishing empire. From a backyard barbell business, Joe and Ben built equipment and food supplement companies each as big as Weider Publishing. And they transformed bodybuilding into a hugely successful sport, organized under one of the largest and best-run athletic federations in the world.The Weider brothers are heroes to bodybuilders and fans all over the world. They're heroes because they're revolutionaries. The Weiders changed the way people think about exercise, health, and what makes a body beautiful. They changed the world and Brothers of Iron tells their fascinating story.

The Social Security program touches the lives of Americans young and old. Almost everyone has a Social Security number and a job that deducts Social Security taxes from his or her paycheck. And more than 60 million Americans, 1 out of every 6 people, collect a monthly Social Security check. Social Security spending makes up about one-fourth of the entire federal budget. A program this big is bound to have complex laws and regulations. Tom Margenau has been helping people understand Social Security for almost 50 years, both as a Social Security Administration employee and as a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. For the first time, he has gathered all of his knowledge and advice into a series of easy-to-read fact sheets and placed them in this book. Simply find the fact sheet that covers the topic you are interested in and you will improve your understanding of how Social Security affects you and your family. And if you still have questions after reading this book, Tom is ready to help. Just send him an email at [email protected].

Before Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Reeves, or Charles Atlas, there was Eugen Sandow, a muscular vaudeville strongman who used his good looks, intelligence, and business savvy to forge a fitness empire. The German-born Sandow (1867-1925) established a worldwide string of gyms, published a popular magazine, sold exercise equipment, and pioneered the use of food supplements. He even marketed a patented health corset for his female followers. Among the colorful figures who played a part in Sandow's life are Bernarr Macfadden, Florenz Ziegfeld, Lillian Russell, and others in sports and the theater. Sandow the Magnificent is the story of this first showman to emphasize physique display rather than lifting prowess. Sandow's is also the story of the earliest days of the fitness movement, and Chapman explains the popularity of physical culture in terms of its wider social implications. Sandow was a proponent of exercise to alleviate physical ailments, anticipating the field of physical therapy. By making exercise fashionable, he encouraged the fitness craze that still endures. As the first superstar in his field, Sandow also pried open some surprising cracks in the Victorian wall of prudery. His nude photographs, a kind of soft-core pornography, were anxiously sought by both male and female admirers, and after many of his major public events he gave private "receptions" wearing little more than a G-string.