I recently found myself wondering if there was a better way to do fitness after I Started a 90 day no-gym fitness journey, and I think I found it.

First of all, I don’t think that you will be able to find this book in a traditional book store. And truthfully, if it wasn’t for the immense library at Library Genesis, I doubt that I would have ever known about this book.

This book was an absolute god send to me after I noticed a strange pain in my right foot, right behind the Hallux Bone. If you don’t know what bone that is, that’s okay. Its the proper name for the big toe. Anyway, I found that this part of my foot was hurting soooo bad and I really couldn’t quite explain it, and so I was propelled to find something that would help remedy this problem.

See, there are really only one of four things that influence the body’s pain (from my limited understanding of the body): the way you use the body, the food you feed the body, the condition you have received your body, and the way that other’s are using your body. That last one sounds weird, but bear with me; the way that a virus uses your body will determine if your body will deteriorate or not, and which parts. The other things that influence your experience of you body are pretty self explanatory.

Now, I haven’t been sick. So that ruled out the last one. I haven’t had any major changes in my diet recently. I tend to eat pretty well six out of eight days a week, so that ruled out the food aspect for me. I have only recently been experiencing this pain and so I strongly doubted it was congenital. So what that really left me with was how I was using the body.

As it turns out, this is exactly what was happening. I have been misusing my body ever since I left the gym and began using weights at home. Now, I am not using crazy amounts of weight, below is a picture of the weights I have been using. But did you notice something?

Yes, that is a hard wood floor. I have been working out barefoot on a hard wood floor and the repetitions using weight on this floor caused serious soft tissue damage to my feet. I know, crazy to think about how sensitive the body is when placed under tremendous repetitive strain. And that’s exactly what Paul Wade describes in his book.

The human body wasn’t made to lift weights over and over again. Day after day after day, with every increasing weight and intensity. This is, in his opinion, a recipe for disaster. And why is that? From his point of view, the human body is only as strong as the weakest link. And when you are lifting heavy weights, in his opinion, you are unnaturally applying resistance on parts of the body that take a tremendous amount of time and training to be able to perform some of the feats of strength that are being demanded of them. Specifically, the ligaments and joints.

Your body is incredibly adaptive when it comes to hypertrophy, or muscle building, but it isn’t very good at adapting to stress with regards to ligaments and joints. Look at the picture below, do you see all those ligaments and tendons? Those bad boys will never become muscular like the calves or the biceps. They have to be trained over a long period of time. So how do you do that?

On the surface calisthenics, or the art of beautiful strength, makes sense. But when taken into account against modern methods found in #gymlife, they seem lame. That is until you take some time to look into some of the strongest people on the planet: Convicts. And from the perspective of someone who has been going to the gym for almost half a decade, the ideas that are presented in Convict Conditioning are life changing.

It almost goes without saying that the body is capable of incredible feats of strength. But when you think about your body, is it capable of incredible feats of strength? Can you do a single one-arm pullup? I know that I can’t, and in the years of going to the gym I have never seen any one who can at the gym. If you are having a hard time conceptualizing how you would do one, here’s how.

I have found my self incredibly intrigued by this book and Paul Wade does an amazing job of explaining how you too can make your body into an incredible gym. And you don’t need a gym membership or weights or anything like that. You simply have to dedicate time, in a graduated way, doing progressively more difficult exercises until you are able to do the unthinkable. Like 100 one-arm pullups or pushups or one-legged squats or one-arm handstand pushups or one-arm leg raises or standing to standing bridges.

Anyway, if you have been thinking about changing your life: Convict Conditioning has begun to change mine.