💪Books & Biceps Issue 193 - October 15th, 2021

Books & Biceps is the only weekly e-mail that combines reading recommendations, bestselling author interviews, legit workouts and powerful quotes.

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BOOKS

Hip Hop (And Other Things) by Shea Serrano

Hip Hop (And Other Things) is the final book in Shea Serrano’s “and other things” trilogy. The first two installments were New York Times bestsellers and this one will be too. I’m pretty sure I recommended Movies (And Other Things) when it came out as well as Basketball (And Other Things). The titles are self explanatory, so if you’re into movies or basketball or, in this case, Hip Hop, you’ll enjoy the hell out of this book.

The format in HHAOT is the same as the other two books, meaning there is no real format. Instead, Shea bills these books as a “collection of questions asked, answered and illustrated”, which is exactly what they are.

Important note: the questions Serrano asks are usually awesome, occasionally goofy, typically conversational, always interesting and contain an impressive amount of research and knowledge on the topic. There’s also jokes. Lots of jokes. And self-deprecating humor and pop culture references which make the chapters that much better.

For instance, in this book we get these beauties:

How about a taxonomy of advice from 50 Cent: Parts I & II

Which was the most perfect duo in rap history?*

Which line on Illmatic is the most Nasian?

2Pac or Biggie?

And about 30 others. You’re either already a fan of Serrano’s, are now about to become a fan…or have absolutely no idea what those chapters mean and are going to skip this recommendation because you don’t care about hip hop. Up to you. Here’s the link to grab the book.

* for me it’s probably Method Man and Red Man or maybe Eric B. and Rakim

BICEPS

I love a good leg day joke as much as the next meathead and I’m all about starting my week on the bench press…but I’ve been reading more and more about muscle overloading and the idea that for short periods of time you can train the same muscle group almost every day and experience heavy gains in size and strength.

Now, I’m not saying you should go and max out on squats every day, you’ll ruin your muscles and joints… you need time to recover from 1RMs. BUT, let’s say you want bigger arms or shoulders or a body part that’s bugging you and won’t grow… What you can try is to hit that body part daily with a few exercises in the 8-12 range (12 meaning you’d barely get rep #13) not twelve where you finish without a problem. Try hitting that muscle group 3-5 days a week for a month at the end of your regular lifts and see what happens.

I promise you’ll be presently surprised. In fact, this is how I broke through a plateau with pull-ups (which I used to hate). I decided a few years ago to commit to doing 50 per day, M-T-Th-Fr for a month with all different grips. Went from doing sets of 5-7 to sets of 10-14 easy by the end. Give it a shot.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.” - Babe Ruth

QUICK FLEXES

I’ve been experimenting more and more with threads on twitter and I posted a few fun ones this week:

8 Reasons Why Nobody Will Ever Top What Charlie Ward Did as an Athlete

How thriller author Brad Meltzer launched a tremendous kids book series

The 10 Best Books Written About the Red Sox or Boston Baseball Legends

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