ARMOR BUILDING FORMULA II REVIEW

Like Terminator 2, it's rare for the sequel to surpass the first

Dan John released the sequel to his Armor Building Formula book last week, and I promptly purchased it the day I discovered it was available and read the whole damn thing in one sitting immediately afterward.  Much like my first time reading Super Squats, I found myself saying “I’ll just read the next chapter” over and over again until suddenly I had run out of book.  Suffice it to say, I’m giving away the end of this review by saying right now that, at $17.99 (2 dollars cheaper than the first book), it’s 100% worth buying and reading, irrespective of if you have any intention of running the Armor Building Formula at all.  Just like the Easy Strength Omnibook, though ABFII is premised around the Armor Building Formula, it contains so much general Dan John wisdom and awesomeness that you’re bound to walk away with SOMETHING worthwhile after you make your way through it and, most likely, you’ll have the bug to run one of Dan’s programs when you’re done.  I know I always do.  Anyway, onto the review.

 

WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT?

 

This actually sums it up pretty well

The Armor Building Formula itself is exactly as Dan John describes it: bodybuilding for real people.  That is to say, people with jobs, family obligations, and lives outside of the weightroom.  Armor Building Formula II is not the second edition of Armor Building Formula, but, instead, a sequel to it.  As such, it presupposes that you already know the material from the first book, to include the kettlebell AND barbell programs, and now expands upon it with a variety of different ideas, protocols, tweaks, and some sharing of different manners it’s been implemented by other readers/users.  It’s similar to Jim Wendler’s “5/3/1 Beyond” compared to the original 5/3/1 book.  It contains ways to implement the ABF while training only on weekends, the ABF for fat loss (Dan’s majority focus these days, given his 4 year long journey through that process), ABF for the over 55 crowd, integrating ABF and Easy Strength, ABF in a seasonal approach, and many other side tangents and useful tidbits.

 

WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T ABOUT

 

Yeah, none of this

This is NOT the book for becoming Mr. Olympia.  People have a tendency to read Dan’s programs and go “that’s it?!”  Yes, it is: because it’s ENOUGH.  Which is an idea that Dan talks about in the book.  The delta between the kind of training necessary to simply elicit hypertrophy and improve your quality of life vs the kind of training necessary to absolutely maximize your physical potential is a SIGNIFICANT delta, and it’s not going to be accomplished by going from 3 sets of 10 to 5 sets of 10.  For people that want to train twice a day, six days a week for 2 hours per session, there are books out there and gurus who will gladly fleece you.  Dan’s book never pretends to be the book to get you to the top of the physique pyramid.  Instead, it’s the book that gives you the tools you need in order to succeed at improving your physique while also giving you the permission to go ahead and still live your life.

 

THE CONS

 

The thing is, I'd listen to this story coming from Dan

I know it’s atypical to start with the negatives of a book in a review, but I’m honestly going to be gushing about this positives of this so much I figured I may as well just get these out of the way and not let them detract from why I enjoyed this book so much.

 

·       I literally was in the middle of re-reading the first ABF book when Dan released the second one, which meant I had a very clear ability to compare the two.  In doing so, you will find that Dan repeats stuff from the first book in the second one.  HOWEVER, Dan did not just lazily copy and paste sections from the first book into the second, as a means to pad the book.  Instead, Dan has done something that I’ve been guilty of as well in my own blog: he re-wrote ideas and stories he’s previously expressed elsewhere.  I know that I’ve literally re-written the same blog post on 2 non-consecutive occasions (“More Trouble Than You’re Worth” and “Defeating the Prisoner’s Dilemma”) wholly unaware that I was doing so, and if you listen to Dan’s podcast, you’ll know that he repeats stories and concepts previously expressed with no questions.  This is no fault of Dan’s: if you have a tool that works, you keep using it when the situation arises that requires it.  You don’t get a new tool for the same job.  However, if you ARE familiar with Dan’s work from the previous book, you may feel that you’re getting “shorted”, since some of the book repeats from the previous.  In the case of myself, I’ve said it before: Dan could write a phonebook and I’d read it cover to cover.  He’s got a way with words.

 

·       Not-insignificant portions of the book are comprised of graphs/lists/charts.  They are useful, not simply put there for the sake of bulk, ala Rodney Dangerfield’s character in “Back to School” beefing up his homework.  But, once again, for someone looking at the page number total and expecting a certain volume of reading, you may be disappointed.  Which, again, is a good sign: you wish there was even MORE book to be read.

 

·       As far as editing goes, the book starts out VERY strong and toward the end it seems the effort reduced a little.  Little typos, grammatical errors, a sentence that starts and ends the same way (something like “a good idea is to fast regularly is a good idea”), etc.  Given the state of my blog, I’m not going to hold anyone’s feet to the fire over editing, but I’ve seen enough people cry over Jim Wendler’s work that I figure I’d bring it up.

 

 

THE PROS

 

Honestly, just the nodding fatherly approval of this man is enough

·       “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is an incredibly true statement when it comes to Dan and his work.  I’ve been reading Dan John for at least 17 years, which I know because my wife and I took a cruise for our first anniversary and I bought “Never Let Go” on kindle and drove her nuts because I was glued to my kindle for the majority of the trip, devouring Dan’s words.  However, I was also still a punk 22 year old kid at that point (man time flies) and so much of Dan’s “reasonable, sustainable, repeatable” work fell on deaf ears, while I instead inhaled his stories of the Velocity Diet, tabata front squats and squatting 50 reps with bodyweight on your back.  However, as I grow wiser with experience, I’m so thankful to still have Dan there slinging the same wisdom now that I can actually digest and appreciate it.  If you’re an aging meathead like me, or perhaps a younger meathead ready to learn from the experience of others, this book is going to equip you with the tools necessary to train for the rest of your life WITHOUT having to have quite as many visits to the orthopedic surgeon.

 

·       This is honestly a total “no excuses” book, because no matter your situation, Dan has A way for you to be able to train.  If you only have 1 KB, Dan has you covered.  Same with mixed KBs.  Same if you can only train 1 or 2 days per week.  Same if you’re old, young, male, female, recovering from injury, etc etc.  And it’s paired with some no-nonsense simple nutrition and lifestyle habits (get adequate sleep, drink water, manage stress, etc) stuff that is going to have BIG impacts over the long haul.  Dan is the master at zooming out, finding the stuff that REALLY matters, and emphasizing that.  About the only negative to say about this book is that it would have been so valuable during the pandemic.

 

 

·       Because it’s a no-excuses book, progression is a bit more in the grey compared to something like Tactical Barbell, which can be a pro or con depending on your personality.  I know a lot of folks demand Dan lay down hard rules on how to progress with his programs, but he makes a compelling argument that, without being able to put hands on you and actually get to know YOU, the reader, he’s not going to be able to give you a hardset rule on how much weight to add, how many reps, how many sets, etc.  He leaves it up to you while still providing some solid bumpers to help guide you along the way.  Ultimately, this means, again, you have no reason NOT to be able to employ the system and find ways to progress and grow.

 

·       Dan includes a Q&A section that goes on to answer a LOT of common questions about ABF and help “unstick” people that have gotten a little too fixated on finer details and small obstacles on the way to progress.  There’s no way Dan can foresee all the issues people will encounter along the way (such as needing to explain that, between sets, one is supposed to put the kettlebells DOWN rather than hold onto them), but this should at least curtail a majority of the issues that come up along the way.

 

SHOULD YOU BUY THIS BOOK?

 

It's no lose!

Yes.  100%.  Dan has been on a streak, starting with the Easy Strength Omnibook, and from that, Easy Strength For Fat Loss, Armor Building Formula and now Armor Building Formula II we’ve been blessed to have some of Dan’s greatest work and thoughts all consolidated into one location.  I still am a major fan of Mass Made Simple, as a book and a program, and feel like that deserves some time in the spotlight as well as far as mass building goes, but for sustainable, reasonable and repeatable, the ABF is a winner, and all 5 of those books will easily provide you with the tools to train for the rest of your life.