Mens Fitness
July 9, 2009 by Pulmonary Disease · Leave a Comment
MEN’S FITNESS is a guide for fit and active men. The information on training, nutrition, gear, apparel, relationships and adventure sports.
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars Not as great as it once was…
I’ve been a subscriber to Men’s Fitness since late 1999. In fact, I still go back and use their year-long workout routines from 2000, 2001 and 2002 when I feel like I’ve hit a rut, or am coming back after a layoff.
Unfortunately, the publication has changed over that time, and sadly, not for the best. Where I was once able to read the magazine from cover to cover and get lots of information that I felt made the issues valuable to keep, since I could go back and always find something to tweak my workouts with, these days, I just don’t see the same quality. Not only in the workouts provided, but in the other articles and the magazine itself.
For example, over the last 4 years or so, when they started to put celebrities on the cover, LL Cool J is one of the VERY few that they have managed to discuss any type of a workout with that really goes further than the standard, “Oh, I do weights 3 days per week and cardio 4 days, blah blah blah” repetitive answer. Instead, the writers focus on their movie, their CD, or how they feel about the sport they play. If they put Ryan Reynolds on the cover, then I want to know what his workouts are like; sets, reps, what he does on different days of the week and so on. Not how he feels about whatever role he’s playing in his new movie, not who he’s dating/married to, not the kind of clothes he wears or what he drives, which is typical of the type of interviews and articles that appear issue after issue in the magazine today.
In a nutshell, Men’s Fitness appears to be drifting away from the informative magazine that I feel that it used to be - so much so, that for several years, I held it in higher regard than Men’s Health - to something resembling Maxim. In other words, a magazine that I will flip through once, and forget that I have it an hour after I’ve read it. And that is really too bad, considering that it used to be such a high quality magazine at one point in time.
