Weighting On 40

For this review, I  selected the August 2009 edition of Muscle & Fitness magazine.  Featured on the front cover of this magazine is UFC fighter Nate Marquardt, and this particular issue was dubbed by editors as "The Tough Issue".  Among the cover stories are the following:

• Only the Strong Survive
• More Muscle Less Fat Naturally
• Test your Chest without Bench
• M&F Tests the Gym Equipment of Tomorrow
• Caught Looking at you (Kathleen Tesori)

Muscle magazines have a notorious reputation for being little more than a collection of trivial articles embedded with tons of advertisements and other fluff content.  It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that most of the body builders featured in such magazines, especially in the ads, are artificially enhanced monsters who bear no resemblance to normal people who lift weights.  They have abandoned exercise for the sake of health and entered the realm of extreme vanity.

All deference to Mr. Marquardt, who does NOT appear to be steroidally enhanced and could seriously screw me up in a fight!

While this edition of Muscle & Fitness magazine doesn't report any stories on the next up-and-coming steroid beast, it doesn't disappoint in the content-versus-advertisement arena.  Within its 248 pages (not counting inside front cover, inside back cover, and back cover - all of which are full-page ads) are the following breakdowns:

• Articles: 77 pages (31.0% of content)
• Advertisements: 144 pages (58.1%)
• Fluff (non-fitness related content): 23 pages (9.3%)
• Junk (stuff neither of us is going to read): 4 pages (1.6%)

There was a bit of generosity on my part with these numbers due to the fact that there are small ads on the same pages as actual articles.  Rather than counting half-pages, I simply credited the page as an article. 

The "Fluff" consisted of the following:

• A 1 page editorial about men who like to fight
• 2 pages of reader feedback
• An article about a car
• An article about an outdoor grill
• An article about Nolan Ryan getting in fights and getting hit by a ball
• 5 pages of pictoral (Kathleen Tesori)
• 12 pages of article titles (2 page pictoral spread with little or no content)

The "Junk" consisted of 2 pages of Table of Contents and 2 pages of staff listings for Muscle & Fitness Magazine.  A bit of generosity was offered here as well, since both of the Staff pages were 1/3 page margin advertisements.

The really difficult part of reading this magazine is sifting through the chaffe to find the wheat.  There's A LOT of worthless supplement advertisement to be found in this magazine.  Since I've already addressed the supplementation issue in another article, suffice it to say that the ad pages are all pretty much dead space to any readers of weightingon40. 

However, the publishers of Muscle & Fitness take the confusion a couple steps further by putting a page of article beside a page of advertising.  For example, in their article "Freq Out" (a discussion of workout frequency with a workout program outline - page 110), there is a 2 page pictoral title followed by a page of the actual text of the article (pages 110-112).  The next 10 pages are: advertisement (113), program routine (114), advertisement (115), program (116), advertisement (117), program (118), advertisement (119), more article text (120), advertisement (121), article conclusion (122).  Included (but not counted as page content) is a pull-out workout reference card to carry to the gym.  Very handy, except I almost missed it between advertisments.

Another bothersome aspect of this magazine is the fact that ads can be dressed to look like articles.  I started reading what I thought was an article about improving my sex life only to discover that it was an ad for a male enhancement pill.  It's probably a good thing that there was little useful information in the "article" - I'm not sure Alice could handle me being more interested in sex than I already am! ;-)

Regarding the actual (real) articles, there is indeed much good information on nutrition and exercise interspersed between the pages and pages of advertising.  There are some pretty tasty sounding recipes and information on various foods.  The workouts presented in the various articles (including the Freq Out article and another on police Training Tactics) look intense and would be beneficial in shocking muscle into growth.

There are a few "fluff" articles that I counted as fitness articles despite the fact that they give no real meaningful fitness information to the reader.  Sure, it's interesting to read about new training equipment that my small-town gym will likely never buy.  So is reading about the 10 toughest gyms in the United States, none of which are near my not-so-tough hometown (the closest one to me is in Florida).  Neither of these articles, however, is going to help me shed the last 10-15 pounds of fat or help me increase the size of my quads.

Perhaps the most telling detail in this issue of Muscle & Fitness magazine is that the first 42 pages of the magazine are either Fluff, Junk, or Advertising.  There is ZERO meaningful content in the first 1/6th of the magazine's pages.  This fairly proves to me that my interests as a reader must survive the constant pummeling of advertising in order to be fed.  Personally, I'd rather not deal with it.

You could probably read the salient portions of this magazine in an hour while sipping a skinny latte at Books-a-Million.  Unless you really want the training regimens or recipes offered in the magazine, you're probably better off keeping the $6.99 you'd have to pay to carry the magazine home with you.