It's extremely slow at work so I picked up a Men's Health mag from an empty desk near me. Here is a question from their 'Ask Men's Health' section. See if you can spot what wouldnt be asked on this site.

How can I continue to build strength without bulking up?

I'm sure if you look hard enough you'll find that question asked on here somewhere. The difference is that Men's Health won't verbally dismantle the person posing the question in an often hilarious fashion.

In other words, their readers are people who want to look like this?

The question makes sense for athletes in weight divisions or sports which require agility and stamina as well as strenght.

MH is almost completely useless. They've vastly improved their nutrition advice, though.

I hate to admit, but when I started with this Physical Culture thing Mens Health is the first thing I started reading. It's not the worst thing to read if your a complete novice. It took me a while before I had the courage to pick up Flex!

I think Men's Health is fine for beginners. I used to read it, until I learned some things from other people and myself.

The only thing that bothered me about it, and still does, is that it's all about weight loss or maintenance, and that's not at all what I'm going for. I would like to weigh about at the 200 range, and articles about carb cutting or whatever aren't going to help me.

Who would have thought-

People have different goals! Not everyone wants to be Mr. Olympia.

I prefer Men's Health to Flex, easily.

Sure, there is a lot of stuff aimed at beginners, but *in general* the nutrition and training pieces are way better than most other muscle magazines. Lots of good contributors, many of whom write for T-Nation as well. I remember MH ran a piece a LONG time ago talking about the virtues of pull-ups and chin-ups over lat pulldowns...before they were in vogue. They also were among the first to recommend dusting off your old "ab wheel" and using them for jack-knives. Yeah, they've run some absolute POS articles as well, but who hasn't?

Now, reading through an issue of Flex typically goes like this:

1.) Turn through 16 pages of ads to find the index.
2.) A couple of thinly-veiled "ed-vertisements" before the first piece, usually several pages of a jacked guy in cutoff jean shorts and work boots showing off his striated hamstrings and/or buttocks (I don't care how big you are, cutoff jean shorts are for reserved for sexy Southern chicks and girls washing cars only!)
3.) Another 23 pages of ads, most of which are littered with extreme sounding-superlatives like "most bodacious" and "explodingest".
4.) A training article, typically containing such groundbreaking muscle-building tips as "Go for sets of 8-12, make the last two reps really count", "Feel the pump...you've gotta feel the pump!" and "To really burn up your bracialis, try drop-sets!".
5.) More ads. "For the most bodacious, explodingest grape-enosity imaginable, try our ready-to-drink grape whey protein isolate!". No, thank you, I don't think I'm intense enough to handle that magnitude of grape-enosity.
6.) A nutrition piece. Again, real hard-hitting topics like "Egg Yolks: Friend or Foe?" or "Gram of Protein per Pound of Bodyweight...Enough?". There is always a requisite picture of a bodybuilder in his kitchen, spooning a powder into his blender and giving the camera a goofy grin. He is inevitably wearing a tank-top which coincidentally advertises said powder.
7.) Did someone ask for more ads? No? Well too bad, here are another 28 pages! "When Jean-Pierre Fux wants to REALLY put on mass, he looks no further than Chrysin!". Oh, forgive me, I thought it was a whole medicine cabinet of exotic testosterone esters from countries which no longer exist, stacked with growth hormones extracted from a Dodo bird's pituitary. It was CHRYSIN! Should have known all along.
8.) You reach the back cover. An audible sigh is emitted, along with the word "fuck". You think of a whole laundry list of things that 6 dollars could have been better spent on, including Cadbury Easter Eggs, a rhubarb-scented freshener for your car, or a set of collector's coins commerating "Wild Songbirds of New England".

I have a subscription, not so much for the workout stuff but for everything else it offers. Mostly this is random advice targeted towards males (interview tips, recipes, style stuff, whatever). Its a pretty good bathroom mag and looks good next to the esquire and gq.

BTW CornSprint you play sprint football? I played sprint football at an upstate private university for a while (until I realized I wasn't good)... good to see another one on this site. Lift with me at noyes next semester??

Lol. that and worse gets asked here daily.

i like reading men's health from time to time because they have articles about things other than improving a muscle group and who placed what in whatever recent shows there was.

it's more of an on-the-toilet read for me.

Jimmy the Bartender says some funny shit.