Unqualified Female Writers School Men On Male Fitness

I am on the mailing list of a female writer whose main area of writer’s success seems to be fitness, and often male-specific fitness. She asks me for input on various articles she is writing on the subject. The problem is that she has a lot of weak areas when it comes to fitness knowledge and expertise, which she hopes professionals like yours truly will help her with by providing our input. My question is, how does this woman get so many writing assignments in an area in which she is deficient—fitness— and for an audience of which she is not a member—male—and why am I, fitness author and lifelong fitness trainer, not asked to write such articles? Why are so many men’s magazines and websites hiring women to school men on male fitness?

I began to notice the many workout, bodybuilding fitness articles regularly appearing on male-oriented websites and in men’s magazines such as GQ, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal and others, all written by females. Why are women given these assignments, and what qualifications do they have? No qualifications are listed; there are no photos of the writer included that allow us to gauge her fitness level, no biography citing her fitness expertise or history. And often the articles are absolute vacuous fluff offering little of substance, such as the one pictured above.

I have the same issue with male writers as well, as far as experience and qualifications, as rarely are these crucial details provided the reader so as to be able to quantify the writer’s suitability for advising per the subject matter he espouses.

As a male fitness professional who daily wears the proof of my knowledge on the subject, I put no store in uncredentialed females advising males on something they so clearly know little about. As a male I know precious little about estrogen and would feel like a fraud advising women on the subject. Are these publications assigning women these male-oriented articles because they pay females less than males, or perhaps nothing at all? Little other than that possibility makes any sense.

Chris Pratt: Destined To Be A Life-long FatBoy

https://pagesix.com/2019/08/12/ripped-rob-lowe-third-wheels-chris-pratt-and-katherine-schwarzenegger-for-beach-day/

Celebrity "Makeovers"—is there anything phonier?

 The list of names of celebs who have gotten into shape for a movie, who then immediately upon hearing “that’s a wrap!” revert right back to their original average schlubness is endless. Granted, there are a few who seem to maintain, more or less, such as Mark Wahlberg and Chris Hemsworth, but even those two vacillate between diamond sharp and puffy, as any Google image search will clearly reveal. Others, like Chris Pratt, will always be teetering at the edge of the cliff of flabbiness, ready to tumble over at any moment.

What’s maddening about this is that a Hollywood actor’s entire appeal and success is primarily based on their physical attractiveness. This is inarguable. Few ugly out-of-shape male or female actors ever become screen idols. And attaining the status of Screen Idol is every wannabe actor’s dream. Yet they bitch and moan about how hard it is to maintain. How unfair, what an ordeal it is to work out three days a week and not eat everything in sight —just so they can keep on earning tens of millions of dollars every year. 

We really feel their pain.

This might seem understandable on some level, as fame, fortune and celebrity status all facilitate celebrating: eating, drinking, drugging, having lots of sex, staying out to all hours, vacationing, relaxing. None of these however are entirely conducive to maintaining a rock hard body, dewey-fresh skin, or eyes free from dark circles.

And yet I, and many of you, who do not rake in $20 million for a few months' work, and do not have an army of employees to free us up from mundane day2day errands and chores, manage quite well to stay in great shape. Nothing in our lives requires this, yet we do it because we can, because we respect ourselves, because being and feeling strong and healthy are important for both our physical and emotional health.

So whenever I hear some entitled jerk, male or female, who by sheer luck has managed to rise to the heights of wealth and celebrity based 95% on their attractiveness, cry on some talk show about how unfair it is that they are under unbearable pressure to maintain their attractiveness, it makes me want to punch them in the face.

The Magnificent Linda Ronstadt

This post has nothing to do with bodybuilding, but I wanted to write about Linda Ronstadt this morning. Linda can no longer sing due to Parkinson’s disease, but I have at least a dozen of her CDs that I listen to often. I just read a disappointing interview with her in the New Yorker conducted by a younger person who didn’t quite have a handle on who Linda Ronstadt was.

In the early 1970s I was working as a photographer for the Canadian Press in Los Angeles, covering all the awards shows, doing interviews with celebrities, etc. I arranged an interview with Linda and was told to meet her at a tiny rehearsal studio in North Hollywood. She was rehearsing there with her band, which transformed to the Eagles a year or two later.

I sat on a stool right next to her. She sat on her stool in front of the microphone two feet from me and sang her entire set over a couple of hours with classic Eagles vocals backing her. I was in heaven. I loved Linda and her music, and the idea that I was an audience of one as Linda sang all her hits (including Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”) was one of the highlights of my life.

The lighting in the studio was terrible and my strobe was broken, and I only got off four or five shots between songs, including the one you see here. When there was a lull I had the balls to ask her if she might sing one of my favorites of her early songs, “The Dolphins,” and amazingly she obliged me.

We lived on the same street, Beachwood Canyon, but I had never run into her in the neighborhood. After I said goodbye I waited across the street for a friend to come pick me up. My car was in the shop. It was past midnight. Linda drove by in her green Datsun 240Z, stopped at a red light and waved. I was embarrassed I didn’t have a car and didn’t have the nerve to ask if I could have a ride home.

My ride never showed up.

Why Do You Keep Falling For The “Easy Fix” Scam?

Go to Men’s Health’s website and scroll…and scroll…and scroll. What you see there is empty promise after empty promise after empty promise of “the easy fix” or "secrets revealed"—both blatantly stated and implied.

Build Tree-Trunk Legs With This Two-Week Program
You're 14 days away from the quads (and hamstrings and calves) of the Gods.
BY DAVID OTEY, C.S.C.S.

Wow! Little did I know after years of heavy leg work that I've been wasting my time all along! Now I can just build tree trunk legs in only two weeks! Surely this Otey fella must be the savant of bodybuilding—look at all them-there official-looking initials after his name!

This Explosive Kettlebell Flow Torches Fat
Get ripped with this kettlebell combo.
BY SEAN HYSON, CSCS

My goodness! This guy implies I can simply "torch" away fat with this combo. The word "torch" implies super-fast, so it must be true that in no time at all this one specialized workout will burn off, I mean, "torch" all that stubborn fat that everybody else says is due to all the crap I eat!  

This Guy Tweaked His Diet to Lose His Gut and Get Ripped in His Forties
“People that I had known for years literally didn’t recognize me. "
BY STACEY LEASCA
AUG 23, 2019

"Tweaked his diet?" Stacey's so-called "tweak" turns out in reality to be a major extended diet overhaul that few others would ever consider, but that doesn't mean the girl's outright lying...right? I mean, so what if there's no mention in her headline of the additional arduous workout routine which demands 2 hours a day of cardio in addition to extreme strength training with heavy weights? Keep on keepin' it real, Stacey!

New York Times Doubles Down On Intentional Disinformation Re: Testosterone

Absolute bullshit from the FDA

It is beyond baffling that the New York Times, which many rely on, and even praise, for competency in journalism overall, can have so many writers with their heads up their asses when it comes to fitness, diet, obesity, and testosterone.

Over the years the Times’ “reporting,” as it is humorously labeled, on these very subjects has been highly prejudiced in favor of the ignorant, disproven and downright stupid. The penultimate example was a bizarre lengthy piece about all the whiny excuse-making contestants on the TV show The Biggest Loser, who following their successful participation and extreme weight loss, gained an entirely new, food-frenzy-fueled couple hundred pounds of morbid obesity once more—the apologist writers quick to claim—through no fault of their own whatsoever.

This latest waste of precious space (HERE) in the NYT is authored by an Adam Popescu, who knows nothing about that which he has been paid (I assume) to write. The article, focusing on testosterone supplements, rambles all over the place without making any cogent point whatsoever. And like all his likeminded predecessors on the subject of testosterone, Popescu manages to double down on the mistaken, disproven, debunked and prejudicial from which any simple Google search could have rescued him journalistic humiliation.

Popescu inserts the preposterous claim of "Some research, however, indicates that men using testosterone therapy have a higher risk of heart attack or stroke..."

"SOME RESEARCH"? My, that's quite definitive! Who can possibly argue with something so bulletproof as the completely non-specific citation of “some research”?

The writer links to an FDA website which, following an unhinged and hysterical headline (see the above illustration), only then, within the article, tepidly and unassuredly warns about some "possible" (as in, not proven whatsoever) TRT links to heart disease and stroke. Then within this FDA article the FDA links us to a 4 year old meeting in Italy (2014 Meeting Materials, Bone, Reproductive and Urologic Drugs Advisory Committee) which drew this "possible" conclusion. Keep in mind that it was a 2013 article published in JAMA that has since been derided, discredited, debunked and professionally condemned by hundreds of medical professionals worldwide that infected and fueled this knee-jerk 2014 Italy Meeting "advisory" that the FDA bought into lock, stock and barrel and irresponsibly spread without question, it being the most recent false door to anti-TRT claims.

Popescu, like all assholes of his ilk, cherry picked data to fit his deepest trepidations stemming from his self doubts and his own feared lack of masculinity. The FDA article he links to states, way down at the end (the FDA being assured most people wouldn’t read that far) the following: “Some studies reported an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, or death associated with testosterone treatment, while others did not.” —Yeah, Popescu edited that insignificant part out, the "while others did not" qualifier, since it was unsupportive of his deeply prejudiced screed.

Again, what a bunch of non-committal bullshit the fucking FDA pukes out on us. “...Others did not”? Notice that the FDA feels no need whatsoever in this article to expand upon those "other" studies, nor to include specific data within related to those stated "others." Rather, the FDA included only their so-called "data" supporting their prejudicial and completely disproven “risk” warning.

What a shit show all around.

The bottom line is that obesity, smoking, drinking alcohol, and doing recreational drugs pose a PROVEN EXTREME RISK for heart attack, stroke, or death, while TRT has PROVEN the exact opposite. The facts as shown in multiple studies have PROVEN this: Men with low T who are NOT being treated with TRT have TWICE the death rate overall as men with low T who ARE being treated with TRT.

In other words, TRT Saves Lives—so exactly what’s up with the medical community’s united and deadly anti-TRT campaign?

Vladimír Semerád‎ : Monday Inspiration

Vladimír Semerád‎ on Facebook

WORKOUT RULE No. 1: MUSCLE ISOLATION

The foundation of any workout routine is isolating the target muscle. When it comes to body transformation—sculpting and enlarging your physique, otherwise known as bodybuilding—we need to learn how to isolate the TARGET muscle.

The target muscle is that muscle which a particular exercise or machine is designed to work in isolation. You can’t efficiently isolate a target muscle if you are bound and determined to lift heavy at any cost. 

As an example, watching people on a chest press machine, or on a bench press bench using free weights, it is clear that MOST people are misusing their shoulder muscles to do a significant portion of the work. Chest exercises are not called “shoulder exercises” for the obvious reason that chest exercises are designed to work, build and sculpt your chest. 

To figure out how to go about learning to isolate the pecs in this case you'll find it easier to remove the emphasis you are currently placing on your shoulders—most likely you’re doing so out of fear of dropping the too-heavy weight you’ve taken on—and transfer 100% effort to your pectorals. Re-learning movements to make them more rewarding means backing off on the poundages so you can concentrate on the actual mechanics of the movement.

The problem so many people in the gym have is that they are ego-lifters; their goal is “how much weight can I lift so as to impress others?” —which might be all right if you are a powerlifter. However to sculpt, build and shape your individual muscles (calfs, biceps, quads, etc.), it’s not about how much weight you can move. But rather it’s about performing the exercise by utilizing the target muscle in ISOLATION, while employing the heaviest weight that still allows you to use PROPER STRICT FORM. When we lose proper form we end up just spinning our wheels.

Even after 50 years in the gym, if my mind wanders as I perform a set, there goes my form. It takes as much mental energy as it does physical energy to properly complete a productive set, to achieve the results that you originally set out to achieve.

Weekend Inspiration: Melis Pier Paolo

 Italian Bodybuilder Melis Pier Paolo

Sometimes We Need A Kick In The Ass To Get Us To The Gym:

Relatively few people wish to engage in any physical fitness regimen. To them, physical exertion is not appealing.

Everyone has the right to do, or not do, what makes them happy, but no one has the right to demand that others accommodate the fallout from their poor decisions.

 Additionally, investing time and dedication in writing and rehearsing a script—as so many do—from which to testify one’s decision to not engage in exercise or eat healthfully is poor choice of one’s time and resources.

There are hundreds of Youtube videos showing people having wheelchairs strapped to their bodies performing pullups, people missing arms or legs—or both—working out in gyms, people grievously wounded in battle participating in organized sports. Some problems with injury or illness as described here, minor in comparison, may not preclude the writers' swimming, doing pullups, chinups, crunches, pushups or a whole host of muscle strengthening, body transforming, self-empowering physical activity.

One revealing response from people in my experience is the scoffing “What are you trying to do, live forever?” as if they perceive no value in extending one’s healthy years, mobility, strength, energy, stamina and sex life.

Indeed the physical manifestations of destructive choices we observe in our older friends and relatives— smoking, drinking, pain pill popping, obesity, their disinterest in rehabilitating fixable injuries—provide an example to the rest of us that our chosen path of pursuing physical fitness is the wiser one.

HORMONALPHOBIA: Doctors Go To War Against TRT

The bare-faced LIES that doctors tell against hormone replacement therapy regarding both genders, but especially TRT for men, are egregious.

The facts as shown in multiple studies have PROVEN this: Men with low T who are NOT being treated with TRT have TWICE the death rate overall as men with low T who ARE being treated with TRT.

In other words, TRT Saves Lives.

Dr. Abraham Morgantaler, Head of Urology at Harvard Medical School, lectures his fellow physicians on the error of their ways at a conference in Madrid: