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Boom! This is Books & Biceps #350!

THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY ISSUES! That seems insane to even write! We’re talking about nearly 7 years of Books & Biceps hitting your inboxes on Friday. And here’s another crazy stat… If you include my yearly “Most Memorable Books” review and my summer Blockbuster Movie Reads and all the awesome author Q&As, I’ve written 800,00 WORDS for B&B during that time. That’s over three quarters of a million words! All for us!

The very first issue went to 17 people. Mostly family. A few friends. It was called Finkel’s Fast Five. It wasn’t very good, to be honest. It was a ripoff of Tim Ferriss’s ‘Five Bullet Friday’ email. Then somewhere during that first year we found our groove and I was walking the dog and - BOOM - the name Books & Biceps jolted into my head as if a gift from the literary gods!

And I committed to the idea that no matter what book I was working on, what project I was doing, what job I was holding down, I would write Books & Biceps each week to share what I’m reading, what books I’m working on, what I’m lifting, how I’m training and generally anything involving both books and biceps in my life.

Writing this each week has been one of the most gratifying experiences of my career. I mean, we created a massive crew of sophisticated meatheads out of thin air! This was like a newsletter version of Field of Dreams: Write it and they will come…

And over 23,000 of you have and we’re growing by hundreds each week. I’ve met so many amazing readers who have become friends. I’ve been able to meet tons of authors, many of whom I’ve admired for a long time, and they’ve become friends. I’ve been able to publish books and share the process with you from Macho Man to 1996 to Hoops Heist and Generation Griffey and some upcoming projects I can’t wait to reveal to you…

So thank you! Thank you to each and every one of you who reads this each week and who shares book recs with me and writes me to tell me what you thought of the books we talk about in here. You’re all Books & Biceps Hall of Famers. Appreciate you!

If someone forwarded you this issue of B&B, you can join us right here:

If you’re a new subscriber you’ll love this profile that the New Yorker ran on our Books & Biceps crew.

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BOOKS

The Rambo Report: Five Films, Three Books, One Legend by Nat Segaloff

It’s fitting that for our 350th issue we have (to borrow one of my favorite Bob Ryan writing tropes) a capital B.O.O.K.S. & B.I.C.E.P.S. book - a book that speaks to our crew on multiple levels.

You’ve got a foreword from B&B Legend David Morrell.

You’ve got a blurb from recent B&B author rec Jack Carr.

And then, of course, we have the book itself, which came out this week and that I just started and already love because it dives into Morrell’s mindset for writing the novels in the first place.

This is one of my favorite quotes early on:

“Another factor that made the novel different was Morrell’s interest in trying to write action novels. “They’re often filled with cliches, such as ‘A shot rang out’. I wondered if there was a fresher way to do it, to eliminate all the familiar expressions and try to make the incidents seem as vivid and real as possible.”

Now, I can’t time travel to the year before First Blood was released, but I’ve read enough older works of fiction before then to know that Morrell was absolutely right.

I also loved that Morrell says his first draft was a mess that readers couldn’t follow. And then he got the advice from a fiction author/professor of his at Penn State who told him to “start with the first time Rambo and Teasle meet.”

That one piece of advice allowed Morrell to focus his story and helped him have a strong starting point to write the rest of the novel and the subsequent books. I haven’t even gotten to Sylvester Stallone and the movies yet, but I’m 100% confident you’ll love this one. Grab it here.

BICEPS

I don’t know how or when I got signed up for certain alerts from Quora, but once a week or so I’ll get an email with a popular question in the headline that’s super intriguing. It’s usually something like, “Would Superman be able to win in a battle against the MCU’s three most powerful heroes?”

But this week I got an email that said, “Can You Do Mike Tyson’s Prison Squat Workout?”

This is pure meathead catnip and I clicked, and the post was fascinating, although I have no way of verifying if it’s true or not. You can decide for yourself. All you need to try his workout is a deck of cards, apparently:

“When Mike Tyson came out of prison, his upper body was huge, and his legs were bigger than ever. He built his new physique using only his bodyweight because there was no traditional gym equipment in the jail. One of the movements he used the most was the humble bodyweight squat. 100 of them. Daily.”

Mike Tyson’s squat routine to build giant legs with no equipment:

1. Take 10 playing cards and line them up on the floor, 3 inches apart.

2. Squat and pick up the first card, move on to the next one and place the first card on top of the second card

3. Then squat down twice to pick up each card and move onto the 3rd card, squatting twice again to stack them into a pile of 3.

4. Squat 3 times to pick up all three cards before moving onto the 4th card and placing them down one by one again.

5. You can only pick up or put down one card at a time — each time is an extra squat.

6. The sequence of 10 cards requires 100 squats in total

To track your progress, time yourself. To make it harder, add more cards. If you’re a true psychopath, you can rest for a minute or two and then perform the whole thing again.

What do you think? Seems hard and I’m sure playing cards were easy to come by in prison. Are you gonna try it? Let me know!

QUICK FLEXES

My wife bought us a new set of dumbbells for the garage gym and in true Flex Factory fashion this is our 7th set of dumbbells and 7th different weight from 7 different brands collected over about 20 years haha:

100% of the time I see my books on the shelf at a bookstore I will take pictures and share them. Especially when I spot TWO!:

STRONG LINKS

In honor of our 350th issue I made a LIMITED EDITION POWDER BLUE Books & Biceps Official Tee!

Look at this beauty! Full Carolina blue with that glorious logo on the left lapel AKA the left pec for us sophisticated meatheads!

We’re only making 25 so get yours quick:

Generation Griffey is still the #1 Sports & Pop Culture book for dudes who grew up in the 80s and 90s… Get your copy!

If you still wear your hat backward like Griffey, think all the Prime flavors are dumb because Gatorade Citrus Cooler is the greatest sports drink ever, miss Blockbuster and Tower Records, destroyed your friends in Street Fighter, GoldenEye, and NBA Jam, can quote Tommy Boy and Billy Madison, and never missed Stu Scott on SportsCenter —this book, Generation Griffey, is for you.

I ranked 90 of the '90s things that made your dude childhood legendary. A rankfest, if you will. Ninety columns. By me. For you. For US.

Why Generation Griffey?

First, it’s a great name. We’ve got alliteration, “generation,” and the quintessential athlete of that era: Ken Griffey Jr.

Junior perfectly defines the era for late '80s and '90s kids because the apex of his career matches our childhood. From the day he joined the Mariners’ lineup in 1989 through the next decade, nobody embodied '90s style (the backward hat), swagger (the swing, the smile, the commercials), and coolness (the kicks, the cameos, the crossover stardom) quite like Griffey.
His reign atop the sports/celebrity pyramid (alongside Jordan) from his rookie year in Seattle to his move to the Reds in 2000 serves as the perfect bookend for all of us who grew up in the last decade of the last century.

See? Generation Griffey is a spectacular name for this book.

What are we ranking?

Everything. Well, noteverything, but the 90 most nostalgic things that make us dudes smile all these years later: the movies we quoted, the athletes we loved, the cards we collected, the foods we devoured, the shows we watched, and more. All of it. Got it? Good. Let’s go.