Here’s a little known fact about yours truly. I like to read. When I was 8 in the summer between grade 3 and 4, I went down to the city library and started trying to make my way through every book they had in stock. It was a possible goal, seeing as how my city library was about the size of a large apartment and was well-stocked with Tintin comics which made the whole process easier. As a result of reading each Tintin book I was kind of excited to see they were making a movie of it, until I saw they were making a movie of it.

 I probably made it through about 2/3 of that library collection before school started again in September, which made me the talk of school and had all the cool girls wanting to hang out with me. Because after all, chicks dig book worms, right? Right??

I still like to read, and tend to have a couple of books on the go all the time. Most of them are business development, personal development, or training related, and I also try to keep up with some of the most recent research to make sure I continuously stay the Bawse.

The downside is that reading through a lot of the research is difficult without an unlimited budget, or without access to a university One-Card that can let me download and view all to my hearts content. That means I’m usually scrambling through abstracts (which rarely tell the whole story) or scanning through free copies (which tend to suck in ways that would be inappropriate to share on a public forum like this), or through hearsay and conjecture, which always adds up to buckets of fun when you’re trying to form an argument or help someone crank out more core stability due to someone telling you that reciting Pi to 17 digits was the magic, yo.

That being said, I wanted to share a wicked-awesome new service that Bret Contreras is putting together. Now Bret’s the kind of guy who you could say knows a thing or two. Not only is he currently working on completing his PhD in New Zealand, but he’s been published in a bunch of different publications, some of which are peer-reviewed academic journals, which means that he doesn’t just have a good in with an editor who owes him a favour for helping to move a body. No no, he actually knows what the hell he’s talking about.

Because he’s a fellow geek like myself, except for the fact that I’m probably just a first degree geek and he’s right around a 19th degree dork-mageddon of knowledge-seekingness, he’s scanning pretty much every tidbit of research coming out that would be related to health, fitness and strength training and compacting it together into a handy dandy report that will help you to see everything that’s new and exciting in the world of counting reps. And the really cool thing is that he decided to call it something that was so creative it pretty much knocks your socks into the next county due to its’ sheer extravagance:

STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING RESEARCH!!!

Not only did he condense crazy amounts of information down into a single source with full access, he also tore apart each study, looked at their holes and inaccuracies, and wrote out the defining characteristics about each in an easily digestible format. I’ll admit there’s a lot of studies that make me feel like I’m trying to put together a set of furniture from Ikea with their dryness so this is a feature I’m definitely happy to see.

Now I’m not one to blow smoke up your bum and tell you something is good to check out if it’s not, so he’s also willing to give away a portion of the first issue for free so you can make up your own mind about whether or not it’s worth signing up for. Also, he’s practically giving this away for only $10 a month, with the first month being only a dollar. To give you an idea of what kinds of ass this kicks, I purchased one single journal article a week ago for a project I’m working on, and it cost me $30.

For

One

Single

Article.

He’s condensing dozens of directly applicable articles into a 50-page magnum opus of testosterone, creatine and ANOVA statistical analysis for a fraction of the cost of a single Pub Med accessible article.

If you’re serious about being a fitness professional, or simply want to get your geek on with some of the best information on the cutting edge of what’s developing in the industry, or simply want to point and laugh when people try to compare goblet squatting a 30 pound kettle bell to back squatting a 200 pound barbell, you should definitely get access to Strength and Conditioning Research. I did, so if you don’t get it as well I’m just going to get that much more skillz as a trainer-man, and will soon be on another Inception-like level of greatness that you just won’t ever be able to get to. You wouldn’t want me to make a quantum leap in knowledge without you, would you? Thought not, so become more awesome with me and get access for yourself today.

=====>  Get Strength and Conditioning Research NOW!!!   <=======