Book review -- Escape Your Shape

Escape Your Shape; How to Work Out Smarter, Not Harder by Edward J. Jackowski, Ph.D.

I appreciate the comments left on my earlier post about this book. In summary, Dr. Jackowski has decided any body can be described as one of four shapes; hourglass, ruler, cone, or spoon, and each shape has a correct way to exercise. (I'm guessing spoon has replaced pear, but where did the apple go?)

Anyway, in his experience if you want to "escape your shape" you've got to do what sounds to me like spot reducing. For instance, if you're a spoon (bigger in your lower half, smaller in your upper half) Dr. Jackowski says you should avoid any exercise that would build muscle in your lower body and concentrate on building muscle in your upper body while burning fat. For this particular shape he gave an example of a woman who could build muscle in her lower body faster than her body could burn fat, hence his reason to not build muscle in her lower body until the fat was gone. This would help her "escape her shape." Once the fat in her lower body was gone, she could then carefully build muscle throughout her body, keeping in mind to keep her upper body in proportion with her lower body.

He has designed different exercise programs for each body shape (found in the book), emphasizing lower weights with high repetitions. Personally, I would be bored following his program for my body type, but that's me. I love a challenge in lifting weights. I could see how a novice could fall in love with this book and, if followed exactly, could find desired results.

Despite my feelings, Escape Your Shape is easy to read and quite motivating (I was almost ready to get out of bed at 11:30pm to start a workout). I do give props to Dr. Jackowski for getting the message out there that not every workout is for every body. I would recommend Escape Your Shape to the novice exerciser looking for a concrete path to follow. As a side note to that, I think anyone can get the results they're desiring if they've got constant help from their observant personal trainer. OBSERVANT is the key word.