31 out of 31 people found this review helpful.
Men...minus the workouts.
Date of Review: Jul 2, 2000
Go to your local book store or grocery store and check out the magazine section. You will probably find several magazines devoted to fitness, particularly working out. These magazines, such as Muscle and Fitness, Muscle Media, Muscle Mag and Men's Health are all very informative magazines. In the same area, you may also see Men's Workout. Do not be deceived. This is not your typical exercise magazine, and it is probably pretty well-known in your gym. Men's Workout seems to be a semi-pornographic magazine disguised as a fitness magazine, containing mainly pictures. The few workouts within are dedicated to areas that Richard Simmons would work out (inner-thighs, butt muscle) and not to areas that most bodybuilders tend to work on.
Intended Audience
In no way am I trying to be stereotypical or whatever else you may decide to accuse me of, but Men's Workout is openly geared to homosexual men. While the pictures of men wearing almost nothing making "sexy" faces in a magazine geared toward men is a slight tip-off to this audience, there is greater proof. Check out the advertisements. The magazine is full of 900 homosexual sex lines or male to male dating services. So before you decide to NR me for being "intolerable" or whatever else, go and get the magazine. I assure you that the editors would probably quickly admit that their intended audience is homosexual men, and this is not a case of me just being stereotypical (I don't think any advertisement company would be stupid enough to pay for a homosexual dating service in a magazine that is not going to reach homosexual men...). I am rating this strictly on this category and its inteded purpose fitness and working out! Now, this is not really a negative thing if you are looking for a magazine geared for homosexual men, as I will admit that most of the men in the magazine are twice as fit as I will ever be. But as far as taking this to your local gym, I would not suggest it if you want to "show off" the new workout that you found because you may be the butt of several jokes (no pun intended).
Articles and Credentials
As far as the material on working out (looking past the pictures and advertisements), this magazine is pretty terrible. I skimmed through a couple of these once trying to find some abdominal workouts (which seems to be a big part of the magazine) and they were extremely basic. The magazine showed me nothing about working out. I also looked into their "mega leg workout" and found five or sex exercises to work the inner-thighs. Now, go to a gym and ask men where their trouble spots are and see how many say, "Gee, I really want to trim down my inner thighs." No other magazine touch directly on inner-thighs because squats and other major leg exercises will work on the entire leg, and any devoted body builder knows that holding a bar between their legs and doing some kind of strange exercise would be the last thing they want to do.
I do not know who writes these articles, but the material is stuff that even most beginners would already know. I have not looked into many issues, but both had some of the most basic exercises that I have seen. Some of the stuff was even totally wrong (like the importance of working triceps before chest--never heard this before). And there were very few of these articles actually in the magazine. Most of it was pictures of men lifting weights or sitting on motorcycles. There was even some kind of "confession" article like you would see in a Playboy. In other words, the articles are really not geared toward men's workouts at all. If you are getting a magazine to help you with working out, then Men's Workout probably contains 10 pages dedicated to that subject, and I am not too sure how useful those pages would truly be.
Once again, if you are looking for a magazine to help with working out, this just is not the one to choose. It is just not going to be informative in that category. I assume that you can, every now and then, find something that is somewhat helpful to your workout needs, but it would be much easier to simply buy a true workout magazine (like Natural Bodybuilder or Muscle Media) and if you really want to look at people with truly artistic bodies, I would suggest Muscle Mag or Muscle and Fitness. But I don't expect Men's Workout to be among your health club's recommened reading session, not because of its audience (it evidentally sells) but because of its lack of any truly informative information. Despite the deceiving title, you could literally learn a lot more about working out by simply searching under fitness on Yahoo! than you could with this magazine. So if you are truly searching for a really good magazine about working out, stay clear of this one because you will not find it.
(Just a note: I know that some people on Epinions take political correctness to extremes. So if you are one of those that wants to NR me because I say this magazine, which is geared for homosexual men, is a magazine geared toward homosexual men, then think about how you would write a rating on a book about homosexuality without using references to homosexuals. It's not possible or would make a really horrible review (I mean, what could you possibly say about a book on homosexuality while avoiding the issue?) It's sad that I have to put this, but I have seen so many people get bad ratings simply because they were honest about something and someone else took it to be racist or bigoted or whatever other word people use.)
