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When I started doing publicity for The New Rules of Lifting in January 2006, I was surprised by the question I was asked most often: "Can women do these workouts?" I got a different, more urgent version of that question from some female readers: "This is a terrific book. How come you wrote it for men?"

The answer to the first version of the question is "yes, of course women can do these workouts." The answer to the second is, "I didn't think women would be interested in this type of training."

Since The New Rules of Lifting for Women came out a year ago, all is forgiven, and a legion of female lifters have enjoyed the benefits of Alwyn Cosgrove's challenging but rewarding workouts. (Both books came out in paperback last week.)

But I can't help returning to the original question: Why didn't I think women would want to do these workouts? After all, Alwyn and his wife, Rachel, train at least as many women as men at their facility in Newhall, California. And in my travels as a fitness journalist, when I got a chance to visit facilities where elite athletes trained for high-level competition, I never saw men and women segregated into "his" and "hers" workouts. The women did the same things the men did, usually (but not always) with lighter weights, but never with less enthusiasm or intensity.

The problem is with the way people like me have sold strength training to women. When I pick up books and magazines offering workouts for women, those training programs are inevitably softer, showing angular, lightly muscled models lifting tiny weights through partial ranges of motion. The idea seemed to be that women would break if anyone tried to get them to do real exercises with real weights.

My coauthors and I aimed for a paradigm shift with NROL for Women. We assert that women should indeed challenge themselves in the gym, sometimes by using the heaviest possible weights for relatively few repetitions. Typical advice for women has them do 10 to 15 reps per set of each exercise; Alwyn's workouts have them doing as few as four. (On some days they do as many as 20, since the goal of a good workout program is to develop all muscular qualities, including muscular endurance, along with pure strength.)

Another radical departure is our nutrition program, created by a new coauthor, Cassandra Forsythe. Rather than telling readers interested in fat loss to eat less, we propose that some women need to eat more. A woman who's exercising intensely but eating too little - 1,000 calories a day in some cases - is negating the effects of the former because of the inadequacy of the latter. That's why fat sometimes lingers even when the conventional dietary advice says it should be melting away. With more food, the metabolism shifts to a higher gear, the body adds muscle, and fat is turned into fuel.

We also used a model who's stronger and more muscular than the ones you typically see in fitness books for women. Cassandra's friend Michelle Bower, an athlete and strength coach, demonstrates the exercises on our pages, using weights that are realistic for a dedicated female lifter.

I don't know if we succeeded in changing the paradigm for women in the weight room, but I have to think we at least caught the right moment in the Zeitgeist for this type of information and advice. In coaching my 10-year-old daughter's soccer team, I see girls who're stronger than they were in my day, who enjoy challenging themselves (some of them can do more push-ups than boys their age), and who are going to grow up without an image of themselves as weak or fragile.

That's a big win, no matter how big or small a part my coauthors and I get to play.