Engineering The Alpha

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"All men were meant to be heroes of their own tale."

--Engineering The Alpha

This past Friday I was sitting at dinner enjoying a double double-double (two pounds of ground beef plus cheese and bacon) when I saw a commercial come on for an FDA-approved testosterone boosting gel that was applied like a deodorant.  The ad wasn't trying to appeal to bodybuilders or guys who wanted to improve their rec league performance.  It was targeting middle-aged men who quite simply want to feel like men again.  This commercial is not the first of its kind that I've seen.  In recent years there have been more and more ads popping up asking the question, "Is it low T?".  That's where Engineering The Alpha comes in. 

Engineering The Alpha by Adam Bornstein and John Romaniello is specifically targeted towards men who want to optimize their hormones, including increasing testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin sensitivity.  Bornstein and Romaniello head the fitness division of Schwarzenegger.com and have helped hundreds of personal training clients achieve better physiques and better lives through diet and exercise regimens specifically designed to improve certain hormone levels.  After years of trial and error, Engineering The Alpha contains the workout advice and nutrition plans that they have found to yield the best results.

In addition to the diet and exercise advice, Engineering The Alpha gets into the psychology of boosting testosterone and what it means to be a man from a basic, primal perspective, in particular discussing the idea of the monomyth as proposed by Joseph Campbell.  Essentially, what the monomyth says is that all great stories of good versus evil follow the same plot line with only the characters and location of the story being changed.  This general story is what Campbell called the Hero's Journey, which he describes in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  The purpose behind Engineering The Alpha is to show all men that they too can live their own Hero's Journey.

Engineering The Alpha is not about becoming the top dog of your group of buddies or the people you know, it is about becoming the best version of yourself, the alpha version of you.

An easy read, I enjoyed the ideas proposed within the book.  Bornstein and Romaniello discuss intermittent fasting (IF) and the importance of sleep as they play to optimizing male hormones and I have found the former concept very interesting.  Currently, I am performing some IF trial and error on myself as well as going through the training program (with appropriate modifications) found in the book.

Engineering The Alpha is not about building huge muscles or becoming a testosterone-infused jerk.  It's about presenting basic diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes that can be made to have the greatest opportunity of optimizing specific hormones in order to become the best version of yourself.

Your body.  Your training.

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