Boom! This is Books & Biceps #387!

We started 2025 with just over 20,000 Sophisticated Meatheads reading this newsletter and today, on January 2nd, 2026, we’re sending this issue to almost 30,000! Wild! Thanks to everyone who has shared this newsletter with a buddy or fellow sophisticated 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.

I love writing Books & Biceps for so many reasons, but up at the top is that after I read a book, I’m now able to reach out to the author and score an interview for us. That’s not because of me. It’s because of you! Because as we’ve grown, authors want to get in front of the B&B crew and share some behind-the-book wisdom with you all.

Another thing that sets us apart, though, which seems like common sense, but isn’t, is that before I request an author interview, I actually read the book, enjoy it, and then have questions ready that are specifically about the book.

You might be thinking, “of course, that’s how you should do it”, but trust me, I’ve given hundreds and hundreds of author interviews for my own books and it’s staggering how many people request and conduct interviews and in the first two minutes you know they never read it. It’s fine. I get it. People are busy. And I’m truly grateful to talk to anyone willing to share their audience with me about their writing.

But that’s not us. I love that we stand out because we read the books, think about them, and then come up with compelling questions.

In 2025, I stayed on my goal of getting one big time behind-the-book Q&A for us every few months and we talked to a phenomenal list of authors that includes:

Four multi-New York Times Bestselling writers, a heavyweight boxer, a Navy SEAL, an Edgar Award Winner, an NCAA football National Champion, a college hoops star, an up-and-coming legend and more.

In fact, the coolest thing about this list is that these guys are more than authors, they live the Books & Biceps lifestyle. They write a lot, read a lot and train hard.

Check out the Ace Atkins Interview and you’ll learn that in addition to being an author, Ace was on Auburn’s National Championship football team back in the day and was even on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Click here for the Nick Horvath Interview and in addition to reading about his bad ass character Sledge, you’ll learn that he played college ball at Duke.

In our Jack Carr Interview, not only does he discuss everything you’d want to know about Cry Havoc, but he was a 20-year Team Leader in the Navy SEALs and shares a love of 80s and 90s action movies.

If you read my Eli Cranor Interview about his perfectly-timed book for right now in college football, Mississippi Blue 42, we talk about how his days as a college QB helped him dive deep into the research for his project.

In the Ed Latimore Interview, he shares what it was like to train to become a heavyweight boxer and how that has informed his brutal-truth, honest writing style.

And when talking to my buddy Alex Hutchinson, he shares how how being a dad, training for endurance events and taking his kids on incredible outdoor adventures gives him perspective on writing and choosing the topics he does.

Thank you all for reading Books & Biceps in 2025! I’m super proud of what we’re building and I hope you check out all those interviews above. We’ve got a lot more lined up in 2026 and, most importantly, it is the year of BEAR BRAWL (you will be hearing a TON about my new novel coming out this year starting very, very soon!).

For most of my lifting life I’ve worked on a 7-day training split. The problem I’ve been running into is that I end up with too many double sessions and not enough recovery time as I’ve gotten older. Also, not enough time for mobility work, sprints, etc…

And since I can’t change how many days there are in a week, I decided to play with setting up a 10-day training split, where my goal is to get two upper/lower body sessions in every 10 days instead of every 7. My main constants are that I swim at least 3 days a week and play hoops every Friday morning (so those are weekly things - confusing, I know).

I can work the other stuff around that, but like I mentioned, oftentimes that leaves me with a crammed day or week. I’ve been toying with all kinds of splits and I’ve settled on trying this for January, with a little flexibility built in. A lot depends on my swim practice schedule, since we’re moving to a new pool and I may switch practice days there as well. I could also just keep my seven day split, so I broke it up below.

Anyway, thought I’d share:

7 Day Split or 10 Day Split

Day 1: Upper body lift AM + swimming PM
Day 2: Knees Over Toes (legs) + sprints
Day 3: Swimming
Day 4: Knees Over Toes AM + swimming PM
Day 5: Basketball (Friday)
Day 6: Upper body lift
Day 7: Swimming

Day 8: Knees Over Toes (legs) + Swimming
Day 9: 5K or Ruck
Day 10: Recovery / Stretch / Long Walk

If you’re a guy over 40 and you’ve been looking for a new digital magazine that’s written for midlife men, by midlife men, on the topics that actually matter to us: family, fitness, fashion, finance, food & fun, then join us at Midlife Male.

I write a column every Tuesday called The Manologue. To wrap up the year I put together a unique reading list that I called “6 Novels & 5 Non-Fiction Masterpieces Every Man Should Read”. This list is a great mix of books I’ve read the past ten years, many of which I recommended here in B&B (some, many years ago). Let me know how many of these you’ve read:

Try our “Read More, Lift More” Challenge, the world’s only one-month training program that pairs an awesome book with 30 proven workouts. Ten pages of reading a day with one workout based on your reading.

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