Nice classy article, HN.
- Links to over $500 dollars worth of equipment on Amazon, and over $1000 overall (I guess the Marcy device isn't sold on Amazon?) but no links to any sites with good information about lifting weights.
- Recommendation of specific supplements and lifting program (including suggested numbers of reps and sets) but only a haphazard list of random exercises and no information about how to perform them.
- No discussion of how his suggested total time and set count imply very short rest periods, which isn't necessarily wrong but deserves some comment, especially for beginners who might wonder "WTF is going on?" when they try to do five sets to failure in ten minutes (that's 15-20 sets split into three sessions totaling thirty minutes per day.)
- Come to think of it, very little discussion of how beginners should work their way up to such an effort, especially since they should be much more slow and careful until they're comfortable with good form. Beginners working to failure? You'd better be very specific about what exercises you're talking about before you suggest that.
- Recommendation to use creatine with no discussion of what it does. Creatine does not in itself make you stronger, but it makes it possible for you to sustain a harder pace for a longer time in your workouts. Even if you're experienced in the gym, you have to be careful about overuse injuries when you start using creatine, because the sudden ability to work harder, longer, allows you to put more strain on your connective tissue than you're used to.
- The section on safety includes nothing about safety, except, in the last sentence, a weak suggestion that a single session with a personal trainer might be helpful. No warning that many personal trainers know little about weights. No tips on how to find one who does. NO OTHER SAFETY INFORMATION. And, again, no links to better sources of information.
- Bizarre recommendation of a belt for safety, despite suggesting dumbbell exercises only and suggesting that no instruction is needed beyond a single "fix-up" session with a trainer. What the heck is a person with no instruction and a bunch of dumbbells going to do that makes a belt a good idea?
- Recommendation of working out in the morning with no mention of the possible danger of working your back within one hour of getting out of bed.
- Many links to his own articles but no links to external sources of information about weightlifting (of which there are many) except for a calorie calculator.
- Come to think of it, no acknowledgment of the people or information sources who helped him get started and influenced his choices.
- Finally, seriously, given the choice between creating all those links to equipment and supplements on Amazon and creating a decent list of suggested exercises with links to instruction on how to do them, we got the Amazon links. Odd priorities, there. Very odd.