Outstanding Q&A Articles from Our Canadian Champions

I started reading bodybuilding magazines back in the early ‘80s. At that time, most of the magazines were much better than the ones we see on the shelves today, but many were still lacking when it came to providing useful information that you could apply to your training at the gym. However, for me, one magazine always stood out from the rest – Iron Man, at the time when Perry Radar was in charge of it.

Iron Man came in a smaller format than a regular magazine, like a digest, and it didn’t have very many pictures, nor did it have many ads. Furthermore, it didn’t look flashy, unlike, say, the Weider magazines with their glossy paper, topnotch photography, and numerous pages of full-color ads. Iron Man was impressive for the detailed, no-nonsense training articles you could find in it, which almost all the other magazines lacked. It was helpful information that you could actually use, which, in turn, made Iron Man a valuable little magazine that was definitely educational.

However, Radar sold the magazine a long time ago and has since passed away. And despite the fact that the new Iron Man now comes in a large format and has glossy pages, all of which makes it much more visually appealing, it doesn’t have the relevant content of the old one, even if it’s still one of the better magazines on the market today. Most likely, that’s because nowadays a small magazine like the original Iron Man can’t survive by simply providing credible, useful information; instead, it appears that the way to make it in today’s magazine world is to sell out the readers by pandering to advertisers.

As a result, most magazines nowadays seem to exist with the sole purpose of helping to sell the products that are advertised in their pages – stratospherically priced bodybuilding supplements that are usually a complete rip-off. In fact, most of the print magazines contain mainly ads and have become nothing more than catalogues for the supplement companies. Furthermore, sprinkled amongst those ads are often articles that actually try to sell you those products. And if you find legitimate content in there, it’s usually watered down so badly that it ends up being useless. Good, solid training information? There is hardly any. In fact, you’ll have a tough time finding as much value in a year’s worth of today’s magazines as there was in one issue of the old Iron Man.

Obviously, then, someone has had to pick up the slack – and that’s where the Internet comes in. Today, with a quick search on Google or Yahoo, you can find valuable, credible bodybuilding information that you can’t find in the modern print magazines. What’s more, it’s usually free. Furthermore, because the costs of starting up on the Internet are so low, many of these new online resources don’t have to rely on advertising to survive, so they can print what they want instead of catering to the supplement companies by helping to push the latest snake oil they’re selling. In fact, this freedom that the online world gives is something we’ve been well aware of here at SeriousAboutMuscle.com since we began a few years ago.

When I started SeriousAboutMuscle.com, one of my mandates was to produce quality articles like the old Iron Man had – ones that could teach people about bodybuilding training and nutrition in an honest and candid way, without influence from the supplement companies. Furthermore, we’ve always believed that the best people to provide this information are those bodybuilding champions who put in the hard work and made it to the top. Therefore, as I wrote a couple of months back, SeriousAboutMuscle.com now has more Canadian bodybuilding champions writing for it than any other publication, print or online. We currently have Vince Wawryk, Autumn Raby, Denis Pedneault, Guy Bourgon, Stéphane Bussière, and Ron Partlow. These are some of the best bodybuilders that Canada’s ever produced, and they’re writing outstanding Q&A articles that we believe provide more valuable information to readers than any of the magazines on the market today.

While the quality of print-based bodybuilding magazines continues to slide, the Internet-based resources are getting better and better. As a result, it’s online that you’ll find credible information that the magazines seem unable to provide anymore, and it’s on SeriousAboutMuscle.com that you’ll find outstanding training articles by true champions done in the old Iron Man way – raw, honest, and out from under the supplement companies’ influence. It’s that sort of quality we’re proud of here and will continue to produce. This month look for articles from Guy Bourgon and Ron Partlow – and in the coming months, we’ll have much, much more.

...Doug Schneider, Publisher
das@seriousaboutmuscle.com

Doug Schneider is the publisher and chief photographer for SeriousAboutMuscle.com, BodyBuildingLive.com, and SeriousAboutFitness.com.