Your Body, Your Responsibility Book Review

Your Body, Your Responsibility by Debra M. Corbo, PT, CPT and Douglas J. Splittgerber, CPT Book review.

Your Body, Your Responsibility is more than just a book. It’s a guide to the form and function of the skeletal muscle system and a very informative read for anyone preparing to embark in to the world of weight training, physical fitness and/or physical injury recovery. You don’t have to attend an anatomy class to know that muscle, while strong, are still very susceptible to injury very easily if used the wrong way, or not used often. Many times too often people start a gym membership with good intentions. Lose weight, get fit, live healthy. The problem is that people try to jump into it too quickly and want to see results right away. What better way to either work yourself so hard the first day and be sore for a week and not ever want to go back to the gym or worse, become a casualty of severe injury before you even give your body a chance to get used to strenuous physical activity. You set yourself up for failure and take two steps back from where you already were.

Everyone knows that the best way to go about things in life is to prepare and educate yourself before taking that giant step in the right direction. With that said, this is a great book to start that preparation self-education.

Part one of the book The Reality Of Our Lives,

• Chapter 1, starts out it out with a ‘Reality Check’, laying it out with a heaping spoonful of candor. Statistics of the American overweight epidemic that is plaguing our country. Are plagues and epidemics preventable? Of course they are. But this is one of those plagues that is fueled by laziness and poor eating habits. Reality Check is a quick eye opener to the truth of the matter that it is Your Body, Your Responsibility.
• Chapter 2 The Health Care Crisis gives a short but detailed insight of why health care expenses are so high and that they too are preventable. Does that mean you should drop your health insurance coverage? No, that would be stupid. Affordable…but stupid. How is it preventable? By teaching people how to take care of themselves because they believe that that is the major problem…people just don’t know. (I believe, and I’m sure a lot will agree with me, that a lot of people that don’t know, just don’t care. They don’t care until they have some serious health ailment and then they pull hard on the reigns and realize “Holy crap…what have I done to myself and how can I fix it?”. Sometimes it’s too late.)
• Chapter 3, The Dieting Dilemma. The chapter title says it all. It explains the problems people face when trying to start and maintain a diet, especially without really understanding how the human body works. Chapter 3 also gives some basics about dieting that if people understood before they started to diet, would better help them reach their goals.
• Lastly in part on, Chapter four’s Exercise-Why And How Much elaborates on just what constitutes exercise, muscle maintenance and body proportion. It also stresses the importance or Resistance Training and it’s importance.
• Chapter 4 through 8 give you some basic need to know facts about Resistance Training with correct form, Flexibility, Aerobic Conditioning and Putting It All Together. (Those are actually the chapter titles in italics.)

So part 1 of the book gets you into The Reality Of Our Lives. There is really no other way to explain it. It’s the eye opening truth that it all comes down to you and how you take care of yourself that will ultimately effect your health in the long run, possibly your children’s health and what you can do about steering yourself in to the right lane.

Part 2, The Alignment Resistance Training Method.

• Chapters1 through 3 teaches you the importance of muscle, neutral spine, the different parts of the spine, spinal alignment and how it all works in conjunction. Stressing the fact that how we position ourselves during and while executing an exercise is normally how we perceive as correct position and how 99% of the time we are not correct. It also goes in to the fact that men, being the stubborn way that we are, automatically assume that we know what we’re doing when it comes to weight training. (I hear Tim Allen grunting right now.)
• Chapter 4 through 9 goes through the various joints of the body such as the hip joint, knee joint, and shoulder joint, just to name a few. It explains how these joints are supposed to work, where the muscle attach and function and the problems you may face if muscles are too tight or if they are not being moved or positioned properly.
• Chapter 10 is a Summary Of Joint Function. The title says it all.
• Chapter 11, Stretching Overview is the beginning of your education of the full body stretching that leads in to…
• Chapter 12, Total Body Stretches. This is where everything you have read and will surely re-read comes in to play. Now in case I forgot to mention, this book also comes with a DVD. The DVD is another tool to help you perform these stretches. Each section of the Total Body Stretches chapter gets you in to preparation for the stretch. It gives you key points to pay close attention to and prepares you for the stretch. After you read through that particular section you turn on that chapter of the DVD, watch Debra and Douglas perform the stretches and follow along.
• Chapter 13, Strengthening reminds you that maintenance of the muscles is key to longevity and proper execution is a must. This chapter also introduces you to Debra and Douglas’s next book Alignment Resistance Training-Strengthening that will focus on resistance training for each body part with proper execution and once again will come with a DVD that will show you how.

So what sets this apart from other fitness and dieting books on the market right now? It’s neither a fitness book or a dieting book. It’s a guide to how your body functions and what you need to do to make it function better. It gives you an understanding of the human body, it’s skeletal muscle function, joint function and proper position. It helps you understand that pain is your body’s way of telling you that something isn’t quite right and needs to be fixed and helps you get an idea of how to begin the fixing process. This isn’t a one time read either. It is a tool, a resource. A guide…a weapon against injury and a implement of anatomical education. Lastly, it imprints in your head that you’re the one that is responsible for taking care of your body. Unless you’re a vegetable (excuse the expression), no one is going to take care of you the way that YOU can take care of you. We’re too quick to blame someone or thing when something goes wrong with our body, when all along it could have been prevented by who? YOU!

I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone that is either overweight, is thinking about a fitness plan, currently or wants to start weightlifting, or is about to buy all those DVD’s, diet books, weight loss plan memberships, “fat-burners” and/or one of those crazy Ab. contraptions on TV. Read this book first. Read it, understand it, and read it again.

Who am I to recommend this? I’m nobody. I’m not educated in the healthcare field. I’m not a personal trainer, a physician, or any kind of health consultant. I’m just a blogger that finds health and fitness an extremely overlooked but interesting topic that is taken for granted far too often.

Go to http://www.alignmentresistancetraining.com/ for more info

You can buy a copy of Your Body, Your Responsibility Here