Exercise tips have interesting twists. This well written review makes two outstanding points. First, the book's author compares (appropriately) the effects of aging to the effects of weighlessness.

The first twist, as intriguing as it is relatively new, is that aging appears to have much in common with space travel. Evans, an adviser to NASA and former head of a special nutrition and physical fitness team for the National Space Biomedical Institution in Houston, is now running a study to figure out what exercises can best protect astronauts' bones and muscles during a Mars mission, likely to occur in 2013 or 2018.

Indeed, writes Evans, prolonged space flight in near-zero gravity results in remarkable physical changes within the body that are astonishingly similar to our journey into old age. In fact, he says, within weeks of blasting off, the astronauts' muscle cells will atrophy, calcium will be leached from their bones, and normal bone growth will be upset to the point where the risk of fracture soars. Recent research, he says, has determined that one month of space flight yields bone loss equivalent to five years of aging. By Evans's calculations, this means that with their muscles and bones weakened by gravity deprivation, even young, healthy astronauts may become as weak as most 80-year-olds.

Second, he focuses on our technique in weight lifting. He champions the eccesntric rather than the concentric (most readers are now wondering what language I'm typing). Let the article explain,

Evans's exercise prescription (for all of us, not just astronauts and research volunteers) focuses on eccentric (which means away from the body, not weird) muscle movements, as opposed to concentric (or toward-the-body) moves. The idea, which is contrary to the way most muscle builders work out, is that it's the away-from-the-body motion that strengthens muscles most quickly.

Take a biceps curl. When you start with a dumbbell at thigh level and raise it to your shoulder, the raising, or upward-bound, part of the motion is considered concentric; the lowering of the weight back down is eccentric, or as Evans prefers, E-centric. Muscles grow in bulk by undergoing microscopic tears during training; it is during the repair of these tears that muscles increase in size.

And it's E-centric motions that produce the most microscopic tears, hence the most muscle growth. The secret, Evans says, is to raise a weight (or move the business end of an exercise machine) quickly, to a count of two, on the concentric motion and lower it slowly, away from the body, to a count of six, in other words, taking three times as long on the eccentric maneuver.

The book is called AstroFit. I just might buy it.