These authors love to shop as much as they love to exercise.

As a fitness neophyte, I turned once again to the Dummies series for its comprehensive, unbiased coverage of broad topics. What disappointed me about this selection is its enthusiasm for expensive gadgetry, club memberships, and professional consultation.

Admittedly, a healthy lifestyle isn't without a price tag, but this is ridiculous. In almost every chapter of this book (including a couple devoted entirely to the subject), you can expect to find one or more words of advice encouraging the reader to go shell out some more dough for one thing or another - a heart monitor, a personal trainer, a water pack, a dietician, a special mat for stretching exercises, etc. If you bought every item they recommended throughout the course of this book, you'd spend a full year's salary and fill a bedroom with all your new junk!

While they do advise against some of the more foolish purchases, such as those fat-zapping electrodes sold on infomercials, they spend little time extolling the virtues of those invaluable exercises you can do for free - stair walking, push ups, pull ups, etc. The chapter on exercising at home is a veritable catalog of the fanciest equipment money can buy, rather than suggestions of exercises you can do on a bare floor with your own body weight.

The authors also go a little skimpy on such topics as nutrition and weight training, but make darn sure to point you in the direction of other related titles in the "for Dummies" series.

If you generally like the Dummies books, do a little more shopping before you put your faith in this one.

If only all Dummies books were as good as this one. Extremely well-written with the most clear language one could ever hope for. Full of anecdotes, definitions, and plenty of myth busters. The personalization from the authors gets tiring ("Suzanne thinks that...", "Liz's grandmother once..."), but it is tolerable. Many, many aspects of fitness are covered in remarkable thoroughness. General weight lifting (both at home and the gym), supplements, gym etiquette, trainer tips, aerobic machines and classes, and fitness video buying are all covered with impressive detail. (If buying this book used, be sure to get the 2nd edition as it covers many topics that didn't exist with the first edition: Pilates, Physio balls, elliptical trainers, Bikram Yoga, and more.)

When I bought this book I thought it would cover all the basics (= for dummies) and allow me to start working on my own at home.

To my disappointment this book contains very little needed info to do that.

Example - there are three pages about stretching, giving rules such as "Stretch all your muscles, not just those you've used in your workout", with the chapter describing the muscles coming up 45 pages later. I'd expect :

1. The chapter about muscles to be close to or preceding the section about stretching. The design keeps the relevant info too far apart.

2. A list of stretching excercises to be given with pictures. No excercises are given at all (though there are plenty of space given to useless pictures, e.g. of a computerized bike panel), denying me the info I need.

The section recommends buying a video that shows how to stretch. For the price of a video and a video cassete (about $300 in Israel) I could get personal training.

The "Nutrition Basics" chapter is another disappointment - five and a half pages are spent on vitamins providing less information than given in leaflets given for free in pharmacies, the section about titled "Watch Your Calories" gives trivial advice, and no table of caloric values of different kinds of foods is included, etc.

I find this book very disappointing, will not buy any other "for dummies" books, and will sell this book at a second hand books store - at least I'll get some of my money back and not waste any shelve space on this useless book.