Book Reviews

Last month I was invited to review the book Master Your Core by Dr. Bohdanna Zazulak, a noted sports medicine researcher who specializes in the disparity in injury rates between men and women. The central claim of the book is that, despite massively increased spending and advancements in sports medicine, high injury rates persist due to a lack of core stability. As a solution, the book proposes a four-phase system known as Core BASE which offers curated sets of activities and exercises, ranging from focused breathing to planks to squats and lunges, to strengthen and stabilize your core. I'm a [...]

Training for the Uphill Athlete is a follow-up to the bible of mountaineering fitness Training for the New Alpinism, generalizing the fitness advice to include mountain running, skimo and ski mountaineering. This time around they've enlisted the help of Killian Jornet, a crazy person who jogs across mountain ridges for a living (that's him on the cover). Despite being loaded with pretty pictures and semi-interesting athlete stories the book contains a numeric overflow's worth of scientific and tournament-tested endurance fitness information. It starts out with the biological basis of fitness, covering mitochondria, pyruvate production, ATP, lactate thresholds, and so on. [...]

In the winter of 2014-2015 Justin "Trauma" Lichter and Shawn "Pepper" Forry became the first people to complete the Pacific Crest Trail in winter. That's 2,650 miles of continuous winter backpacking which is absolutely insane. Two years later they released this book which contains not only a wealth of knowledge on winter backpacking but also an appendix containing their PCT gear lists. I picked this up at the beginning of November and despite not being much for physical books these days I've had trouble putting it down. During a bout of insomnia I finally finished it around 4 in the [...]