1. Female: yes, although I should note that I have a new book coming out in January that's specifically for women. (Alwyn Cosgrove designed the workouts, and Cassandra Forsythe created the diets and helped me with research and insight throughout the book.) The philosophy is the same in both books, although the workouts are a bit different, with NROL having more upper-body work and the book for women having more emphasis on metabolic manipulation.
2. On pull exercises, you have three choices:

• Get a power rack with a cable stack. My friends at Fitness Factory make a pretty good one. According to this, it's on sale for $300. (The one on sale is plate-loaded; for a selectorized weight stack, you'd pay more.) That allows you to do pulldowns and rows, as well as chin-ups and pull-ups.
• If you have a chin-up bar, substitute modified chin-ups and pull-ups for all the pulldowns. You can purchase a set of bands (such as these) and use them to do assisted chins and pulls. Your body weight is the limiting factor on body-weight exercises (obviously!), so the bands help you manipulate that, enabling you to do greater ranges of repetitions.
• Finally, you have dumbbell and barbell pulls. Rows are easy enough to manipulate. If you don't want to do every rowing exercise while bent forward at the hips, you can do some of them lying chest-down on an incline bench. That takes the load off your lower back, although the trade-off is that the set-up and execution can be awkward on some variations. The only free-weight alternative to pulldowns, though, is the barbell or dumbbell pullover, and while it's a fine exercise, it's not the same thing in terms of muscle use.

3. You don't need supplements to have a strong body. Protein supps are just a faster path to where you're going. The biological availability of the amino acids (i.e., your body's ability to use the protein to build and repair muscle tissue) in whey protein is the highest measured. It's been shown to be effective for muscle growth when taken before, during, or after workouts. Plus, when you have the protein in liquid form, all the good stuff happens faster, since it's easier for your body to digest.

So the supps have three big things going for them:

• quality of protein
• effectiveness of liquid ingestion
• convenience (i.e., easier to whip up than a chicken breast).

Plus, there's the treat factor. My favorite possession is my KitchenAid blender, which my wife gave me for Father's Day a couple years ago. Having a post-workout shake with a good-tasting supplement (I use Biotest's Metabolic Drive Complete vanilla) and fresh or frozen fruit is a pretty nice reward after a hard workout.

But I'm not pimping powders here. You should be able to get the same results with real food -- I don't think anyone disputes that. It's just a bit harder to do, and takes more planning.

When I was younger and protein supplements tasted like industrial waste, I used to have a half-dozen scrambled eggs and an English muffin with jelly right after workouts, and that worked pretty well. Old-school bodybuilders used to drink whole milk by the quart, and that worked pretty well, too.

Just make sure you have some protein in your system when you train (a meal an hour or two before the workout should be fine), and eat something protein-rich immediately after.

I hope this helps!

Skim milk is fine. All you want from milk is protein with some sugar to spike your insulin. You don't need fat post-workout.

But I have to tell a funny story:

My older daughter is studying prefixes in third grade. One of her tests was a list of words, used in specific contexts in sentences, and a separate list of possible prefixes. The sentences and prefixes were set up so she was supposed to use each prefix once, and only once.

She got to "fat" and couldn't figure out which prefix to use. The correct choice was "non," as in "nonfat milk," but she's never seen nonfat milk in our house, so she got it wrong.

The story would be funnier if I could remember what she wrote instead ("prefat"?), but I got a kick out of anyway.

My younger daughter also came up with a great misuse of a prefix: She was talking about breathing, and referred to how people "inhale" and "outhale." I didn't bother correcting her. I think I prefer her word to "exhale."

Back to live action:

Close-grip lat pulldown: You can't really replicate the actions of your upper-back muscles without a chin-up bar or overhead cable, but you can replicate the arm-muscle action (kind of) if you do a neutral-grip bent-over row. (That's with the palms facing each other.)