The book is well written and easy to ready. There are some brief sections on diet, lifestyle and "heroes", but the bulk of the book surrounds the exercises themselves. There are three main types (a) tensing the muscle to get a maximum contraction, often visualising lifting a weight; (b) using one muscle to provide resistance against another (eg left arm pushing while right arm pulls; and (c) advanced calisthetics (eg lots of variations of press-ups. The exercises are all clearly explained with good photos throughout.

How effective are the exercises? Early days. The calisthetics are clearly sound exercises and will certainly improve fitness and functional strength. I found the visualised resistance exercises gave me a surprisingly touch workout, although this will depend very much on how much effort you put into them. Having lifted weights for the last 10+ years, this certainly helped me with the visualisation and feeling of control. The author is in great shape, but I have to admit I am skeptical as to whether you can build that sort of muscle mass just from the techniques in the book. That said, I would love to be proved wrong and am certainly going to test the theory over the coming months.

In summary, this is a great book providing a really comprehensive set of bodyweight exercises. I'll use it alongside my existing fitness regime of weights, running and martial arts, but if you don't do any exercise at the moment, if you put the effort in with this program I'm sure you'll see some results.

You'll be amazed how effective this book is.
Review date: 2005-04-28 Rating: 10 out of 10

Basically I got fed up with consistently feeling over trained with weights. I'd either start getting sore throats and under the weather or a nasty twinge in the chest or a searing tendon pain down my forearm. So I'd go half heartedly into the workout. Holding back a desire to go all out.
So I chased up a bullworker. I found lots of fun with it and very effective for certain body parts especially forearms and biceps and back. I found it reasonably effective for chest, but not as I'd hoped.
So I was just looking really for some isometric exercises for the legs when I found this book.
John Peterson is in his 50's an believe me he's in the best condition of his life right now. He really is a total inspiration. He's incredibly strong and powerful. He's managed to build that body just using his own body as an incredible muscle building machine.
He uses a variety of techniques. The 4 main techniques are isometrics; What he calls DVR (dynamic visualised resistance) where one visualises the resistance; DSR (dynamic self resistance) here it is using your other arm for resistance and still moving at the same time. And power calisthenics.
The book is well written, it has olden day heroes, some might remember Woody Strode. Woody had this amazing flow of power and grace to his physique.
One quote of John's that actually twanged my heart strings a bit was that today's aspiring young man who wishes to build his body, has no realistic role model to look up to. He is looking at magazines today of freaks. Guys taking so much juice that they'll be lucky to make 45. How can any young man think to himself
'oh maybe with hard work I could look like that'. Firstly he'll think man that just looks plain freaky and unhuman.
This is where John comes in. He has plenty of muscle, more than perhaps I would want, which is a good thing. Yet to watch John doing an inverted press up in a handstand position, hands placed on two raised platforms going lower than his hands is good old fashioned inspiring stuff. This is part of advanced power calisthenics, not really required to build regular muscle.
The DVR is sooo easy to dismiss. You look at the photo and go sure that's really gonna hurt(not). then you try it and then wow, you believe! I was incredibly skeptical about this in his book. Some of the american reviews were going on about it. But it really does work.
There are lots of things I really like about this method of working out. The one that really suits me though is that I can once again go fully out. I mean I can give it everything. Totally tense it out and not injure myself. So finally I can really go for it. There's nothing worse I find than going half hearted with weight training because you might hurt something on your body. It breaks you down and you loose heart. Not with this method though. There are mentions of a really bad shoulder injury john got(from martial arts block) and how he overcame this with Furley push-ups.
There's an average of 12 exercises per body part.
Another thing that I really liked from this book was the chest routine really feels like I am working my pecs! Yet at the same time you are working yourself in other areas as well. One's grip becomes really strong and powerful as you're using grip all the time in this method. I can say the same for shoulders as well, especially the hard to reach rear deltoid. One feels powerful from these workouts. One develops a sense of Mr. Incredible Crushing power!
Take it from me this form of training is going to make a comeback. Fake bodies built from steroids and joint inflaming weights will start to wane.
As you get older(44) youthful aggressive weight-training catches up with you. It smashes your immune system and leaves you feeling sore and stiff like concrete.
These exercises leave you feeling sore but the ache is deep and there is still plenty of movement. It's a nice healthy soreness.
Buy it, what a great investment. If you can find the spiral bound copies they'll be more practical.

update 21-09-08:
I have added some comments below.

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