Despite the fine authors, trainers, and other contributers, it now seems "dumbed down." It's virtually indistinguishable from Men's Health, with the exception that is smaller.
It's now filled with a bunch of "quick fixes" for your small arms, chest, back... What do women like and how to get your body parts that way. There was even a blurb that stated that the best way to get rid of "love handles" is to focus on your obliques to burn THAT fat (it gave a specific exercise to perform).
The first issue was great! The 2nd issue was almost as good with great info.
While I haven't finished the 3rd issue, I'm not impressed, so far. The look and feel of the mag is less article oriented and filled more with tiny little news items and one page "tips."
The MH mag and forum went downhill a long time ago. The MF forum has also turned to crap because it got neglected. Not sure where Adam has been, I heard he got a change in employment but Im not sure about that.
__________________
"The strongest steel goes through the hottest fires."-Anonymous
"When you begin to believe nothing is heavy, all weights become light." -Rossbow
"Just remember, somewhere there is a little Chinese girl warming up with your max."-Jim Convroy
"It's a round hole, dammit. Everyone fits."--Anonymous Mod at Strengthmill
Originally posted by Chris Correia: I'm kinda happy if that's the case. One less resource I have to worry about. I can focus on what I know is good.
Happy??? What do you consider as "good"?
This was the first mag I had seen in ten years that focused on Lifting, and not how to get laid and look good while doing it. I am very upset to see this turn south. When will someone come out with a mag geared towards the natural, drugfree lifter, who doesn't care about clothing styles?
quote:Originally posted by Chris Correia: I'm kinda happy if that's the case. One less resource I have to worry about. I can focus on what I know is good.
Happy??? What do you consider as "good"?
This was the first mag I had seen in ten years that focused on Lifting, and not how to get laid and look good while doing it. I am very upset to see this turn south. When will someone come out with a mag geared towards the natural, drugfree lifter, who doesn't care about clothing styles? [/quote]Hey, I was still sleeping! The comment was both premature and unclear. I hate to lose a good resource, & your post nicely states why. The feeling I was expressing is that with the value or direction of MH Muscle in limbo (at least, that's how I was feeling), I get tired of holding my breath to see how it will turn out. Frankly, I was waiting for this to happen.
I don't like having to check things out month to month/issue to issue. I'd rather subscribe and be confident in what I'm getting. If I can't, I don't want to worry about it. Chaffe in the wind. The other shoe has now fallen. Someone please let me know if MH changes shoes down the line, will you?
Originally posted by Lost_Dog: While I haven't finished the 3rd issue, I'm not impressed, so far. The look and feel of the mag is less article oriented and filled more with tiny little news items and one page "tips."
My mistake. I HAD read it. I thought I had only skimmed it, but when I attempted to actually read the whole thing, I found nothing new.
Aside from a short section from Scrawny to Brawny, an interesting article on a powerlifter and an article on Shaq, it's mostly reprinted stuff. I think I even recognized a routine from Home Grown Muscle!
I think the popular phrase should be revised to read "If you don't have anything NEW to say, don't say anything at all."
Everything is profit driven. There really is only so much material you can print articles on before everything begins to sound repetitive. Look at Muscle and Fitness, and all of those magazines. They print the same articles on bronzers, what hair to shave off, and how to stick needles in your ass while striking a double biceps pose in the mirror practically every issue.
Summary of Mens Health Magazines:
-How to dress to appeal to women
-"Innovative" ab exersizes that really will have minimal effect
-An article on a model. Give his diet.
-Fat burning section with tips 90% of us already know.
-A few circuit training/fullbody workouts
And...The Greatest Workout Ever is really not all that great.
And...The Greatest Workout Ever is really not all that great.
I strongly disagree. GWE is a very solid plan that gave me lean mass, and explosive gains. Have you completed the program, or are you commenting on it from your couch? The rep plan is perfect and the movements are 70% compound and 30% BB style. I can't think of a better mix for the average lifter who has experience in the gym.
I wonder how much of the magazine content is driven by occasional newstand buyers (who pay a much heftier price per issue) versus subscribers?? For subscribers, virtually any hobby magazine is going to seem like recycled content once you have read a few issues. Newstand buyers may not care or notice, if they only buy an issue every 5 or 6 months. There can't be that much new info. every month to fill up a magazine.
I let my MH subscrption lapse last year and switched to MF. Now I am debating letting my MF subscription lapse, even though it is dirt cheap. It's a better magazine, but I still don't really find myself needing or using the content, given all of the resources on the web like this forum. I have been thinking about giving "Runner's World" a try, although I'm sure it will get stale very quickly as well. And no doubt it's full of goofy stuff like "Run off your Love Handles and have Great Sex Tonight!"
I disagree that there's nothing new to say. I was hoping we could put out Muscle as a quarterly, or even do six issues a year.
I had no trouble coming up with ideas for the first two issues. With a staff, coming up with enough interesting content to fill six issues a year wouldn't have been a problem.
Especially when you mix in the athletes and celebrities that every magazine is supposed to have these days, there's no information shortage.
There might be a creativity shortage, or a budget shortage, or a lack of respect for the readers' curiosity and intelligence (lot of that going around).
But good, interesting, unexposed information is all around us.
But inevitably, an editor will say, "This section really needs something on biceps," or, "We must have a basic guide to fat loss." And that's when journalists get frustrated and rehash the same old crap.
If that's what the boss wants, that's what the boss gets.
If you were to sit in on a year's worth of editorial meetings at a major magazine, and counted every reference to readers' needs and desires, I guarantee you wouldn't run out of fingers and toes. You might not even run out of fingers.
At Men's Health, I used to be amazed at how much reader-survey information the editors had to work with, and how little use they made of it.
Dang, Lou! You mean when I fill out those online surveys and give them my honest opinion, it's ignored?
I'm not naive enough to expect individual attention, but I sort of hoped MH was putting those surveys out there for a reason other than to waste readers' time.
Thanks for the inside angle.
__________________ The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same. -- Carlos Castaneda
You will learn a great deal about shoes from Runner's World. I usually only subscribe to any magazine for 1 year (Golfer's Digest, Runner's World, Men's Health) for all of the reasons listed above. Besides, if I have learned and applied everything in the 10+ issues from my first year, who needs the next several issues. I would be perfect at that point.
Marc
__________________
Am I to understand that you men completed your training on your own? ...That\'s the fact, Jack!
Originally posted by Chris Correia: A year of decent information, actually applied, can probably last a decade . . . or even a lifetime.
Many routines, yet it all boils down to age old advice:
Pick up heavy sh*t.
Repeat several times.
Stop
Eat
Rest
Repeat
Yeah. If a mag paid more attention to Biomechanics and injuries (i.e. like Cressey's articles) and how to fix them, then Id be reading up. Pure strength setups would be interesting. Hell, decomposing some of the dense stuff in Supertraining would be neat. Oh well
__________________
"The strongest steel goes through the hottest fires."-Anonymous
"When you begin to believe nothing is heavy, all weights become light." -Rossbow
"Just remember, somewhere there is a little Chinese girl warming up with your max."-Jim Convroy
"It's a round hole, dammit. Everyone fits."--Anonymous Mod at Strengthmill
If you want a good magazine that just deals with strength, no clothes, no "how to get laid", no BS, go to Ironmind and order MILO. It only comes four times a year, but it is loaded with good information.
Originally posted by BamaDave: I have been thinking about giving "Runner's World" a try, although I'm sure it will get stale very quickly as well. And no doubt it's full of goofy stuff like "Run off your Love Handles and have Great Sex Tonight!"
As someone who reads every issue of that magazine (granted, I only pay for about 2 a year, the rest are read and returned to the Barnes and Noble shelf) I can say that RW isn't of much use to somebody with training experience like yourself. The contents usually go like this:
23 Reasons Why Protein Will Destroy Your Kidneys
Awesome Abs Thru Crunches
Beginners' Circle: Getting Your Ass Off the Couch
P-Diddy Ran a Marathon, Now You Can Too
Great Moments in Running History (actually kinda interesting at times)
Latest Innovations in Extremely Expensive Technical Wear
While there is some useful info in RW it's not worth $20/year. You can breeze through the crap and read the decent stuff in a half hour at the library.
You know, the general editorial shift of RW away from serious training advice to fluff shouldn't be all that surprising - it is a Rodale mag.
__________________
"If it felt good, you didn't push hard enough. It's supposed to hurt like hell." - Dean Karnazes' track coach, Ultramarathon Man
"My baby's soft and sweet, somewhere between a flower and a gun" - fiction family
I didn't mean to bust on Rodale. I just think modern magazines are trending dangerously toward ever-more-fantastical visions of who readers are and what they want.
What I find particularly sad and depressing is the idea that anything a celebrity does is worth passing on to readers ("Colin Farrell Reveals: 'Why I Wipe My Ass Back-to-Front Instead of Front-to-Back' ").
Survey after survey shows that readers of fitness magazines -- and possibly all men's magazines in general -- do not give a flying f*** about celebrities. They don't want to know how the celebrity dresses, trains, or cleans himself on the toilet.
Every survey I saw at MH showed that celebrity workouts, athlete workouts, and "beginner's guides" (to anything!) were our least-popular topics.
And yet, the pressure to write about celebrities just grew and grew until it became an integral part of every issue. And the beginner's guides? The idea probably came up at every third or fourth editorial meeting.
Topics like flexibility tended to rank high on reader surveys, whether we were asking about stories they'd like to see, or a story that had appeared in the current issue.
But, despite the fact readers told us they loved flexibility stories, editors think they're boring, so they never run. Count the ratio of beginner's guides to flexibility stories in the past few years in any fitness magazine. And take my word for it: What you see is the opposite of the readers' stated interest.
I think today's editors -- and, to be fair, a lot of this is driven by their bosses on the corporate side -- have this vision of what a successful magazine should be which is truly at odds with what the magazine's readers actually want.
:p 
Linear Mode
