Excess Matters

Tag: women’s fitness

  • Next Level by Stacy T. Sims: Summary, Key Ideas & Notable Quotes

    10 min read

    Why This Book Matters

    If you are a woman in your forties or fifties who has been exercising regularly, eating carefully, and watching your body change anyway — more belly fat, less muscle, less energy, less of everything you worked for — this book is for you. Not because it will tell you to try harder. But because it will tell you why everything you have been doing is working against your physiology, and exactly what to do instead.

    Next Level was written by Stacy T. Sims, PhD, an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who has spent her career studying how women’s physiology differs from men’s — and how dramatically wrong most mainstream fitness advice is for women at this stage of life. Sims spent years at Stanford University and later at the University of Waikato in New Zealand researching female athletic performance. Her previous book, ROAR (2016), focused on training and nutrition around the menstrual cycle. Next Level is its sequel: everything that happens when those cycles start to end.

    The book is co-written with Selene Yeager, an elite cyclist and endurance athlete who was living through perimenopause while they were writing it. That matters. This is not a theoretical text produced at clinical distance. It is written by two women who know what it feels like when the body you have trained for decades suddenly seems to be working against you — and who have the research to explain why, and what to do.

    Here is the core problem the book addresses: when estrogen and progesterone begin to decline, all the physiological functions those hormones were quietly performing — building muscle, regulating blood sugar, protecting bone, managing body temperature, keeping cortisol in check — start going undone. The symptoms women experience during menopause are not random misfortunes. They are the predictable downstream effects of specific hormonal signals going offline. And the standard response most women (and most doctors) reach for — eat less, do more cardio — makes nearly all of them worse.

    Sims’s prescription is specific, evidence-based, and often the opposite of conventional wisdom. That is what makes it worth reading.

    The Core Framework: Picking Up the Slack

    The animating concept behind Next Level is one the book introduces in the very first pages and returns to throughout: “What you’re really doing when you act on the advice in this book is picking up the slack and starting to do the work that your fluctuating and dwindling hormones have always done.”

    This reframe is important. For most of a woman’s life, estrogen and progesterone have been performing anabolic, metabolic, and regulatory work in the background — stimulating muscle protein synthesis, maintaining bone density, balancing cortisol, regulating blood sugar and fat storage. You did not need to think about these functions because your hormones were handling them. As they decline, those functions do not continue automatically. The work simply goes undone unless you intervene.

    Sims maps each lost hormonal function to a specific intervention:

    • Estrogen’s anabolic stimulus for muscle → Heavy lifting (low reps, high load)
    • Estrogen’s blood sugar regulation → Sprint interval training + strategic carbohydrate timing
    • Estrogen’s mitochondrial support → Both sprint intervals and plyometrics
    • Estrogen’s fast-twitch muscle and power signal → Plyometrics and heavy lifting combined
    • Estrogen’s bone remodeling signal → Plyometrics and resistance training
    • Progesterone’s cortisol regulation → Adequate sleep, post-workout nutrition, eliminating fasted training

    This is the map. Every specific recommendation in the book flows from it.

    Key Ideas

    Sprint Interval Training Is the Cardio You Actually Need

    The cardio most women default to during menopause — long, moderate-intensity sessions, the kind that feel virtuous and sustainable — is precisely the kind most likely to make things worse. Long steady-state cardio chronically elevates cortisol in women who already have elevated cortisol due to declining progesterone. The result is more abdominal fat storage, more muscle breakdown, and more fatigue, not less.

    What works instead is sprint interval training, or SIT. Genuinely short, genuinely all-out efforts — 10 to 40 seconds — with full recovery between them. The key word is “all-out.” Not hard. Not elevated heart rate. Maximal. A Tabata protocol (20 seconds all-out, 10 seconds rest, 6-8 rounds) done on a bike or with full-body movements like kettlebell swings. Hill repeats of 20-30 seconds going as hard as possible, then walking back. This level of intensity provides the metabolic stimulus that estrogen used to provide — improving insulin sensitivity, preserving lean mass, building mitochondrial density — while the brevity of the effort prevents the chronic cortisol elevation that moderate-intensity cardio creates.

    Two sessions per week is sufficient. The long run or easy bike ride does not disappear — it becomes active recovery on different days, not the primary training driver.

    Lift Heavy — Not Light, Not Moderate, Heavy

    The fitness industry has sold women on high-rep, low-weight training for decades, promising “toning” and “sculpting” without “bulking up.” For menopausal women, Sims is blunt: this advice is not just ineffective, it is actively unhelpful. High-rep light-weight training builds muscular endurance. Menopausal women need muscular strength.

    Estrogen was the primary driver of muscle stem cell activation — the biological process that repairs and builds muscle tissue. When estrogen declines, that signal drops precipitously. Research shows that removing estrogen from animal models causes muscle stem cell regeneration to fall 30 to 60 percent. The only training that can replace this stimulus is lifting heavy enough to recruit high-threshold motor units: compound movements (squats, deadlifts, rows, chest press) performed in the 3-6 rep range at near-maximal load.

    The downstream benefits extend far beyond appearance. Heavy lifting increases resting metabolic rate, improves joint stability and posture, reduces cardiovascular disease risk, strengthens bone, and produces the lean body mass that is the most significant determinant of fat metabolism in postmenopausal women. A study found that postmenopausal women had 33 percent lower fat burning during cardio than premenopausal women — and the entire difference was explained by the 9.5 pounds of lean mass they had lost.

    The Cortisol Paradox: Why Eating Less Makes You Store More Fat

    This is the concept that most often stops women cold when they first encounter it. They are eating less. They are exercising more. They are gaining belly fat. They are not imagining it, and they are not failures. They are caught in a cortisol paradox.

    Menopausal women have elevated baseline cortisol because progesterone — the hormone that kept cortisol in check — has declined. Adding long cardio sessions (which spike cortisol), training fasted (another cortisol spike), restricting calories (which triggers metabolic survival mode), and sleeping poorly (cortisol falls 6 times more slowly in sleep-deprived people) creates a self-reinforcing stress cascade. The body interprets this cascade as survival emergency and responds accordingly: break down muscle for fuel, store abdominal fat as an energy reserve, suppress the thyroid to conserve resources.

    The intervention that breaks the cycle is counterintuitive: eat enough (especially around training), replace long cardio with short intense intervals, add heavy lifting, and protect sleep. Not the “work harder, eat less” message women have been given. The opposite of it.

    The 30-Minute Recovery Window and the Leucine Threshold

    For muscle protein synthesis to occur, the body needs to receive a specific amino acid signal — approximately 3 to 3.5 grams of leucine per feeding — at the cellular level. This “leucine threshold” triggers the anabolic response. Meeting total daily protein without hitting the threshold at each meal does not produce the same effect.

    For menopausal women, the post-workout recovery window is 30 minutes — not the 2 to 3 hours that research in male subjects suggested. After hard training (sprint intervals, heavy lifting, endurance work), cortisol is high and the body is actively breaking down muscle. Eating 30-40 grams of high-quality protein (with sufficient leucine) within that 30-minute window stops the breakdown, lowers cortisol, and initiates muscle repair. Skipping post-workout eating in an attempt to “burn more fat” does the opposite: it extends the catabolic state, elevates blood sugar through cortisol-driven glycogen release, and drives fat storage.

    The practical math: 25 grams of whey protein provides about 2.5 grams of leucine. Meeting the 3-3.5 gram threshold requires 30+ grams of whey or equivalent animal protein. Plant-based athletes need roughly 50 grams of soy protein to match the leucine in 25 grams of whey — a commonly misunderstood gap.

    Plyometrics for Bone Density (10 Minutes, 3x a Week)

    Women can lose up to 20 percent of bone density in the five to seven years following menopause. Resistance training helps, but running and cycling — the cardio most women use — provide limited osteogenic stimulus because they involve repetitive single-plane loading rather than the multidirectional, varied-impact loading that triggers bone remodeling most effectively.

    Plyometrics — jump training — fill this gap. Even 10-20 jumps twice daily has been shown in research to produce measurable improvements in hip bone density after 16 weeks. Sims recommends 10 minutes of plyometric circuits three times per week, starting with beginner movements (squat jumps, jumping jacks, side hops) and building toward more advanced options (tuck jumps, speed skaters, burpees). The investment is small. The bone density, fast-twitch muscle preservation, and insulin sensitivity benefits are significant, and there is no training category more commonly neglected by women in this age group.

    Notable Quotes

    “What you’re really doing when you act on the advice in this book is picking up the slack and starting to do the work that your fluctuating and dwindling hormones have always done.”

    This is the book’s thesis in one sentence. Every exercise and nutrition prescription that follows is an answer to the question: which hormonal job just went undone, and how do I do it myself?

    “There’s a tendency for women to lift lighter weights for high repetitions, like picking up five-pound dumbbells and lifting them 20 times. This is often called ‘body sculpting’ by trainers, who promise women that they can ‘tone up’ without ‘getting bulky muscles.’ This mindset needs to go because it’s misleading, misguided, and honestly not helpful for women whose sex hormones, lean muscle mass, and strength are on a precipitous decline.”

    Sims is not gentle with the fitness industry’s treatment of menopausal women. Light weights are not a conservative starting point. They are the wrong tool for the job.

    “One of the first things that happens when the body isn’t getting the energy it needs is that it starts increasing body fat. Without enough energy to perform basic functions (let alone your long runs or strength workouts), your endocrine system signals for your body to start breaking down muscle and to store more fat, so you have a reserve of energy.”

    The explanation most women who are dieting and exercising and getting worse results have never heard. Not willpower failure. Survival biology.

    “For menopausal women, high-intensity sprint interval training sessions can provide the metabolic stimulus to trigger the performance-boosting body composition changes that our hormones helped us achieve in our premenopausal years. The key here is the intensity.”

    Intensity — not duration, not consistency, not moderate effort — is the operative word. The intensity of genuine all-out effort cannot be replicated by working “hard-ish” for longer.

    “Menopausal women often reach for soy because they want the plant estrogens to relieve menopausal symptoms like hot flashes. The problem is that you need twice as much soy to provide the muscle recovery benefits of animal-based protein like whey.”

    A specific, commonly misunderstood finding. Soy’s phytoestrogen content does not translate into equivalent muscle protein synthesis capacity.

    “Women in their forties are still in their athletic prime. We see that in inspirational athletes like seven-time world champion Rebecca Rusch, who didn’t even start bike racing until her late twenties and is still crushing competitions in her early fifties.”

    The cultural reframe the whole book rests on. Menopause is not the beginning of athletic decline. It is a transition that demands a specific response — and the response produces a body that can perform at the highest levels for decades.

    Who Should Read This

    Next Level is best suited for women in their forties or fifties — peri- or postmenopausal — who are already active and finding that what worked before is no longer working. If you have been training consistently, eating carefully, and watching your body composition change in the wrong direction anyway, this book explains why and tells you exactly what to change.

    It is also essential reading for women entering perimenopause who want to get ahead of the transition — the interventions are most effective when started early, before significant muscle and bone loss has accumulated.

    Coaches, trainers, and healthcare practitioners working with women in midlife will find it valuable for the specificity of its prescriptions. The book is more useful than most clinical resources for translating physiology into actionable programming.

    It is less suited for sedentary women who are just beginning to exercise. The protocols assume a baseline level of fitness and familiarity with training concepts. A complete beginner would benefit from starting with a simpler movement foundation before implementing the sprint and lifting protocols.

    Women primarily dealing with the non-fitness dimensions of menopause — hormonal symptoms, vaginal changes, cognitive shifts, MHT decisions — will find this book addresses those topics but is not the primary resource for them. The New Menopause by Mary Claire Haver is a better clinical companion for that dimension.

    ROAR — Stacy T. Sims: The predecessor to Next Level, covering training and nutrition optimization across the menstrual cycle for premenopausal women. Establishes the energy availability and nutrition timing principles that Next Level builds upon.

    The New Menopause — Mary Claire Haver: The clinical complement to Next Level. Where Sims focuses on exercise and nutrition, Haver covers hormonal symptom management, HRT options, and medical decision-making. Best read together.

    Good Energy — Casey Means: Covers metabolic health and blood sugar regulation from a precision medicine angle. Strong overlap with Next Level‘s nutrition content; more detailed on biomarker tracking.

    Outlive — Peter Attia: Covers the exercise science of longevity with significant overlap on strength training and cardiovascular training for long-term health. Approaches similar conclusions from different research; less women-specific but broader in scope.

  • The Year One Challenge for Women by Michael Matthews: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    The book in one sentence: A 12-month workout journal that lays out every barbell session in advance, so you just show up, follow the page, and get stronger.

    What Is The Year One Challenge for Women About?

    Most gym programs hand you a plan and send you on your way. This one goes further. The Year One Challenge for Women is a physical workout journal. You bring it to the gym, open it to the right page, and every set of every session for 54 weeks is already written out. You fill in the weights and reps as you go. That’s the whole system.

    It’s a companion to Michael Matthews’s main book, Thinner Leaner Stronger (TLS). Where TLS gives you the science and rationale for why women should train with heavy barbells, the Challenge gives you the execution: six sequential nine-week phases, pre-built workouts for 3-, 4-, or 5-day splits, a warm-up protocol, rest times, a deload week baked into every phase, and measurement checkpoints built into the calendar.

    Matthews is a self-taught fitness researcher and founder of Legion Athletics. His books have sold over a million copies and carry endorsements from Mark Rippetoe (Starting Strength), James Clear (Atomic Habits), and several obesity medicine physicians. He is not a credentialed exercise scientist, but his recommendations align consistently with mainstream sports science. He cites research rather than gym lore, which is still unusual in the women’s fitness space.

    The high reader rating tells you something specific: this format works for people who want to be told exactly what to do. The journal structure removes the most common reason gym programs fail: not knowing what to do once you get there.

    What Does the Program Actually Look Like?

    Six phases, each nine weeks: eight weeks of training followed by one mandatory deload week. The phases run consecutively for just over a year. Here’s the basic shape:

    Phase 1 uses the same five workouts identically for eight weeks. Nothing changes except the numbers on the bar. That’s intentional. The goal is to learn the foundational compound movements (barbell squat, deadlift, bench press, row, overhead press) and establish baseline working weights. Exercise novelty is actively counterproductive at this stage.

    Phases 2 through 5 introduce new variations while keeping the core compounds as anchors. Front squats and Bulgarian split squats come in during Phase 2. Chin-ups in Phase 3. Dips and hanging leg raises in Phase 5.

    Phase 6 replaces chin-ups with pull-ups and adds barbell walking lunges. By the end, you have a full exercise library and a year of logged data showing exactly how far you’ve come.

    The preferred split is five days per week: two lower-body days, one push day (chest, shoulders, triceps), one pull day (back, biceps), and one upper body and core day. Four-day and three-day options are included for people with less gym availability. Matthews is honest about the hierarchy: five days produces better results than four, four beats three. But three days still works.

    One structural detail worth noting: the deload week isn’t rest. It uses the same compound movements at the same weights, but drops volume to 3 sets of 5 reps. The point is to maintain motor patterns and connective tissue health while allowing recovery. Body measurements and progress photos happen at the end of every deload week, which means six structured comparison points across the year built directly into the program.

    How Does Progressive Overload Work in This Program?

    The entire program runs on one rule. Matthews calls it double progression, and it is worth understanding even if you never follow TLS specifically.

    The rule: when you complete 10 clean reps on any hard set with good form, add 5 pounds to the bar on your next set. That’s it. One trigger, one response, applied every session across 54 weeks.

    “Like most everything in life, you don’t need to be anywhere near perfect to win in the fitness game — you just have to be good enough most of the time.”

    Michael Matthews, The Year One Challenge for Women

    When the new weight is too heavy and you can only get 5 or 6 reps, you drop back to the original weight. Then you build back up to 10 clean reps for two consecutive hard sets before trying the heavier load again. The system has a built-in failure protocol so bad days don’t derail the whole program.

    The math is compelling. A beginner who adds 5 pounds to her squat every two weeks adds 130 pounds in a year. Matthews’s reader testimonials document exactly that kind of progression: women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s adding 45 to 65 pounds to their squats and deadlifts across a single training year.

    Rest periods are longer than most women’s programs prescribe: 3 minutes between hard sets for big compound lifts. The reason is straightforward. Strength degrades when rest is too short. The program prioritizes performance on every set, which means giving the energy systems time to recover before the next one.

    Why Does This Matter for Weight Loss?

    This is the part worth understanding if you’re here from ExcessMatters, where the focus is on weight loss and long-term metabolic health.

    Cardio burns calories during the session. Muscle burns calories around the clock. Building lean muscle raises resting metabolic rate, which means your body burns more energy at rest over time. That math compounds. For anyone working on long-term weight management rather than a short-term cut, this is the mechanism that makes strength training more valuable than the elliptical.

    During a calorie deficit, the risk is always muscle loss alongside fat loss. Strength training preserves muscle during weight loss. Women who lose weight with strength training alongside the cut retain more lean mass, which means a higher metabolic rate at the end of the process and better long-term weight maintenance. The research on this is consistent.

    Matthews’s nutrition framework is flexible dieting: no foods are off-limits, 80% of calories from whole foods, up to 20% from whatever you want. Protein is set at 1 to 1.2 grams per pound of body weight when cutting. Carbohydrates are not restricted (he explicitly argues that active women perform better with adequate carbohydrate intake). The system uses a calorie target and macro ratios. There’s no food hierarchy, no clean/dirty binary.

    One honest caveat: the nutrition framework involves calorie targets and food scale use. For someone in active recovery from an eating disorder, that can be destabilizing without clinical support. The program doesn’t address this. If that’s you, talk to a dietitian before implementing any calorie-based framework.

    Is The Year One Challenge for Women Worth Reading?

    Read this if you want a complete beginner-to-intermediate strength program where every decision is already made. If you’ve spent time in the gym not really knowing what to do, if you’ve tried cardio-based programs and hit a wall, or if you’re drawn to data-forward approaches over inspirational wellness content, this format will suit you well. It works best with full gym access (squat rack, bench, barbell, pull-up bar).

    Read Thinner Leaner Stronger first. Matthews explicitly recommends this, and it’s good advice. The journal assumes you’ve read TLS. The science and rationale live in that book; the journal is the execution layer. Picking up the journal without the context makes the nutrition section feel thin.

    Skip it if you’re an experienced lifter with a periodized program already. You don’t need Phase 1 for eight weeks of identical workouts. The program is designed for beginners and people returning after a gap, and it’s excellent for that. It’s not where advanced trainees should be spending their time.

    One honest limitation: the program ends after Phase 6. There’s no Phase 7. Matthews’s implicit answer is that after a year of TLS, you’ve built enough knowledge to self-program. That transition is real work, and the journal doesn’t fully bridge it. His follow-up resources cover this, but the journal leaves you at the edge without a clear path forward.

    Books Like The Year One Challenge for Women

    BookAuthorBest For
    Thinner Leaner StrongerMichael MatthewsRead this first: has the full science and rationale
    Strong CurvesBret ContrerasWomen who want more glute emphasis and program variety
    Next LevelDr. Stacy SimsWomen navigating perimenopause and hormonal changes with training
    SparkJohn RateyUnderstanding why exercise affects mood, cognition, and mental health
    Lean and StrongJennifer HillisWomen who want a barbell program with more flexible periodization

  • Strong Curves by Bret Contreras: Summary, Key Ideas & Review

    The book in one sentence: The most evidence-backed glute training program for women ever written, built on EMG research that overturned how the fitness industry thinks about squats, hip thrusts, and body recomposition.

    What Is Strong Curves About?

    Picture someone who has been in the gym for a year. Lunges, squats, leg press, maybe some deadlifts. She is consistent. She works hard. And at the end of twelve months, her glutes look essentially the same as when she started.

    Strong Curves was written for that woman. The book, co-authored by Bret Contreras (a certified strength and conditioning specialist who spent years doing EMG research to measure which exercises actually activate the glutes) and Kellie Davis (who trained under his system and documents her own before/after throughout the book), offers a straightforward explanation for why conventional programs fail at lower-body development and a complete system to fix it.

    The core claim sounds almost too simple: the hip thrust, not the squat, is the primary glute-building exercise. Contreras built that claim on electromyography data collected over years of real-world testing. The squat loads the glutes in a stretched, mechanically disadvantaged position. The hip thrust loads them at end-range extension, where they produce maximum force. That difference, it turns out, is the entire ballgame.

    Published in 2013, the book is now over a decade old. The hip thrust is everywhere. Contreras’s research has been replicated and cited widely. If anything, mainstream fitness has caught up to what this book argued before most trainers took it seriously.

    Why Do Women’s Programs Fail at Glute Development?

    The answer involves a concept Contreras calls gluteal amnesia, and it is more common than most people realize.

    Vladimir Janda, a physical therapist, identified the gluteus maximus as the muscle most prone to inhibition in the human body. Prolonged sitting causes hip flexors to adaptively shorten. Shortened hip flexors reflexively suppress glute activation through a neurological mechanism. Add hours of compression from sitting (which impairs blood flow and neuromuscular signaling) and the reflex shutdown that follows any lower-body injury, and you have a muscle that is partially dormant in most sedentary adults.

    The consequence is practical and frustrating: a woman can squat consistently for a year and produce minimal glute development because her quads and spinal erectors are compensating. Her glutes are present but not participating. This is why glute activation work (bird dogs, side-lying clams, bodyweight glute bridges) opens every Strong Curves session. It is not filler. It is the prerequisite step that determines whether everything else works.

    Beyond dormancy, most programs also fail by training only one dimension of gluteal function. The gluteus maximus has four actions:

    • Hip extension (squats, deadlifts, the vertical plane)
    • Hip abduction (band walks, side-lying clams, the lateral plane)
    • Hip external rotation (cable rotations, the rotational plane)
    • Posterior pelvic tilt (hip thrusts, back extensions, the horizontal plane)

    A program built entirely around squats and deadlifts trains one of those four. The other three remain untrained. The glute may grow in absolute size but stays flat rather than round, because the upper fibers responsible for the outer curve are never challenged. Strong Curves programs all four vectors every week, by design.

    How Does the Strong Curves Program Actually Work?

    The book includes four 12-week programs: Booty-ful Beginnings (complete beginners), Gluteal Goddess (advanced), Best Butt Bodyweight (home/travel), and Gorgeous Glutes (lower-body only). Each runs in three 4-week blocks with progressive increases in volume and intensity.

    The session template is the same across all programs:

    1. Glute-dominant exercise first (hip thrust or glute bridge)
    2. Horizontal pull
    3. Quad-dominant exercise
    4. Horizontal/vertical press
    5. Hip-dominant/hamstring exercise
    6. Glute accessory
    7. Linear core
    8. Lateral/rotary core

    Hip thrusts go first, not last. That placement is deliberate. When the glutes are fresh, neural drive is highest and the mind-muscle connection is easiest to maintain. Most conventional programs put squats first and treat hip thrusts as a finisher, which means the primary glute exercise happens after the glutes are already partially fatigued.

    Three mechanisms of muscle growth run through every training week:

    • Mechanical tension from heavy loaded hip thrusts and glute bridges (the primary driver)
    • Metabolic stress from high-rep band work and accessory movements (the pump and burn)
    • Muscle damage from deep-range squats, lunges, and split squats that stretch the glute under load

    Programs that rely only on high-rep bodyweight work (Brazilian Butt Lift-style) create metabolic stress but miss mechanical tension entirely. That is why they produce results in weeks one through four and then plateau. A bodyweight glute bridge activates the glutes at 20-30% of maximum voluntary contraction. A 225-pound barbell hip thrust activates them at 100%. No amount of rep volume compensates for that gap.

    Contreras also devotes a full chapter to the training log, which he treats as non-negotiable. Progressive overload without a log is accidental. With one, it becomes intentional. Before each session: review what you did last time, set the next target, and try to beat it on at least one metric. This is the mechanism. Not the exercises, not the program structure, not the warm-up. The relentless, documented effort to lift more or move better than last time.

    Does Strong Curves Address Body Recomposition and Weight Loss?

    Yes, and in a way that is unusually honest about the limits of scale-based progress tracking.

    The book documents Kellie Davis’s 18-month recomposition: same body weight at the end as at the beginning, but approximately 8 pounds of muscle gained and 8 pounds of fat lost. The scale showed zero change. The body looked completely different.

    “You must also forget about starving yourself skinny. You need to eat the right amount of calories from the right foods every day to achieve the body you want, and that body is one with full, rounded, and athletic muscles. It isn’t one with soft, barely-there muscles and a fat layer resting upon bone. That’s what starvation will get you.”

    That quote is from the nutrition chapter, which is the oldest-feeling section of the book. The caloric formulas (bodyweight × 14 for maintenance, × 11-12 for fat loss) are a reasonable starting point, but they predate more recent work on protein optimization and female-specific hormonal context. If nutrition is your primary question, supplement this book. The training programming is the real value.

    What the nutrition chapter gets right is the reframe: the goal of eating during a strength program is to fuel muscle retention, not to accelerate weight loss. Large caloric deficits cause muscle loss alongside fat loss, and the body that emerges from aggressive dieting looks smaller but undefined. Eating near maintenance while training for progressive overload produces a slower scale change but a better body composition outcome.

    For anyone currently on a GLP-1 medication (semaglutide, tirzepatide), this framing is directly relevant. GLP-1 drugs suppress appetite aggressively, and many people end up in larger deficits than they intended. Muscle loss during GLP-1-assisted weight loss is a documented concern. The Strong Curves approach, with its emphasis on protein-supported progressive overload, is one of the better frameworks available for preserving body composition during active weight loss. Nothing in the book addresses GLP-1s specifically (the book predates their widespread use by a decade), but the principles apply cleanly.

    Is Strong Curves Worth Reading?

    Read this if you have been training consistently and haven’t gotten the lower-body results you expected, especially if your program is squat-and-lunge-centric. If you have been afraid to lift heavy because of the “bulk” myth, the book addresses this directly and with clinical precision. (Women don’t have enough testosterone to accidentally get huge. This takes years of intentional effort.) Also read this if you are losing weight and want to prioritize body composition over scale weight.

    Skip it if you already have a well-designed program that includes hip thrusts, multi-vector glute work, and progressive overload. In that case, Contreras’s follow-up Glute Lab (2019) has updated research and more nuanced periodization, and it is the better use of your time.

    One caveat worth naming: Bret Contreras has faced serious personal conduct allegations in recent years. This review focuses on the book’s content because the science behind it does not depend on the author’s personal conduct, the methods have been independently validated, and the co-author Kellie Davis played a genuine role in developing and testing the material. Readers are entitled to weigh that context as they see fit.

    The bottom line: the training science holds up. The hip thrust is now everywhere because the research was correct. A decade-old book that correctly predicted how the industry would change is worth reading, whatever you think of its author.

    Books Like Strong Curves

    BookAuthorBest For
    Lean and StrongRachel HillisWomen new to strength training who want a simpler on-ramp
    Year One Challenge for WomenMichael MatthewsDetailed progressive overload programming with more nutrition depth
    Next LevelStacy SimsFemale-specific physiology, training around the menstrual cycle and perimenopause
    The Joy of MovementKelly McGonigalThe psychology of why movement feels good and how to build lasting exercise identity
    SparkJohn RateyThe brain science behind exercise and why it matters beyond aesthetics