Lift Strong

[Robert Allison]

I recently picked up Lift Strong, Alwyn Cosgrove's project to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I haven't really checked it out in great detail, but I suspect a lot of the material is available for free on the Internet.

Having said that, you get 800 pages of articles and the opportunity to support a relatively good cause, so all in all, not a bad deal. I picked mine up through Elite Fitness--they offer free shipping and also throw in one of their hand towels and a free issue of Powerlifting USA magazine.

The disk includes a nice piece by Shaf on frugal training, and also features articles by Mike Boyle, Pavel, Charles Staley and about 40 or 50 others. For more info, you can visit: www.elitefts.com

[Steve Liberati]

Looks like a good deal....besides I always knew Shaf belonged in the same sentence with the likes of Boyle, Staley and Pavel.

(Just messing with you Steve where ever you are at!)

[Danny John]

My article isn't available anywhere but on the CD. It is my philosophy of training and most people would recognize it, but most people would disagree with it.

It is a great project and well worth the investment.

[Steve Shafley]

Yeah, a wonderful project. Alwyn Cosgrove had a great idea, unfortunately, it's not panning out as nicely as he would have liked, as in not as many people have bought it as he projected.

[Danny John]

It is funny you say that, Steve. Every so often, I will bump into somebody who has a great idea for fitness or health or whatever and, key the music, wants to make money on the internet selling the pdf or DVD or whatever. I always tell them to give it away free and save themself a lot of pain.

Alwyn's idea and the product are genius, but I think we have raised a subgeneration on the internet that expects "free" or "I'll just find it somewhere else." I think this might be especially so in the strength/fitness/health world.

There was an odd backlash to this about two years ago when some people put out "free stuff" then expected payment or credit "backwards." Once you put something on the internet, it is pretty much gone. Bodybuilding.com put up one of my articles verbatim (it might have even been word for word) and gave no credit at all back to me. I understand when small operations do that, like the guy who had my "Exercise for Fat Loss" on his site for years without credit or the people who took my "Old School Strength Site" stuff and cut and pasted it on their site, but BB was rather large (and profitable) to do that. It is now fixed, but I think Alwyn ran into the same mind set with this project.

Seriously, getting a bootleg copy of something to support cancer research starts to look like stealing from orphans in my worldview.

I hope he does something like this again because the good will seemed to carry for a while.

[James R. Climer]

I had intended to contribute to this when I received
notice via eMail from elitefts.com, but I don't like to
do internet transactions while at work, and I forgot
about it by the time I was home.

Thx for the reminder. It looks like the program's still
intact.