Forged: A Training Guide For Real Life

by Matthew Cheney

A Training Guide for Real Life is the antidote to every failed program, fad diet, and one-size-fits-all plan that collapses the moment real life gets in the way. Built from experience instead of theory, this book delivers a complete training system designed for people who are tired of starting over and ready for results that finally stick.

Inside, you’ll learn a five-phase blueprint that repairs your metabolism, rebuilds strength, restores confidence, and produces visible, lasting change without extreme dieting or endless workouts. Forged shows you how to eat for performance, train with intention, manage recovery like an athlete, and create momentum even when life is busy, stressful, or unpredictable. Every chapter is structured for normal people with jobs, kids, aging joints, inconsistent motivation, and the desire to feel strong again.

This book doesn’t ask for perfection. It gives you a system that works even when things aren’t perfect.

If you’ve struggled with burnout, stalled progress, low energy, or old routines that don’t make sense anymore, Forged will show you exactly where to start and how to keep going.
If you’ve ever wished you could feel athletic, capable, and disciplined again, Forged gives you the roadmap.
If you want a body you’re proud of, a mindset you can trust, and a plan you can follow for the rest of your life, it’s all here.

This is not a challenge. It is a transformation framework built for real life.
Read it, follow it, and you will not be the same person when you finish.

116 pages, Paperback

Published November 18, 2025

About the author

Matthew Cheney’s debut collection of fiction, Blood: Stories, won the Hudson Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016. His academic book Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form: Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee at the Limits of Fiction was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community will be published by Punctum Books in the winter of 2023 and The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories will be published by Third Man Books in May 2023.

He is Assistant Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Plymouth State University.

His work has been published by Conjunctions, Woolf Studies Annual, One Story, English Journal, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Best Gay Stories 2016, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is the former series editor for the Best American Fantasy anthologies, and the co-editor, with Eric Schaller, of the occasional online magazine The Revelator.