Boom! This is Books & Biceps #362!

Thank you to everyone who has shared this newsletter with a friend or fellow meathead. In fact, if an awesome B&B reader shared this with you, add your e-mail with the subscribe button below:

If you’re a new subscriber you’ll love this profile that the New Yorker ran on us.

Today’s Issue is brought to you by the Summer 2025 ‘Read More, Lift More’ Challenge!

Every summer we take on a ‘Read More, Lift More’ Challenge, where we pair one phenomenal book with 30 workouts inspired by the book along with quotes and commentary. This summer, we’re working off of Alfred Lansing’s brilliant New York Times Bestseller, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. This book is one of the most popular B&B recs of all time and it follows an insane failed attempt to get to the South Pole in 1914, followed by a heroic, mind boggling rescue mission through a thousand miles of pack ice, on foot and makeshift boats. You will never forget this read.

Following the challenge is simple:

📚 You read 10 pages a day
💪 You do one Finkel-designed workout inspired by those pages
🧠 You get a daily quote from the book matching the section you just read, chosen by me, and a Meathead Motivation thought from me to keep your mindset locked in.

We start on August 1st. By September 1st you’ll be in better shape with a great book under your belt. You in? You ready? Let’s gooooooo!!!

P.S.: Order now and you get a FREE Printable Challenge Tracker

Dark Matter: A Novel by Blake Crouch

If I don’t pay attention to my reading habits I can very easily get stuck into a cycle of the same kinds of books: historical non-fiction, biography, action/thriller, sports, a classic from Robert B. Parker or Elmore Leonard, rinse and repeat…

Since I started Books & Biceps, I’ve made a concerted effort to expand my reading horizons into genres I didn’t pay much attention to before. And the one area of reading that I’ve found myself having the most enjoyment is in science fiction.

Specifically, Sci-Fi thrillers that are at least loosely based on a theory or scientific belief that is somewhat plausible. My favorites are when talented authors take the string of an idea rooted in reality (or what at least some scientists believe) and they tease it out into a story about what would happen if this were true… or if this theory was tested…

Even better, I love when these stories start with a “normal” person having a “normal” day and then flip their world upside down on a sci-fi adventure. Project Hail Mary is maybe the masterpiece version of this. On my list of sci-fi books that B&B readers have recommended to me, Blake Crouch’s ‘Dark Matter’ is at the top and I just started it.

The book checks all the sci-fi boxes for me. In fact, this is how the author himself describes the plot in an interview:

A brilliant physicist named Jason Dessen is living in Chicago with his wife, Daniela, and son, Charlie. He is a true genius, and while there was a point in his late twenties when his research could have made him a star in his field, he instead chose a family-focused life. One night, while walking home, he’s abducted by a mysterious masked man and injected with a drug. When he next awakes, his world has completely changed. He’s no longer married, doesn’t have a son, and has achieved professional success beyond his wildest dreams. This sets him on a thrilling, mysterious, and at times terrifying journey to learn what has happened to him, and to find his way home to the people and the life he loves.

Perfect, right? This is exactly the kind of science fiction I love… And let me tell you right now, this book starts fast and doesn’t stop.I picked it up Thursday morning and read the first 30 pages in what felt like five seconds. Hands down one of the best, most compelling first chapters to a book I’ve ever read. And chapter two doesn’t stop… I’m about 80 pages in and I can already 100% endorse this book… The fast-pacing, the “genius”-but-relatable-main character, the dorky-but-understandable science that piques your interest... The stakes. It’s all brilliant. I foresee two or three late nights with this one and I’ll be done by Monday, haha. Check it out here.

Let’s talk about ARM DAY! Yeah, you heard me right. Screw leg day for a minute.

I ventured out of the Flex Factory on Wednesday for an afternoon workout at our local community gym. Why? Because my day got away from me.

I have been banging away on the edits for my action/thriller debut novel, Bear Brawl, which comes out Fall ‘26 (I know, a long way away, but it’ll be worth it, trust me!) and I needed to make one final push to finish it. So, instead of trying to find three or four one-hour chunks to focus, I went old school, on-deadline style, got up early, poured some coffee, and blocked out the first 3 hours of my day to dial in, edit and write.

Of course, it took me closer to five hours to finish with a few interruptions, but, in the end, I got it done by noon. At that point, I had to get some other work done and eat and by 2pm I realized that other than walking my dog in the early morning, I’d barely moved.

Way different from my normal days of waking, walking and working out immediately.

But at 2pm, in August, in South Florida, my garage gym is roughly 95 degrees with 92 humidity. Brutal. Even the barbell was hot.

So I headed over to the local gym and on the fly decided I was going to lift ALL ARMS.

I picked three biceps and triceps supersets and I was off. One of the supersets was an oldie-but-goody that I can’t do in my garage because I don’t have cables.

It’s a superset of rope hammer curls with with overhead rope press downs.

I used a typical descending set, starting at 20 reps and dropping by 5 reps each set while adding ten pounds. The key was to squeeze and hold at the top of each rep on both the rope hammer curls and the rope press downs.

These were about 10x harder than I remember, pumping up my outer biceps and my triceps heads big time. I did 4 sets of the superset:

Rope Hammer Curl x 20

Rope Press Down x 20

Then sets of 15, 10 and finally 5, increasing the weight ten pounds each time.

Fun twist: I didn’t rest between the sets. I just added weight and kept moving.

Enjoy, meatheads!

You may or may not know who billionaire Jesse Itzler is, but all you need to know for the purposes of this story is that he’s a sauna maniac and he built one of those barrel saunas and put it on a small boat… Then the boat’s motor died and one of his swimmer friends decided to pull the boat one mile across the lake to the dock by swimming freestyle. Makes total sense. This is 100% something I’d try to do. Watch this:

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I write a column every Tuesday called The Manologue. This week, when news of Hulk Hogan’s passing broke, I wrote a piece on what it was like to grow up in a time when Hulkamania was running wild, brother:

1 Book. 1 Month. 30 Workouts. 300 Pages.

Your August just got way more awesome! We start 8/1.

Join us and grab your Challenge here:

NOTE: Order now and you get a FREE Printable Challenge Tracker

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