MAN OVERBOARD
After reading the formula for how to become an alpha male, Tymon Smith decides to remain the bookish nerd he was meant to be
SO you’re a formerly skinny man with a high metabolism that’s been decimated in your 30s by beer and the belief that exercise is for people you can’t relate to? Well, don’t worry, help is at hand in the printed version of that ad you see on the internet promising you rock-hard washboard abs in two weeks.
You’re about to turn the half a man you are into the alpha man you should always have been. Only one thing stands in your way and that’s the impenetrable mush of rubbish with an introduction by Arnold Schwarzenegger that is Man 2.0. Its authors promise that this book will “unlock the secret to burn fat faster, build more muscle, have better sex and become the best version of yourself.”
All of which is wonderful but will necessitate your having to read far too many pages of small print separated by headlines such as “make more money, have more sex, and be f***ing awesome”.
Yes, this is the fitness equivalent of the getting laid lectures delivered by Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia — in your face, full of bold reminders, bullet points and testimonies from losers like you who took the plunge, answered the call and became alpha, better bonking, ab flexing motherf*****s. Everything you thought you knew is wrong and the book is replete with little notes reminding you of all the traditional thoughts about dieting and exercise that you should reject — “reject this thought: light weights + high reps = shredded body”.
You need to wade through almost 200 pages of this nonsense before you get to the pictures of exercises you should be doing to become your true alpha self and the lists of food you need to eat while doing them. It’s a bad version of basic training scenes from films like Full Metal
Jacket and Biloxi Blues, starring an invisible team of idiots who can’t write their way out of a set of dumbbells.
All the four-letter words are there to show you that these are men who understand how to talk to other men and turn them into real men, a tried and tested army technique that turns nice youngsters with brains into amoral killers in helicopters.
The use of quotes from blockbuster films such as Batman Begins and The Lord of
the Rings only serves to rev you up and make you more determined to become all that you can be as quickly as possible — apparently one man’s fictional wizard is another man’s personal trainer.
I’ve also learnt that the old ways of measuring things are incapable of expressing the adrenaline-fuelled needs of the man in search of his 2.0. What used to be a ton is now described as a “metric f**k-ton” in the section advising me to “Have More Sexy Time”.
I’m sure there are hundreds of Men’s Health subscribers for whom all of this will only increase their gym time, but for someone disinclined to be such a person there’s been no better encouragement for me to keep to my sloth-filled, beerdrenched ways than this terrible bible of blather.
To its authors I can only say thank you for making me believe in me and not want to be anything like you. As they say, the best intentions are something or other and filled with sh*tloads of protein. • Man 2.0 by John Romaniello and Adam Bornstein, published by Vermillion, R250