Are Muscle Magazines Realistic?
We’ve all seen the muscle magazines in the checkout line at the grocery store. Some quasi porn star looking, barely clad female standing in apparent awe at the tanned, ultra muscular, young buck who is every man’s envy, and the apparent desire of every female. There’s a bunch of these muscle magazines that are published monthly that not only contain the aforementioned photo shoot, but a million and one supplement advertisements, the secret diets of the pros, and of course, how you can get huge and ripped in 20 minutes.
While there can certainly be some useful information or speculations written in these publications, they are generally no different from any other sensationalistic publication that is looking to sell as many copies as possible with shocker headlines. How often have you seen captions on the cover that say “Huge arms in just 1 day”? “Get ripped abs in 5 minutes per day”. The examples could go on and on, but the bottom line is that it’s nothing more than sensationalism at it’s finest and scientific content at it’s lowest.
If you want to have visible abdominal muscles, you’re going to have to have a very proper and strict nutrition plan coupled with an awful lot of cardiovascular exercise. There is no simple answer, trick, or supplement that can effectively alter that reality. As for getting bigger arms quickly, yes, you can do a gazillion arm exercises in a certain amount of time and see an appreciable difference in circumference, but that is a temporary effect known throughout the bodybuilding world, as “the pump”. Once the excess blood leaves the worked out muscles, the arm will return to it’s pre exercised state. Only repeated weight lifting sessions coupled with good techniques, and a proper diet, will stimulate muscular growth in the arms, and elsewhere for that matter.
Another thing these muscle magazines often depict are professional bodybuilders showing off their weight room prowess and spelling out their workout routines for us mere mortals to try if we want to look anything like them. What thy don’t tell you is the copious amounts of anabolic steroids these bodybuilders are using as well as the insulin and human growth hormone they inject on a daily basis. You can emulate their diets and workouts all you want to, but without all the drugs, you’ll never get even remotely close to looking like they do. This is absolutely not to say that I’m endorsing using any drugs, but rather a simple reminder of reality.
As I’ve written many times on this website, training is a very individual thing. Some folks get better results from leg presses, while others would benefit more from squats, for example. There are, of course, universal truths, such as that carbohydrates are the best source of fuel for our bodies and that protein is required to build muscle. How much of each, however, depends upon the individual. Just because the guy in the magazine is supposedly taking in 400 grams of protein per day, doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea for you to do the same.
If you can take these publications with a grain of salt, and read between the lines, they’re completely harmless and possibly even entertaining. I personally don’t bother reading what the professional athletes claim to be eating, because as an Austin personal trainer for over 20 years, I’ve trained any number of them, and know full well what they eat, and how we train. Take them for what they are and you’ll be fine, but it’d be a shame to let publications like them set the standard for the male or female physique.
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Andy
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