The muscle rag dilemma

After spending the better part of the night at Borders finishing up some shopping for the holidays...I found myself wandering in the magazine section. Well it may be perceived as "un-holiday" like but it is now time for me to step up on my soapbox, get Scrooge like and blast a portion of my industry. It's time to get nasty and tell you the truth about all the health, fitness/bodybuilding and food magazines that lead millions of us astray.

Did I just hear you say, "But if it's in print, then it must be true...right?" Nope...Sorry. Fitness magazines are, perhaps, the most deceitful communication medium in the health and fitness industry let alone in publishing.

Some magazines attempt to print reliable training and dieting recommendations, with good intentions - yet most are just full of propaganda, lies, and fraud to protect their vested interests!
C'mon, not all these magazines, publishers or editors set out to commit fraud. Right?

That's true - sorta, but when I read ignorant and stupid advice over and over again in these magazines, it leads me to believe that these editors must be committing fraud or worse they are simply too incompetent and unqualified to give advice.

Sounds harsh doesn't it?..... Keep in mind that the public views fitness magazines as an expert source, one to be trusted, so I and the rest of us fitness professionals need to be hard on the industry to make sure they are truthful and forthright. We as professionals need to represent the average guy who are spending their subscription fees trying to find factual information to get healthy and build a better body.

The Muscle Rag Dilemma...
If only truthful, useful and factual info were printed into fitness and muscle magazines, just imagine how difficult it would be to fill 200+ pages every month. Magazines would be reduced to 10 % content and 90% advertising (humm... have you looked at the latest issue of Shape or muscle and fantasy lately? I think most of them are already doing just that!)

If they added just factual content to the magazine, it would be reduced from monthly to quarterly or bi-monthly at best. This would lead to financial suicide since the money made from magazines is not due to newsstand sales or subscriptions...

WHAT?! It's not? Heck, no! Muscle magazines profit from advertisers! (mainly supplement and equipment advertisers) Less monthly magazine circulation means you can't charge as much for advertising. Less advertising dollars leads to less profit for the publisher.

Each month, a new issue must be replenished with a new 'vault of knowledge', so new training programs, philosophies and techniques must be (re)invented each month to keep the readers entertained. Notice I did not say educated....

In any given issue you may read about 10 sets of 3 and a few pages later read about 4 sets of 4 and then 10 sets of 10, etc. Most months you'll read about different programs that conflict with each other in the same issue! No wonder we are so friggin confused.

Why do they do this? Because the publishers of these various magazines are very smart... they are providing their readership some(read: very little) content - but in reality they know that their readers will implement the "new" training programs every month, resulting in very little to show for all their sweat and hard work. (it usually takes 6 to 8 weeks for the body to show any major physiological change)

So as the frustrated reader, you'll read on the cover of next months issue about the next new Mother of All workouts or the Holy Grail of ab and buns training. And again they buy. Can't blame them...you never know when the next ground-breaking system will be discovered, do you?!

So please arm yourselves.... when reading in any magazine, ask yourself one questions. What's in it for the writer, the magazine/publisher, the advertisers and more importantly what is in it for you....

Til next time...