"What I know now," part one

I’ve been waiting for my thoughts on training to organize themselves around a central theme or two, so that I can write them down and post them here, but, since that’s not apparently going to happen anytime soon, I guess a scattershot approach will have to do.

What I know now:

1. Joe Weider is a crackpot. He is an ass-hat. His magazines and training principles are at the top of the dogshit pile of magazines and misinformation out there that characterizes the majority of information that counts as “knowledge” these days. The Weider Empire, as one might call it, does what it does purely to generate money. Few people realize this, but at the time that Joe Weider first began styling himself “fitness guru extraordinaire,” putting out magazines whose sole purpose was to hock fitness supplements and other merchandise, Weider was busy also hatching a another series of “fitness”-related magazines that catered to gay men with their gay fit-man fantasies. The now extinct League of Decency found out about this and put a stop to Weider’s line of gay mags (see the cover of the magazine, “Adonis,” below), but the external trappings of that cultural time and place in history persist to this day—just look at any bodybuilding competition or any of the dozens of muscle magazines on the shelves currently, where oily, hairless men in bikini underwear pose for (Who else?) other damned men.

Joe Weider and men like him make my job a living hell. The first three months that I spend with any client usually involves disabusing them of all their bullshit notions about training, many of which can be traced to damned Muscle and Fitness Magazine. Let’s take the Weider principle of “muscle confusion,” for example. A search of the Sportdiscus database (an online database containing research papers and articles relating to sports and fitness) yields a number of results on “muscle confusion.” Not coincidentally, those results link to articles taken from none other than Muscle and Fitness magazine. What I’m getting at here is that very little actual research has been conducted on “muscle confusion.” Maybe that’s because the very concept is not easily quantified and measured. I mean, how do you quantify and measure “confusion?” Somebody f**kin’ tell me, okay, because I’m at my wit’s end. Sure, you can observe the results of your “muscle confusion” routine on a person and record that, but how do you know which if any of the variables of the routine made the real difference? How do you know whether some other approach might not have given you the same if not better results? How do you know whether it will work well for all populations or just some, or if it only works on lifters who take steroids or other performance enhancing drugs, since most if not all of your subjects take them?

F**k Joe Weider!

Long before Joe Weider came along there were serious, hardworking men (some women, too, I suppose) who began with a few basic lifts, to which they added weight every workout and saw serious results. These lifters were doing this for many years before Joe Weider came along, and it worked for them. The work was hard and sometimes monotonous, but the rewards were huge. You could find them at York Barbell and in modest little gyms all over the country. They ate good whole food and lots of it, squatted, deadlifted and pressed themselves to incredible size and strength. The problem is, nobody wants to work hard, no one has the focus to stay the course when the lifting program gets tough. If they did, then everybody would be living and dying in the squat rack and everybody would be f**kin’ huge! People still want to believe that a “snake oil” supplement can help them bypass the hard work that a serious, systematic, rigorously applied, and linearly progressed program entails.

Instead, folks would rather subscribe to Muscle and Fitness Magazine and the like, which serves up a buffet of workout routines (routines of the bodybuilding stars, people!) designed to help sell whatever worthless supplement appears on the opposite side pages. What’s more, if magazines were to actually publish would DOES work, then they’d very quickly run out of things to write about in subsequent issues. The truth is that hard work, focus and dedication to a few basic exercises, along with correct eating, will always yield the best results in the beginning. Got it?

Oh yeah, f**k Joe Weider.