MALE PATTERN FITNESS: Media Archives

April 03, 2007

Bald Man Fuming

I've thoroughly enjoyed my two months as a member of the AARP. The magazine, formerly known as Modern Maturity, is a first-rate product.

But I have a serious problem with a workout feature in the latest issue.

If you click on the link, you'll see a middle-aged guy who appears to be robust and in perfectly good health. And he's doing bench presses with eight-pound dumbbells.

A grown man. Eight-pound dumbbells.

Let's assume the man weighs 200 pounds, and he can do at least one push-up. A push-up forces you to move about 60 percent of your body's weight, which in his case would be 120 pounds. So the photo in the magazine shows a man capable of pushing at least 120 pounds off his chest doing an exercise with 16 pounds.

Here's the article's advice on how to select the weights to use:

Beginners should start with one set -- 8 to 12 repetitions -- of each exercise, using 5- to 8-pound weights (you can find them for $20 or less at any sporting-goods store). More advanced exercisers should shoot for two sets of each exercise, using 10- to 12-pound weights.

So I'm the magazine's reader, and I'd consider myself a "more advanced exerciser." That means I'm supposed to use 12-pound weights for bench presses, as well as the other exercises in the workout -- squats, one-arm rows, biceps curls, lateral raises, and triceps extensions. (The triceps extensions show the model using a single dumbbell, held in both hands.) I could see how those weights might start to feel heavy on lateral raises, especially since it's an exercise I rarely do. But bench presses? Squats? What possible benefit would I get from that?

According to the article, I'd get all these:

Strength training has been shown to decrease insulin resistance, decrease resting blood pressure, reduce arthritis pain, even improve memory. Some experts believe it's as essential as aerobic training: "As good as walking is for a variety of things, it does not address the loss of muscle that accompanies the aging process," says Wayne L. Westcott, Ph.D., fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Massachusetts, and coauthor of Strength Training Past 50 (Human Kinetics, 2007). That loss of muscle -- about seven pounds per decade for men and five pounds per decade for women -- causes a slowdown in resting metabolism that then translates into a host of health problems.

Yes, but where's the research showing that grown men working out with Barbie weights get any of those benefits?

It's hard enough to convince women to use weights that will increase their strength and muscle mass, which of course are the only ways they can get the promised benefits of strength training. You don't increase your metabolism unless you challenge your body. But now here's a magazine that goes out to millions of people telling men to work out with weights that wouldn't challenge my six-year-old daughter.

Grrrrr ...

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:42 AM | Comments (2)

March 28, 2007

Married to the Media: A Bad Deal All Around

Rannoch Donald sends along this study from my alma mater:

A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.

"Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone," said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory." ...

The study suggests that the majority of women would benefit from interventions aimed at decreasing the effects of the media, regardless of weight.

So how do you "intervene" when it comes to the media? Lock the women up in a dungeon with no access to the Internet or cable TV?

I was also curious about how "all women" are defined (the study's abstract isn't any help). Were the 81 women in the study college students, or all ages? Mostly single, mostly married, or somewhere in between? Exclusively hetero? All we know is that they were "European-American" -- white chicks.

If they were predominately single and hetero, there is some good news:

According to a New Zealand study on women and aging, single women have more orgasms than those with partners, leading researchers to conclude that removing men from the equation allows women to "better connect with themselves." ...

It found that 56 percent of sexually active women could reach orgasm every time they masturbated, while only 24 percent of the women with partners could bring themselves to orgasm.

Looks like all us married guys owe our wives an apology, assuming that 100 percent of us can reach orgasm 100 percent of the time during masturbation, and that that doesn't change with marriage.

Finally, in the interests of gender equality, I should mention this study, which got some attention when it came out two years ago:

[M]en's self-rated body satisfaction decreased after viewing images of muscular men but did not change after viewing images of average men. Thus, it appears that men's body satisfaction may be influenced by exposure to brief images of muscular models. These results are congruent with results of previous investigations of the effects of viewing images of thin models on womens body satisfaction.

So we're all screwed, which is only fair.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2007

Thursday Blog Meat: Satan, P&G Had no Operational Relationship; U.S. Defends Decision to Invade Anyway

As Rannoch Donald said when he sent this link, "unfuckingbelievable":

The Devil is not in league with global consumer brand Procter & Gamble, a U.S. court has ruled. P&G won a $19 million lawsuit against four distributors of rival Amway over rumors tying it to Satanism.

The court concluded a 12-year lawsuit in P&G's favour, after it ruled that the four had spread a false accusation that P&G subsidised Satanic cults. The case is one of several unfair competition suits P&G has brought refuting the Satanism slurs.

According to P&G, the four distributors had passed on to customers the notion that its logo -- featuring a bearded man looking over a field of 13 stars -- was a symbol of Satan.

According to Snopes.com, the bearded-guy logo was trademarked in 1851, and the 13 stars represented the country's original 13 colonies. I found that in five seconds. So why did it take a court 12 years to sort it out?

How much wood would a right-handed pitcher chop ...

This story about ballplayers' unusual off-season training programs is a fun read.

I got that link from Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus, who in the same entry linked to this, a loving compendium of HBWs: hot baseball wives.

If you can't do the time, you'd better hope you're attractive enough to sway the jury against sentencing you to do time

This isn't much of a surprise:

Juries trying criminal cases are likely to be more lenient when the person in the dock is physically attractive, psychologists say.
Scientists gave a fictitious transcript of a mugging to 96 volunteers, along with a photograph of the defendant.

The York and Bath Spa universities team found the jurors were less likely to find attractive defendants guilty. ... Unattractive black defendants were given the harshest sentences, irrespective of the ethnicity of the "juror."

So if you're an unattractive black guy, try to stay out of trouble. Or play in the NBA.

Global warming? Yeah, that sounds scary. But what about Al Gore's waistline?

I understand that people want to speculate on whether or not Al Gore's going to run for the presidency. And I understand that someone connected to Hillary Clinton said they'd start worrying about him if it looked like he was losing weight. And I fully understand that right-wing hacks like Glenn Beck are going to take their shots at the guy no matter what he does.

What amazes me, though, is how many fat guys -- including the megachinned Beck -- are yukking it up over Gore's waistline. Even on the relatively liberal MSNBC, Chris Matthews and David Shuster took their shots.

Shuster looks to me as if he's gained 10 pounds in his face alone since I've been watching Hardball. Check out his bio picture, then look at this recent clip. Even on the tiny screen, you can see his surplus chin flesh bobbing along like a milk jug on the ocean.

So why are all these guys spending so much time talking about Al Gore's weight? Especially when Gore isn't even pretending to be running for office, and in fact lays out such stringent anti-global-warming measures that he couldn't possibly by elected?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:30 AM | Comments (1)

March 06, 2007

Quick Question

We now know that obesity in childhood can trigger early puberty in girls:

Lee noted that girls in the United States are entering puberty at younger ages than they were 30 years ago. Over that same time, there's been a significant increase in obesity rates among American children.

"Previous studies had found that girls who have earlier puberty tend to have higher body mass index (BMI), but it was unclear whether puberty led to the weight gain or weight gain led to the earlier onset of puberty. Our study offers evidence that it is the latter," said Lee, who is also assistant professor in the department of pediatrics and communicable diseases at the U-M Medical School.

We also know that Shaquille O'Neal is trying to help kids with health and weight-control issues:

Shaquille O'Neal will be taking a shot at a TV reality show focused on childhood obesity and health. The ABC summer series will feature the Miami Heat star and his effort to help Florida schoolchildren lose weight, ABC said Monday. ...

The series, being filmed in Broward County, Fla., will track the lives of the children involved. O'Neal will be on hand as booster and, in episodes yet to be shot, will lobby politicians on causes including school nutrition, Daily Variety reported Monday.

The show is an adaptation of the British series Ian Wright's Unfit Kids, which featured the former soccer star.

O'Neal, a father of six, has been outspoken about the issue of children and weight problems.

So this mean we'll someday realize that Shaquille O'Neal prevents early puberty?

That would be a hell of a line to have on your resume:

"... and from 2007 to 2012 I prevented 46.7 million children from reaching early puberty."

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:44 AM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2007

The Wicked, Wicked World of Fitness Magazines

I want you to hold two thoughts in your head before I get into the main idea here:

First, a new study in Pediatrics shows that steroid use among adolescents did not increase between 1999 and 2004, despite growing media coverage of steroids in general, and in particular steroids in sports.

There's also this line from the study's conclusion:

Steroid use decreased as adolescents grew older.

The same group of researchers, two months earlier, published a study in the same journal showing that exposure to information about dieting in magazines increases a variety of behaviors, good and bad, among teenage girls:

For female adolescents, the frequency of healthy, unhealthy, and extreme weight-control behaviors increased with increasing magazine reading ... . The odds of engaging in unhealthy weight-control behaviors (such as fasting, skipping meals, and smoking more cigarettes) were twice as high for the most frequent readers compared with those who did not read magazine articles about dieting and weight loss. The odds of using extreme weight-control behaviors (such as vomiting or using laxatives) were 3 times higher in the highest frequency readers compared with those who did not read such magazines.

But there's also this:

There were no significant associations for either weight-control behaviors or psychological outcomes for male adolescents.

Like I said, I need you to hold these two thoughts when I get into my main news item this morning:

1. Information about dieting and weight loss in magazines does not affect boys in any negative ways, just as boys didn't increase anabolic-drug use despite much more exposure to news coverage of steroids.

2. However, exposure to information about dieting and weight loss in magazines does seem to have profound effects on young women, many of them negative.

Indecent exposure

An organization called the American Council on Science and Health has been reviewing magazine coverage of nutrition and dieting for two decades and counting. Its new study, "Nutrition Accuracy in Popular Magazines: January 2004 -- December 2005," came out this week. (Full PDF here.)

The results aren't encouraging for the ink-stained wretches who write about nutrition in popular magazines:

The quality of reporting on nutrition in popular magazines did not improve between 2000–2002 and 2004–2005 and may even have deteriorated over that time period.

Ouch!

My first instinct was to see if they said anything nasty about me personally, since I was still writing for magazines during that two-year period. Men's Health's score went up, from 71 to 76, probably because I left the magazine during the time of this survey. Men's Journal wasn't included in the study, so the articles I wrote for them are either above reproach or beneath contempt. (I'll sleep all right either way.)

Men's Health was ranked 18th of 21 magazines for accuracy, 20th for presentation, 17th for recommendations, and 18th overall. Men's Fitness ranked a dead-last 21st in every category. I'd feel bad, but I don't think I wrote any nutrition articles for MF in that period.

The study said this about MH:

A clever, attention-grabbing writing style seemed to triumph over accuracy and documentation of sources in this magazine.

And about MF:

Many articles had inaccurate, exaggerated, and/or undocumented statements about various aspects of nutrition.

Undocumented! Sounds almost political. Let's get into a few specifics of the problems the study had with these mags:

Some Men’s Health articles also contained factual
errors. The July/August 2004 article “The Abs Diet” stated, incorrectly, that whole-grain breads prevent the body from storing fat and that Egg Beaters are nutritionally equivalent to whole
eggs. The November 2004 article “Right On, Red” said that creatine is an enzyme. It isn’t. And the previously mentioned article “Build the
Perfect Feast” indicated that fructose and high-fructose corn syrup are the same thing. They are not. All of these errors would almost certainly have been caught before publication if the articles
had been reviewed by a registered dietitian.

As an aside, I should note here that some of the stupidest things I've ever heard about nutrition came out of the mouths of registered dietitians. How long did it take them to figure out that starches, which fall into their beloved category of "complex carbohydrates," were actually making people fat?

Here are some of the specific problems the study has with MF:

Other articles in Men’s Fitness ... led us to
wonder whether this magazine is in the business of publishing fiction. The most notable example was the March 2005 article “The Best and Worst Foods a Man Can Eat,” which managed to make inaccurate, exaggerated, or undocumented statements about most of the 54 foods it evaluated. The lack of documentation was a real disappointment; we would have loved to read the studies that allegedly show that “guys who eat bran cereal frequently are happier, more alert, and have greater energy levels than guys who don’t” or those that demonstrate that “alcohol plus a steak dinner works like lighter fluid on your metabolism.”

Conversely, the highest-rated magazines overall included Shape (#2 overall), Glamour (#4), Fitness (#7), and Self (#11). The only women's magazine down in the gutter with the men's mags is Cosmo (#19, just one notch above Muscle & Fitness).

So now comes the big question:

If the men's magazines are so deficient, how come their readers exhibit no unhealthy behaviors based on the advice they get from those magazines? No eating disorders, no increase in steroid use.

But the teenage girls getting all that accurate advice from Shape and Glamour have problems that range from fasting and skipping meals to vomiting and using laxatives for weight loss. The more they read those magazines, the more problems they have.

So perhaps it's time to address that 800-pound magazine publisher in the room: What the magazines say doesn't really matter. What matters is what the magazines show. Young readers of men's magazines are, we can assume, inspired to get lean and muscular without developing extreme behaviors to reach those goals. But young readers of women's magazines, despite getting information that passes muster with these self-appointed watchdogs in the dietetics community, develop extreme, health-threatening behaviors in apparently linear proportion to how often they read those magazines.

So is the problem with the information? Or do the images they show cancel everything else out?

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:03 AM | Comments (1)

February 28, 2007

The Juice is Goosed

I'm on deadline and had no plans to blog today, but the headlines are just too good.

You probably know about the big steroid/growth hormone bust in Florida.

Two specific names have been linked to the raid: Gary Matthews Jr., who had a career year for Texas in 2006 and signed a $50 million contract with the Angels this offseason; and a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But what really caught my eye is the new paperback version of Game of Shadows, the book that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds hadn't just used steroids, he'd used them in massive doses.

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci offers some of the fresh dirt in the new version:

My favorite fact: the authors detail in their afterword the freakish growth of Bonds' body parts in his years with the Giants: from size 42 to a size 52 jersey; from size 10 1/2 to size 13 cleats; and from a size 7 1/8 to size 7 1/4 cap, even though he had taken to shaving his head.

"The changes in his foot and head size," they write, "were of special interest: medical experts said overuse of human growth hormone could cause an adult's extremities to begin growing, aping the symptoms of the glandular disorder acromegaly."

I'm a sucker for a good acromegaly reference. Photos here.

Wonderful you

In related news, a new study says that college students are more vain than in previous generations:

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

This is my favorite part:

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before, said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

Now, I don't mind if a researcher publishes a major study with the goal of validating a conclusion she's already reached in a book she's already published. But I wonder if she's pointing her accusing finger in the right directions.

For example, she blames the "self-esteem movement" of the 1980s as being responsible for this epidemic of narcissism, along with more permissive parenting. So, clearly, it's the fault of the hippies and parents, especially, I assume, hippies who then became parents.

But couldn't someone argue that powerful forces in society are more responsible than a bunch of pacifist utopians whom none of us paid much attention to in the first place?

For example, could the fact that good-looking people make more money play into an increase in self-consciousness about one's looks?

Could the fact that even relatively prosperous people feel increasing anxiety about their economic security have an effect on their kids, making them focus more on wealth and fame than on goals that might contribute something useful to society?

No, no, talking about that stuff would cause too many of us to question our assumptions about the direction our country has taken in the past quarter-century. It makes us wonder if perhaps we've placed too much emphasis on wealth and status and not enough on what used to be called the common good. It makes us reassess our worship of presidents like Reagan and Clinton, who were celebrated for unleashing the forces of prosperity, and makes us wonder why in the world our celebrity journalists poked such vicious fun at Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, the only two political leaders in a generation who stood for anything besides unmitigated greed and personal power.

No, we can't think along those lines. We can't stop and wonder who decided it was so important to focus on Al Gore's wardrobe and waistline in the 2000 election campaign, rather than on what he might actually do for the country as its chief executive. Or on what his opponent might not do (pay attention to warnings about imminent terrorist attacks, for example).

It's a lot easier to just blame the hippies. They're too busy tending to their patchouli to even notice.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2007

The Lawyer Did It

What a month it's been for journalists.

We've had a procession of superstar reporters (including five Pulitzer Prize winners) take the stand in the Scooter Libby trial. If we've learned anything, it's that the news-gathering business is often the opposite of its sharp-elbowed image. Rather than kicking ass and taking names, reporters revealed that, much of the time, what they're really doing is kissing ass and concealing names.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, two guys who upheld the finest traditions of investigative reporting -- and I say that without sarcasm or irony -- can finally sleep a little easier tonight, knowing they won't be going to jail.

Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle exposed the steroid use of a number of prominent athletes, including Barry Bonds, in articles and in the book Game of Shadows. But, because their reporting was based in large part on grand-jury testimony, they faced jail time if they didn't give up their source for the transcripts.

Yesterday their source finally let them off the hook:

A lawyer admitted in court documents Wednesday that he provided a Chronicle reporter with transcripts of confidential grand jury testimony by Barry Bonds and other athletes about steroid use, and federal authorities said they would drop their effort to send the reporter and a colleague to prison for 18 months for refusing to disclose their source.

The lawyer, Troy Ellerman, 44, who once represented the founder and another executive of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, agreed in court documents to plead guilty to four charges of disclosing the transcripts in violation of a judge's order. The plea agreement calls for a sentence of up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

No surprise that it was a lawyer who did it, and if I'd been following the case more closely I probably could've guessed that it was this particular lawyer. Still, it's easy to see why the guy let the reporters sweat for so long -- two years in jail and a quarter-million-dollar fine is a stiff price to pay for breaking a law that ultimately provided a public service.

And, while it's good news that the reporters now know they aren't going to be bunking with real criminals anytime soon, there's still a chilling message being sent by this case:

While the reporters deserve applause for not revealing their source, "someone who may be thinking about leaking information to the press may think twice if he knows he's going to go to jail,'' said Mark Feldstein, a journalism historian and associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. That could keep important information from coming to light, he said.

There is actually one journalist who remains behind bars for not revealing sources:

In San Francisco, blogger Josh Wolf has spent nearly six months in prison -- the longest incarceration of a journalist in U.S. history -- for refusing to surrender a videotape of a July 2005 anarchist protest to federal authorities.

There may have been a breakthrough this week in Wolf's case, with the government suddenly interested in reaching some kind of solution. But the entire case is beyond strange:

Wolf has been in prison nearly six months for refusing a federal grand jury subpoena to turn over raw video he shot of an anarchist protest against corporate globalization held in San Francisco's Mission District in July 2005, though government lawyers had already obtained Wolf's edited video that he sold to a local independent television station that aired it on the day of the protest.

The journalist broke no laws. He videotaped a public protest. He sold parts of the video to a TV station.

Here's why the feds have been holding him:

The case was brought against Wolf in federal court on the claim that demonstrators at the protest attempted to burn a police car, a federal crime according to government lawyers because the San Francisco Police Department receives funds from Homeland Security. Wolf and his lawyers accused the government of manipulating the case to side-step California's shield law, which allows journalists to withhold unpublished material and confidential sources from prosecutors. There is no federal shield law to afford the same protection in federal court.

Wolf elaborates in this interview. The gist is that the feds are trying to determine if a crime was committed at the anti-globalization protest Wolf was covering. Here's how Wolf describes it:

At some point in time ... a lone squad car that was just patrolling the neighborhood proceeded to accelerate into the crowd. This is what set off the issues that have since become so explosive, because shortly after the car rammed into the crowd, [the two policemen in the car] took off and tackled two individuals.

I happened to be witnessing and filming one, who was being choked, and you could see it on my videotape. The other individual, the other cop that took off, I don't really know what happened, because I was following the one. The cop that I wasn't filming was apparently struck in the head during some sort of an altercation, and at some point, allegedly by the U.S. Attorney, someone threw some sort of a firework four days after the Fourth of July in the vicinity of the cop car, although when I walked past the cop car I certainly didn't see any flames protruding, and the damage report shows that there wasn't really any damage to the cop car beyond a broken tail light.

If you watch 24, the federal agents are doing "whatever it takes" to chase down bad guys who're on the verge of doing horrible things like detonating nuclear warheads in U.S. cities. The reality is that the feds are holding a blogger in jail for six months because of a broken tail light on a police car.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2007

Karma

When you meet someone new, one of the most important steps in the mating ritual is learning the new person's stories. With my wife and me, the exchange of stories was especially crucial, since we had so much in common. We were attending the same creative-writing program, we were both Midwesterners who had graduated from journalism schools in adjacent states, and we were both coming out of relationships that had taught us exactly what we didn't want from future partners.

The foundation stories are about family, of course. The next tier of stories is about past relationships. But because of our similar backgrounds, the work-related stories were some of the most important in establishing how we'd gotten to the place where we met.

She was impressed by fact that I was the bad guy in one of my own stories, about how I got fired from my part-time sportswriting job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

I was covering high school sports, and I just wasn't any good at it. I discovered the hard way that there's a world of difference between being someone who's a sports buff and former participant, and someone who can go into the locker room and interview coaches and athletes after a game and write a story that captures the action and emotion of the contest without making the losers of that contest look like ... well, losers.

It was a story that didn't make me look good in any way, except for the fact that I came out it understanding I was ill-suited for that type of reporting. She found my lack of victimhood refreshing.

Some of her work stories -- by no means the most important, just ones she threw out there -- were about her career as a reporter at the Los Angeles Daily News, which struck me as a comically dysfunctional place to work. A few of those stories included an editor named Doug Dowie, a pure nightmare of a boss. He was a former marine who just didn't get that reporters don't respond well to bullying and humiliation.

Here's why I bring all that up:

Kimberly got a phone call yesterday from a former colleague who told her that Dowie had been sentenced to 42 months behind bars because of his role in defrauding the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power out of a half-million dollars in bogus billing fees.

The details aren't particularly important, unless you live in L.A. and are sick of politicians and other con artists treating your city as an ATM. (And of course you get find the details by clicking on the link above or this one.)

The key piece of the backstory is that Dowie had become a public-relations executive and Big Swinging Dick in L.A. politics after he left the Daily News. That's how he was in a position to defraud the city.

This is the part that Kimberly pointed out to me, with some sense of payback:

Feess [the judge who sentenced him] singled out Dowie for relentlessly pushing subordinates ... until they committed crimes while he insulated himself by not looking at the bills they fraudulently inflated.

The judge said Dowie, a self-styled tough ex-Marine, used intimidation, ridicule and humiliation when he needed to satisfy corporate demands on the L.A. public-relations office.

"Mr. Dowie was going to use those techniques if that was what was needed to hit those numbers. He talks about battlefield honor ... but loyalty is a two-way street from commander to grunt, and from grunt to commander," said Feess, whose father was a Marine.

Feess said Dowie has failed to come to grips with his actions and has displayed a "degree of cynicism" that Feess has seldom encountered.

It's also worth noting that this story appeared in Dowie's former paper, and was written by one of his former employees.

Sometimes the worst people you encounter really do get their comeuppance.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2007

Exploiting My Own Children

This essay in Fit Pregnancy magazine is the last piece I wrote for a print magazine before taking my ongoing sabbatical.

The title, "Not So Great Expectations," refers to pre-fatherhood fears; the story is about one very pleasant surprise of fatherhood -- my older daughter's love of sports. (It would be kind of weird to write about an unpleasant surprise of parenthood in a magazine for expectant mothers.)

It also completes my trifecta of child exploitation -- I wrote about my son here, and about my younger daughter here.

I figure it was a pretty good way to bow out of freelance magazine writing. Now that I've completed the entire set, what's left for me to do?

Posted by LouSchuler at 05:24 PM | Comments (1)

January 05, 2007

Naked People Talking About Fitness

I confess that when I first started appearing on The Fitness Buff radio show, hosted by my friend Pete Williams, I had no idea that Pete and his co-host, Sabrina Vizzari, were actually naked while they did they show. (By the way, the link to Sabrina's web page, although perfectly tasteful, is NSFW.) I knew they were broadcasting from a nudist resort, but it never occurred to me that they were participants. I mean, we journalists are mostly observers, right? Especially when it comes to naked people.

The weekly show runs from 4 to 5 p.m. Eastern on Fridays; I'll be on this afternoon, starting about 4:20. You can listen in here. I'll the one wearing clothes.

BONUS PIMPING FOR MY FRIENDS' BOOKS:

By the way, Pete is one of a long list of friends who have new books out this winter. Core Performance Endurance, by Mark Verstegen and Pete, is the third book in that series, which was launched when I was at Rodale.

Also, Jeff O'Connell is co-author of LL Cool J's Platinum Workout. Jeff and I go all the way back to Weider, where he started as a writer at Flex when I was still a copy editor at Men's Fitness. He moved up through the ranks at Weider to become editor in chief at Muscle & Fitness before taking his current gig as executive writer at Men's Health.

And as long as I'm in full shout-out mode, I have to mention Muscle Revolution, Chad Waterbury's extraordinary strength-training guide. If nobody gave it to you for Christmas, buy it for yourself as a New Year's incentive to get more out of your workouts this year. You can purchase it here (scroll down).

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:21 AM | Comments (1)

December 28, 2006

Book of the Year

Traditionally, when all the critics and bloggers are putting together their end-of-year best-whatever lists, I try to weigh in. I don't believe for second that anyone cares what I think the best books or movies might be. I just like to get into the conversation.

This year is a bit different, in that most of the movies on the top-10 lists aren't yet on DVD, and I haven't read most of the books getting accolades. I wanted to read quite a few of them, but ended up devoting my reading time to older books, or books that didn't make the critics' lists. I'll confess one reason why I avoided new ones: I realized I was reading too much about politics, and the disconnect between the facts I was learning and the way politics is covered was starting to drive me around the bend. I think this is the first time in our history we have a presidency that formulates policy based on what it wishes to be true, rather than on objective reality, and obsessing on something I couldn't change wasn't good for my mental health.

So I took a sabbatical from reading about public policy, which means I avoided The Looming Tower, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Fiasco, Hubris, State of Denial, and many others. I did read The One Percent Doctrine, which is a stunning expose of the administration's fecklessness in fighting and politicizing its various wars. And, because no one was talking about the book's revelations -- particularly the passages that showed the president knew al Qaeda had decided not to launch another attack against the U.S., and that Osama bin Laden clearly wanted Bush to be re-elected in 2004 -- I realized that knowing more of this type of information would just make me more depressed and paranoid.

And nobody needs that.

Instead, I read Brothers of Iron, the dual autobiography of Joe and Ben Weider.

If you have any interest at all in the history of bodybuilding -- which, in my view, is a lot more entertaining than the sport itself -- this is a book you should read. Then there's Joe Weider's rags-to-riches personal story, which is more moving than I'd ever imagined. Finally, there's Ben Weider's accounts of his half-century of work to make bodybuilding a legitimate sport recognized by the International Olympic Committee. On the face of it, this is as quixotic a mission as any of us could imagine. The purpose of human muscle tissue is to facilitate strength and power and speed and endurance, but the purpose of bodybuilding is to celebrate the display of that muscle tissue with no regard to its functional abilities.

That's wacky, and yet Ben Weider has devoted his entire adult life to it.

So you'd think the passages in the book in which Ben describes his travels and meetings and impassioned advocacy for bodybuilding would read like the rantings of a lunatic -- kind of like my blog, in other words. But instead you get real insight into the art of diplomacy. And I don't mean that in any sarcastic or ironic way. Ben describes tense meetings with communists and bureaucrats in the service of brutal dictators, and shows that there's always a way to present your case without making it personal or confrontational. Brothers of Iron is not by any stretch a political book, but Ben Weider is a hell of a politician.

The brothers' narration is arranged in alternating chapters, so you get a couple chapters of Joe talking about his life and his entry into the iron game, followed by a chapter of Ben talking about his quest, followed by more of Joe, and so on. The brothers' coauthor, Mike Steere, makes this work, and that's no small compliment. I was genuinely impressed by how well the stories flow. If Joe Weider had allowed this kind of editorial hand in his magazines, we'd regard him in an entirely different way today.

So let's talk about Joe's magazines.

When I started working full-time at Weider, in 1992, a few of the editors had a running joke: "Energy, Sexy, Hard." That was an actual cover line on an issue of Muscle & Fitness, which ran in '91 or '92. The line makes no sense at all -- one noun, two adjectives, no connection. Whenever one of us was stymied by an assignment or flabbergasted by a decision that had been made above our pay grade, someone would say, "Energy, sexy, hard." It was our acknowledgment that we were working in a nuthouse, and that the best strategy, most of the time, was to go with the flow. In the heart of the Weider empire, making sense wasn't required for advancement.

That's why Joe's flagship magazine was called Muscle Builder/Power for many years, before he changed it to Muscle: A New Body Image for You in 1979, and finally to Muscle & Fitness. I'm hardly an expert on the history of magazine publishing, but if there's ever been a magazine with a worse title than Muscle Builder/Power, I'd like to know about it. (Muscle: A New Body Image for You would be a contender, if it weren't just a transitional title.)

Joe Weider is his own creation, and as he says in Brothers of Iron, he became his own product, his own brand. There's an interesting passage where he tells the young and very ambitious Arnold Schwarzenegger not to waste his money buying a business to run. Arnold should be in the Arnold business, promoting himself as a unique and fungible commodity. If the passage is true, and Arnold really was considering investing his bodybuilding earnings in something that would've distracted him from his true path, then you have to think Joe gave him the best advice he'd ever received.

But it's impossible to say what in this book is true and what is Joe promoting himself. Most of the stories in the book ring true, but whenever Joe shifts from anecdote to analysis, you start getting that uncomfortable feeling that you're stuck in a room with someone truly delusional and can't find a way out.

Joe is convinced he's an absolute genius in the publishing industry, and the most important person in the history of the modern fitness movement. Ben seems convinced of this as well, so you never know when something you're reading is fact or fantasy.

I don't doubt that Joe was a very strong guy, physically, but it gets a little creepy to read in chapter after chapter how strong and muscular and handsome he was. I told some stories about Joe in this article in T-nation, and while they probably come off as mean-spirited, they really only scratch the surface. I don't believe the man has the capacity for humility or any sort of perspective about himself. If there's a camera in the room, it should be taking his picture. If there's a story to be written about fitness or bodybuilding, it should be about him.

I don't say that to deny the man his place in history; he deserves to be celebrated as a guy who believed in himself and believed in the importance of exercise as a ticket to lifelong health and vitality. It's fine that he promotes himself as an example of practicing what he preached.

But, as I said, it sometimes gets a little creepy.

The lack of perspective about himself may have been the trait that allowed him to start off as an impoverished, uneducated kid in Montreal and end up as a mentor and close friend of the governor of California. But it makes me wonder what he could've achieved if he hadn't been so hell-bent on self-promotion. Would someone have been brave enough to him that "Energy, Sexy, Hard" was a really stupid cover line? Or that he should stop boasting about himself long enough for someone else to sing his praises?

Joe's absolute refusal to be objectively assessed or second-guessed shows up in some unintentionally funny passages in Brothers of Iron. In various chapters, he compares himself to Einstein (for codifying bodybuilding methodology), to Alexander the Great (for standing up to Bob Hoffman, a more established rival), to Hernando Cortez (for standing up to his mother, who thought he was nuts for trying to be a magazine publisher), and to Lorenzo di Medici, for bringing "prosperity, stability, and safety from tyrants who wanted to oppress bodybuilders."

I shit you not.

He also prides himself on being self-educated, but then compares himself and Arnold to "Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on their raft, looking up at the stars and drifting into the future." You'd think someone would've pointed out that it was the escaped slave Jim on the raft, not Tom Sawyer. In another passage he mentions Hercules fighting the Hydra, "a horrible monster that ... had a hundred heads." Any sixth-grader with a yen for Greek mythology could have told him the Hydra had nine heads, one of which was immortal. But when you see yourself as the embodiment of all the world's greatest thinkers and conquerors and champions of the downtrodden, you don't listen to sixth graders who might save you from making utterly foolish assertions.

That, I fear, is going to be Joe's legacy -- he'll be remembered as a guy whose single-minded belief in himself was both his greatest virtue and worst shortcoming. In a way, he reminds me of the current president, a genius at politics but a disastrous leader who will go to his grave believing that he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

On the bright side, at least the president has so far resisted comparing himself to Einstein or Huck Finn. If he did ... well, let's just say I'd start drinking early and often.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2006

The Empire Strikes Back

I wrote about Adam Campbell's excellent takedown of the American Diabetes Association here. Now the ADA has written to protest ... and Adam lets them have it again.

(Thanks to Steve Adam for the heads-up.)

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:38 AM | Comments (1)

November 20, 2006

Blasts From the Past

Silicone breast implants.

O.J. Simpson.

A CIA conspiracy to kill Bobby Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson accusing New York Times reporters of being a "bunch of commies."

This is news?

I guess this is the best we can do before a holiday. And catching up on old stories can help us understand why some things are the way they are today. Today's media is tougher on Democrats than Republicans, in part because of the old belief that the media was biased against conservatives. Reporters seem to go out of their way to expose the most minor of scandals within the Democratic Party, while studiously ignoring stories that matter.

Why is that?

Partly, I think, it's because of the echo-chamber effect. If a paper does a story that reflects badly on the Democratic Party, it will get major play on right-wing blogs, talk radio, and eventually cable TV shows like Hardball. If a serious magazine like the New Yorker does a serious story about ongoing plans to attack Iran, it falls into a silent void. No one wants to talk about it, because it's too scary to contemplate.

And humans, according to this, are really good at ignoring warnings about scary things:

[W]hen a warning is repeated over and over -- and then nothing bad happens -- the human brain is designed to discount the warning. From an evolutionary perspective, attention is a precious commodity, not to be wasted on threats that do not carry immediate consequences.

This also helps explain why it's so hard to get traction on fighting problems like global warming. And if politicians are particularly clever, they can train the media, and by extension the public, to focus on minutia instead of the things that matter:

"Our minds are always learning the relevant statistics of what is and is not important," agreed Brian Scholl, a Yale University psychologist who studies attention and vigilance. He has explored a phenomenon known as "inattentional blindness," in which people fail to see things right in front of their noses because they are intensely focused on something else. "Attending to things is not without cost," Scholl said. "The whole lesson of inattentional blindness is you can't attend to everything."

Scholl said that each year he shows a class of 300 students a video created in the 1970s by Cornell University psychologist Ulric Neisser. A group of people are rapidly passing basketballs between one another and the students are asked to count the passes. Later, when the students are asked whether they saw anything unusual, at least 100 students every year say they did not notice that a woman with an open umbrella passed across the middle of the screen.

Psychologist Daniel Simmons has created an even more dramatic video -- he showed that when people are very focused on a task, they can fail to see an actor dressed in a gorilla suit who enters the picture and thumps on his chest.

While it sounds crazy to say people can miss seeing a guy in a gorilla suit thumping on his chest, anyone who has attended a magic show knows that vigilant people can miss things right in front of them. It isn't that the audience isn't paying attention; the magician tricks you into paying attention to the wrong thing.

And you know the best way to distract people? Big boobs. Wouldn't that be the ultimate conspiracy theory? The FDA makes it easier for women to get bigger breasts, which distracts all of us from whatever nefarious things the government is doing, which ...

Well, fill in your own ending there. Bonus points if it involves O.J. Simpson.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2006

Fun with PhotoShop

According to Drudge Report (which means, "consider the source"), Marie Claire magazine photoshopped Elizabeth Vargas' head onto the body of a woman breast-feeding an infant to create the illusion of Vargas nursing her newborn at a TV anchor desk.

As reported by Drudge:

A source close to the anchor says Vargas is disappointed but has a sense of humor about the whole thing.

"Elizabeth was more than happy to sit for the interview but was disturbed that the magazine would set aside basic journalistic standards to photoshop her head onto a fake image. Vargas did joke that her real baby is cuter, that she is proud to breastfeed her newborn but wouldn't do it at the anchor desk and that she wouldn't be caught dead in that ugly gold blouse!"

One other thing about the fake photo of Vargas: The unnamed woman holding the baby isn't wearing a wedding ring. Surely someone is going to jump on that as an editorial endorsement of unmarried motherhood.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2006

Chest Fever

The L.A. Times did its annual section focusing on men's health last week, but I missed it until just now. (I guess I was distracted by something.)

The good news is that many of the stories were actually written by men this year. The bad news? Well, check out this story on the enduring mystique of the one-rep max in the bench press:

The Max -- capitalized when used in the sense of its Platonic ideal -- is actually a bit of an exercise throwback, a weight-room holdover from a less enlightened time of physical fitness, the anaerobic equivalent of Cold War "throw weight." As a practical matter, it's a virtually irrelevant number unless, of course, you plan to push your car to work. As for aesthetics, if you want Abercrombie & Fitch pectorals, you'd be far better off repping out with a lighter weight. You want a major man-rack? Do 200 push-ups a day.

Maybe they don't sell my books on the West Coast. Then again, the author might've known better if he'd read this article, which appeared in the same section:

Employing the body (such as in push-ups) or using elastic bands or tubes provide a finite amount of resistance. Free weights, fixed weight machines and cable machines are better, says Gary Hunter, professor of human studies and nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

For men of all ages, most exercise experts recommend that drills be done with the heaviest weight that can be lifted for two to three sets of eight to 12 repetitions. Most suggest three to five days a week of strength training.

The Times' health section is normally excellent, but you have to wonder how the editor missed those mutually negating passages.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2006

This Is the Life We've Chosen

I don't often get into the public-figure part of my life on this blog. There's not much to it, beyond my books and occasional appearances at fitness events. But, because I have a lot of material out there (I'm up to 269,000 hits on Google), I'm occasionally confronted with the unpleasant truth that I really piss some people off.

I'm not talking about people who disagree with me or raise legitimate questions about my work; those debates are invigorating and necessary. They keep me honest.

It's the crazy shit that throws me off. I don't get a lot of it -- I'm not prominent enough for that -- but when I do, it's unnerving, especially if it involves a review of one of my books.

Take a recent Amazon reader review of Book of Muscle, for example. The reviewer gives it one star, headlines his review "Are You Kidding?", and then says this:

When referencing select muscle groups like shoulders, this book lists EVERY exercise that effects the muscle group and not the exercises that have a direct impact. For example, for shoulder exercises it lists Bench Press. The primary muscle group for Bench Press is the CHEST with the Shoulders being indirectly affected. The Bench Press should not even be in this category. This happens over and over whne discussing various muscle groups and it can lead a beginning weight lifter to have a strong misunderstaing of strength training.

Now, if you've read Book of Muscle, you know the entire point of the exercise sections was to sort movements according to their physiological function. The chapter my critic refers to is called "Muscles That Act on the Shoulder." Those muscles, I wrote, include the pectorals, the main function of which is "to pull your upper arm across the front of your torso, as in a bench press or dumbbell fly."

Put another way, what Ian King and I were deliberately and pointedly trying to avoid was classifying exercises according to "body parts." Lots of workout books have chapters filled with "chest" exercises. Ian and I were trying to change the conversation.

My critic clearly didn't want the conversation changed, and that would be a fair point, if he'd raised it. Instead, he ripped into the book for doing exactly what it set out to do.

I got a similar slam from a reader of New Rules of Lifting, who headlined his two-star review "Not so hot." His complaint:

Page 13. of the book, "when I conceived this book I had a brilliant premise: I would take every excersive in the gym and look at it in terms of possible role in human movemement." Then later goes on on to list the moves they think are important, even debating what should be included. There is no scientific method to this, only apparently two individuals conceiving an idea for a book. I'm sure there strength books are good, but this a "me too" book on core performance.

It would be one thing if this fellow had called me out on my self-absorption or pomposity. But he chose a sentence I wrote in a section in which I was poking fun at myself. Here's the sentence that precedes the one he quoted:

I'm going to make a horrible confession about my own ignorance.

You know, I think it's pretty clear I wasn't going for pomposity there.

There's nothing you can do about these reviews, other than hope that the positive reviews from people who actually read and understood the book will marginalize the bad ones. And, indeed, it's worked out that way so far.

But there's another type of comment that some people in the fitness biz get, a comment that's highly personal and extraordinarily deranged, that crosses the line from infuriating to funny. Eric Cressey, one of the really bright young guys in the fitness world, got one of those recently, and decided to deconstruct it in his newsletter.

I couldn't do justice to it by pulling out any particular passage. So if you want a good laugh, click through and read the entire thing.

Rolling the role models

Cassandra Forsythe, a Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut and one of my coauthors on my next book, has just started blogging, and already has a doozy of a post.

She saw the most recent cover of this magazine, and went off:

This girl looks like she starved herself for weeks before her photo shoot, and has never touched a weight (unless it was pink, and weighed less than five pounds) in her life. To make matters worse, one of the titles on the front of the mag says, “Get hips and thighs like these!” and points to this model.

Give me a break! 99.9 percent of the women in this world couldn’t have hips and thighs like that unless they were still 12 years old or if they stopped eating for a month. Plus, who wants to look like that? I sure don’t, and if there are women out there that do, they need to have their heads checked.

This model is exactly the reason why so many women have distorted views of their body. Women are meant to have hips and thighs, whereas the model here doesn’t. It’s not healthy, or attractive.

If anything, I think Cass took it easy on the magazine. Not only did it promote the model's unmuscled thighs as something its readers should aspire to, it put a "Trim Your Waist!" coverline next to a midsection that would make a Barbie doll look like a candidate for bariatric surgery. I almost hope the magazine's art director Photo Shopped the model's waistline. (I've seen cover images before and after they were manipulated; nobody looks as good as a magazine cover.) If that's her real waist, then Cass is probably right about not eating for a month.

Cass's righteous fury reminds me of the skinny-fashion-model tangent I went off on a few weeks ago. I don't want to speak for her, but I think our points dovetail into this thought:

If the fashion industry wants to sell its products with paperweight models, that's their business. But when those models with that degree of emaciation cross over into our business, we have to push back. Muscles are healthy and look good on women as well as men. To promote a starved, unmuscled physique on the cover of a fitness magazine is an abomination.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:51 AM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2006

Weird Science

Before I get into the bit about the scientist who cured hiccups with a finger in the rectum, I want to pause to point out my favorite news from the frontiers of scientific observation:

Julia R. Fox, assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University isn't joking when she says [The Daily Show with Jon Stewart], which last week featured Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a guest, is just as substantive as network coverage.

While much has been written in the media about The Daily Show's impact, Fox's study is the first scholarly effort to systematically examine how the comedy program compares to traditional television news as sources of political information.

The study, "No Joke: A Comparison of Substance in The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Broadcast Network Television Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign," will be published next summer by the Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, published by the Broadcast Education Association.

"It is clearly a humor show, first and foremost," Fox said of Stewart's program. "But there is some substance on there, and in some cases, like John Edwards announcing his candidacy, the news is made on the show. You have real newsmakers coming on, and yes, sometimes the banter and questions get a little silly, but there is also substantive dialogue going on ... It's a legitimate source of news."

Which bring me to the Ig Nobel awards, given out at Harvard by real Nobel Prize winners to scientists who dared to push the boundaries of science.

One of this year's recipients is Howard Stapleton, inventor of teenager repellent:

His device, called the Mosquito, emits a high-frequency, siren-like noise that is painful to the ears of teens and those in their early 20s, but inaudible to adults.

The invention grew out of his 15-year-old daughter's trip to the local store last year to buy milk. She came back empty-handed, having been intimidated by a group of teenage boys loitering outside the store.

Stapleton, who has sold and installed security systems for more than two decades, thought back to when he was 12 years old and he visited his father at work.

"I walked into this room with six people doing ultrasonic welding, and immediately ran right back out again the noise was so painful," Stapleton said. "I asked an adult, 'What's that noise.' And he said, 'What noise?'"

Stapleton's company, Compound Security Systems of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, has sold hundreds of the units to retailers, local governments, police departments and homeowners all over the United Kingdom. The company is shipping its first Mosquito units for sale in the United States next week.

But that doesn't compare to the guy who figured out the ultimate cure for hiccups:

Dr. Francis Fesmire said he wasn't sure whether he was honored or embarrassed when he learned he'd won an Ig Nobel for his paper called -- ahem -- "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

"I'm a serious guy, and something I wrote in 1987 is coming back to haunt me," said Fesmire, an emergency physician and director of the emergency heart center at Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Fesmire, who stresses he is a real doctor who "someday wishes to be truly be remembered for my cardiac research," tried the technique for the first and last time nearly 20 years ago.

He knew that the technique could be used to slow a rapid heartbeat by stimulating the vagus nerve. The same nerve, when stimulated, can stop hiccups.

"I saw this patient who couldn't stop his hiccups, I tried these other maneuvers, and then I stuck my finger in his bottom," Fesmire said, emphasizing that it was the treatment of last resort. "Will I ever do it again? No!"

One small step for [a] man ...

Posted by LouSchuler at 06:48 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2006

Someone Had to Say It

I've been holding fire on the situation facing the authors of Game of Shadows, the book that blew away any lingering doubts about whether or not Barry Bonds used steroids. The book's authors, San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, broke no laws in publishing information from grand jury testimony that showed Bonds not only admitted using steroids, but almost certainly perjured himself in claiming he didn't know what they were.

But, because the government wants to find out who gave them the grand jury transcripts, the reporters may end up in jail. I haven't followed every legal maneuver in the saga, but it seems like the reporters have been on the verge of incarceration for weeks.

From the beginning, I've thought about the irony here: Barry Bonds continues his climb toward Hank Aaron's career home-run record, but the reporters who exposed the drugs he took to develop his late-career power surge are headed for the hoosegow.

But once you get beyond the irony, you see some flat-out hypocrisy, which sportswriter Mike Lupica exposes here:

The government of George Bush, which will leak the name of a CIA operative named Valerie Plame when it suits its purposes, now wants Fainaru-Wada and Williams in jail because they won't reveal the names of the person or persons the government says leaked them grand jury testimony. It is always worth pointing out that if you ran the country the way Bush and his people do, you wouldn't want to encourage whistleblowers, either.

Once George Bush told baseball to get rid of steroids in a State of the Union address. Fainaru-Wada and Williams, through their reporting and later their book Game of Shadows, did their part. They took the President at his word, obviously unaware that this President will say anything in a State of the Union, about weapons of mass destruction or anything else.

Something else worth considering: According to Game of Shadows, the entire reason this steroid case became such a major federal priority is because high-powered federal officials like Bush and former attorney general John Ashcroft are baseball fans. Bush is former owner of the Texas Rangers. One of his longtime business associates, Bill DeWitt, is a current owner of the St. Louis Cardinals. Ashcroft is a lifelong Cardinals fan. Mark Corallo, Ashcroft's chief media spokesman, is a hard-core Yankees fan.

Here's a paragraph that appears on page 211 of Game of Shadows:

"This really wasn't about BALCO," Corallo said. "In the end, it had nothing to do with Victor Conte and Greg Anderson and their activity. It had to do with the guys who had been cheating Stan Musial and Mickey Mantle and Lou Gehrig and Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, that's what this was about. That's who they're cheating, they're cheating the baseball immortals and they're cheating the fans. And it means something."

So these guys were on a personal mission to save the integrity of baseball's record book. And how are they doing it? By letting Barry Bonds continue his assault on that record book, while harassing the reporters who exposed the source of Bonds' unprecedented power.

That's our federal government in action.

Posted by LouSchuler at 07:20 AM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2006

The Teletubbies Theory of Autism

Gregg Easterbrook admits that his theory is based on pure speculation, but still, I find it hard to fathom how something as stupid as this ended up in a respectable online magazine like Slate:

As recently as the 1970s, cartoons and children's shows were aired only on Saturdays and perhaps a few hours per morning, and there were no movies on cassette. Since about 1980, cartoons and children's shows have become available all day, every day, on TV or through VCRs and now DVD players. Television watching by the very young, rare a generation ago, has since skyrocketed. Shows for infants, such as Teletubbies, have come into being. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 1-year-old children now average almost an hour per day viewing television and videos, while children ages 2 and 3 watch television and videos an average of about two hours daily.

As young children begin to experience the world, their brains organize partly in response to the stimuli received. Science magazine, the technical publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recently reported several studies showing that "problems in autism result from poor connections among brain areas rather than from defects in a specific brain region."

Recent studies have found that when a healthy child is exposed to stimuli, many areas of the brain become active and communicate with each other; in an autistic child, fewer brain areas light up and there is little communication. Studies at the Brain Development Imaging Laboratory of San Diego State University have found that autistic children have a "lack of synchronicity between visual areas in the back of the brain."

Of the new research suggesting that defects in brain organization track with autism, Science concluded, "If a neuronal imbalance is to blame, no one knows how it arises." No one does. But the rise in autism disorders during the very period that early-childhood screen-watching has risen is disturbing. Eyes glued to a colorful tube is an intense form of "exposure" for any young child. Correlation does not prove causation, but there's an awful lot of correlation here. ...

Common symptoms of autism include sudden withdrawal from the real world into a world inside the child's mind; transition from love of parents to constant anger against them; engaging in the same actions over and over again, always with an object close nearby. Don't these sound, in a creepy way, like television's unintended effects?

Screen-viewing conditions the young mind to withdraw from the real, three-dimensional world of social interaction into a two-dimensional world of internalized fantasy. Parents stop being objects of love and become the child's enemy -- after all, they are the ones who turn off the TV! And every parent who has had children with access to a VCR or DVD player and a library of cartoon movies has observed the same phenomena: Young children watch the same movie over and over again.

I don't think there's a serious researcher out there who doesn't think autism is a genetic condition. There are certainly cases in which brain injury produces the same behaviors, and I don't have much trouble believing that, in some cases, there's an environmental trigger that might affect a developing fetus, such as exposure to mercury. We also know that exposing a child to lead can have disastrous effects on the child's developing brain.

But Teletubbies? Isn't that like saying overbearing mothers turn their sons into homosexuals?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:19 AM | Comments (2)

September 01, 2006

Memo to America: It Ain't Working

The research company Mintel sent me a press release yesterday, detailing its latest study of American dieting.

The big finding:

According to a recent Mintel report, more that 80 percent of respondents utilize eating plans they have devised themselves based upon their needs. In contrast, only 6 percent say that they use a commercial diet plan such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig.

"Although there are numerous plans and options, consumers are looking for a diet they feel will work for them, and are developing their own strategies for coping with dieting," said Marcia Mogelonsky, senior analyst for Mintel. "According to our research, only 1 percent of the 13 percent who tried Atkins are still on the diet. Consumers cycle through diet plans with great speed because they are looking for results. If they feel a diet is not working for them, they tend to
look for another alternative. For many dieters, the most successful plan is one that combines dieting methods."

The same report notes that more than two-thirds of Americans consider themselves overweight, which must be great news for the media, which has done a bang-up job of telling people they're fat. (Yeah, I know. I'm part of the problem.) Turns out, the fat people are listening.

But get this: According to Mintel, just 6 percent of people "agreed that they like to try new diet plans." About 30 percent of the people surveyed are "very satisfied" with the plan they're on, and 70 percent told Mintel they have no interest in celebrity diet plans.

I really like that last bit. When I was at Men's Health, all our survey data from readers indicated they couldn't care less about the workouts of the rich and famous, whether we're talking about athletes or entertainers or anybody else who's better known than you and me. The only celebrities whose workouts garnered any reader-driven interest at all were Brad Pitt and Tiger Woods, and those two aren't talking. (Although, when I was at Men's Fitness, I did get the strength coach at Stanford to give us the workout plan Tiger used when he was in college. I only bring it up because I like to celebrate my victories, no matter how small and insignificant.) It's nice to see that the public is no more interested in celebrities' diet advice than in their workouts.

My second-favorite data point: 13 percent of the people surveyed have tried Atkins. Damn! I have no idea how big a slice of America was surveyed -- a representative sample of all adults? middle-class adults? people who previously expressed some kind of interest in a diet-related subject? -- but it's still a huge number. It doesn't matter so much that only 1 percent of those people are still on it. (I think that means that just 0.08 percent of the surveyed population is still on the diet.) Considering it's the most vilified diet of our time, I'm amazed that so many people have given it a shot.

In other news ...

Were you aware that liberalism causes obesity? Anyone relying on logic and data would find it hard to make that argument. Even if you, like so many Americans today, think that logic and data are for pussies, it's hard to drum up many anecdotal examples of fat liberals who aren't Michael Moore. Even Al Sharpton is relatively svelte these days. And if you wanted to pick two poster boys for humorless, ideologically rigid liberalism, you'd be hard-pressed to find any better examples than Ralph Nader and Michael Jacobsen, the latter being the anti-fat crusader who founded and leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest. If anyone on earth deserves to be called a Food Nazi, it's Jacobson.

What do the two have in common, aside from their fanatical desire to impose their fun-free world view on anyone they can reach?

If you said "so skinny you could count their ribs from outer space," then you see what I see.

But none of that stopped Rush Limbaugh, that lifelong conjurer of a fact-free world, from saying this:

This is what happens when you let the left run things. We've been beat about the head. There are hungry people everywhere. UNICEF got it all started. We've seen the babies with the extended tummies, the walking skeletons, told that kids can't learn unless they're fed. We've been guilted into pouring resources on the problem. And now, now, the latest crisis is that there is obesity among those who are impoverished. Because we are sympathetic, we are compassionate people, we have responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity. At least here in America, didn't teach them how to fish, we gave them the fish. Didn't teach them how to butcher a -- slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter. The real bloat here, as we know, is in -- is in government.

And to think I was nice enough to avoid mentioning a fairly obvious fact when I wrote about the latest data: The highest rates of obesity are found in states that voted overwhelmingly for the current president and his minions.

That's what I get for being polite -- an overweight drug addict who knows full well what it's like to be poor and living on unemployment insurance accuses me and my fellow travelers of causing the problem that I've been trying to prevent.

Good thing it's a holiday weekend, so I have some time to get over it.

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:52 AM | Comments (1)

August 22, 2006

Baby Remember My Name

Remember that scene in Back to the Future, when Marty McFly goes back in time to the moment his parents fell in love, and finds his future father up in a tree with a pair of binoculars, watching his future mother get undressed? Great line: "He's a peeping Tom!"

I recently learned an odd detail about my own father's life -- nothing as embarrassing as catching him up in a tree with binoculars, but still not what I expected.

My brothers and I were going through a crate of things my father had saved, which were mostly things his mother had saved. We found a front-page article from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, cira 1943. It was about a young marine from St. Louis who had met and struck up a friendship with a starlet in Hollywood, and who had corresponded with her in between battles in the Pacific.

I forget the name of the starlet -- I'd never heard of her before -- but the name of the marine was familiar: It was our father.

He'd told us all kind of stories about his youth, most of which, we later surmised, were utter bullshit. Here was one that was apparently true, and he'd never shared it.

But even stranger than learning about this episode of our father's life from an old newspaper clipping was the idea that someone in his family had actually taken his letters from this starlet and brought them to a newspaper so they could write the story. Who would do such a thing, and why?

The "who" is easy enough to narrow down -- three people were quoted in the story: my father, who seems unlikely to have contacted a reporter at a St. Louis newspaper while fighting the Japanese many thousands of miles away; his mother; and someone I'd never heard of before, who was identified as my father's grandmother.

We assume she was the mother of Frederick Schuler, our paternal grandfather, but she had a different last name. That side of our family is mostly a mystery to us. All we know is that our grandmother, our dad's mother, had Frederick, her husband, put away in a mental hospital in the 1930s. He stayed there until he died in the 1960s.

You'd think that would create some tension between our grandmother and her mother-in-law. If my wife had me locked up, I can guarantee my mom would take it badly. So the idea of the two of them collaborating to make a minor and momentary celebrity out of our father is one of the oddest parts of a story that was soaring off the oddmeter to begin with.

That brings me to the question of why they'd do such a thing. Were they trying to shore up wartime morale at a time when the war was still a bloody slog with no clear resolution in sight? Knowing my grandmother, that seems unlikely. I don't think I've met anyone who was more focused on her own accomplishments. She did an extraordinary amount of volunteer work, but also expended an extraordinary amount of energy trying to publicize it.

It's a shame she didn't live in this generation, when she could trumpet everything she did across the World Wide Web. (If there's such a thing as a blogger gene, I'm sure I get it from her.) She wanted to be famous at a time when there were few paths to glory, especially for women.

Why some people work so damned hard to get recognition from strangers is the subject of this story in today's New York Times by Benedict Carey:

People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown.

These yearnings can become more acute in life’s later years, as the opportunities for fame dwindle, “but the motive never dies, and when we realize we’re not going to make it in this lifetime, we find some other route: posthumous fame,” said Orville Gilbert Brim, a psychologist who is completing a book called The Fame Motive. The book is based on data he has gathered and analyzed, with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

“It’s like belief in the afterlife in medieval communities, where people couldn’t wait to die and go on to better life,” Dr. Brim said. “That’s how strong it is.” *

Here's the health angle:

Therapists and researchers, including Dr. Brim, have traced longing for renown to lingering feelings of rejection or neglect. After all, celebrity is the ultimate high school in-group, writ large. It appears a perfect balm for the sting of social exclusion, or neglect by emotionally or physically absent parents.

That describes my father pretty well -- when your father is in the loony bin and you escape your circumstances by lying about your age so you can join the marines at 16 (this was several months before Pearl Harbor was attacked), you qualify as a victim of rejection and neglect. As for his mother, she liked to tell us stories about how cruel her own father was, so file her under "lingering feelings of rejection" as well.

There's also a second category of fame-seeking:

Another factor may also be at work in many people who are preoccupied with becoming famous, one linked to a subconscious but acute appreciation of mortality. In recent experiments, psychologists have shown that, when reminded that they will one day die, people fixate on attributes they consider central to their self-worth.

Those who value strength squeeze a hand grip with more force; those who prize driving ability, cooking skills or physical appearance intensify their focus.

I don't know if this applies to my grandmother, but it does bring to mind one of my strangest memories of her:

We were driving somewhere, and were nearly hit by another car. She chuckled and said something like, "Can you imagine the headline in tomorrow's paper? 'Well-known lecturer dies in traffic accident.'" Then she chuckled again at the absurdity of going out that way.

My older brother and I looked at each other, having the same thought: Headline? "Well-known lecturer"?

When she actually died, it was in a nursing home, and it did merit an obituary in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which had published several of her letters to the editor over the years and occasionally covered her volunteer projects.

But there was some irony in the fact she merited an obit.

At her funeral service, the presiding minister, who had never met her and had no idea who she was, used that obituary as the entire basis for his sermon. He never talked to anybody who knew her before the service, and nobody who actually knew her got up and spoke.

That, I concluded when I thought about it years later, is what a quest for fame gets you: the illusion that a few paragraphs of newsprint sums up everything about you that's worth knowing.

* I can assure Dr. Brim that plenty of people in our modern world hold the same views of the afterlife. Trust me on this one.

Posted by LouSchuler at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2006

Thinking Too Hard About Baseball

It's 11:15, and I haven't yet come across a news story that inspires me to blog.

So this is a perfect time to link to this article I wrote about the Cardinals, and how their struggles this season bring back unwelcome memories of another Cardinal team on the decline.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2006

Born to Sit

Normally, studies about fidgeting drive me up a wall. (Then again, since I'm a natural-born fidgeter, everything drives me up a wall; I couldn't sit still if my life depended on it.) Each new study seems to show about the same thing: People who fidget are thinner than those who don't. The first one was interesting, but after that it's just been more of the same. Since no study has shown that non-fidgeters can become fidgeters, I don't see the point in giving overweight people yet another unrealistic standard to achieve.

This study is more of the same, performing the semi-useful work of establishing the genetic basis for non-movement:

Lean rats -- but not fat rats -- are sensitive to a brain signal that makes them restless, find Catherine M. Kotz, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Obesity Center.

"The results point to a biological basis for being a couch potato," Kotz said, in a news release.

Kotz's research team bred two colonies of rats. They bred lean rats with lean rats until they got a strain of obesity-resistant rats. And they bred fat rats with fat rats until they got a strain of obesity-prone rats. Given the same amount of food, the obesity-resistant rats stay lean while the obesity-prone rats get fat.

Motion detectors attached to the animals showed that obesity-resistant rats moved around much more than the obesity-prone rats. This held true from an early age -- even before the obesity-prone rats got fat.

This report is from WebMD, a site I don't visit often because of its annoying propensity to state the obvious.

But this particular story does something really, really interesting: Immediately after the paragraphs I just quoted, it says this:

This suggests that getting people to be just a little more active may be the key to weight loss.

Does it really suggest that? I read it to mean something very different: It's brutally hard to get chronically inactive people to move more when their bodies are telling them to move less. It doesn't offer any hope that activity is the key for people who are genetically inactive.

Time for a weird analogy:

Let's say you've asked a woman out on a date, and she's just told you that she really hates going to movies, and that it must be genetic, because her mother and grandmother and all her siblings likewise have this strange aversion to movies. Would your first response be, "Great! Let's go see Talladega Nights!"?

If it is, I think that relationship would end before it started.

So why would a journalist's first response to news that some people are genetically averse to exercise be to suggest that they just need to get more exercise?

But there's an even bigger head-scratcher in the second half of the article:

The scientists discovered that the brains of the lean rats were very sensitive to a brain chemical called orexin. When injected with orexin into their brain, the lean rats got even more fidgety than they were before.

But orexin injections didn't have much of an effect on the fat rats. Their brains weren't very sensitive to orexin.

Human brains, too, respond to orexin. It may be that an orexin-like drug could make people more active and thus help them lose weight.

Didn't the article just say that the inactive rats didn't respond to the chemical? Why would that suggest a solution involving the very chemical that didn't work?

Posted by LouSchuler at 09:11 AM | Comments (1)

July 11, 2006

Dense

Jane Brody, in today's New York Times, sets out to explain why Americans are gaining weight despite all our efforts to do the opposite.

She trucks out one of the usual suspects -- portion size -- and it's hard to fault the logic there. Everything's bigger now, and it's well-established that the more food you put on a plate, the more food the recipient of that plate of food will eat.

Fine.

But then she gets into the ways people can control their weight, and I got this bizarre sense that she's repulsed by the word "protein." To be fair to Brody, I get that sense just about every time I read a story about weight-control strategies in the mainstream media. And to be even more fair, I don't think she's wrong when she cites the work of Barbara Rolls, who's certainly earned the legitimacy she's given by the media:

Dr. Barbara J. Rolls and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University have recently shown that portion size acts independently with another characteristic of meals -- energy density -- in satisfying hunger and reducing the number of calories ingested.

What is likely to be more satisfying, a quarter-cup of raisins or two cups of grapes? Both supply about the same number of calories. How many calories are packed into a given amount of food can make a big difference in how many extra calories people consume.

The more energy-dense a food is -- that is, the more calories per ounce or gram -- the more calories people tend to consume.

In previous studies, Dr. Rolls found that, all other factors being equal, people eat about the same weight of food each day.

If those foods are in the moderate range of energy density like meat, cheese, pizza and French fries or at the high end of energy density like crackers, nuts and cookies, people consume more calories than they do if their meals contain lots of low-energy-density foods, like soup, green salad, nonstarchy vegetables and fruit.

Okay, but who in the Altered Metabolic States of America does not know that it's better to eat fruits and vegetables than cookies and French fries? Rolls' studies of soup are interesting, but how practical is it to tell people to eat it over and over and over again for the rest of their lives? Most people, I suspect, would rather be fat.

Now, if you bring protein into the conversation, you have something that is easily and consistently available, is satiating (that is, when you eat high-protein foods your appetite is sated longer than it would be following a high-carb meal), and that has a growing catalogue of published research backing it up.

In the latest issue of Strength and Conditioning Journal, my friend Joey Antonio cites four studies (all published since 2003) showing that the swapping protein for carbohydrate in a diet not only leads to weight loss, but limits weight regain following a successful diet.

You can lose weight any number of ways, as I've written more times than I care to remember. The key isn't changing what you eat so much as how you eat. That said, what you eat can make a difference, and protein remains highly underrated as a change agent.

Just don't hold your breath waiting for the New York Times to acknowledge it.

Posted by LouSchuler at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2006

Why the Media Has Fallen and Can't Get Up

When I started out in magazines, there was an unofficial rule: Unless you were the boss, you got out of the business by age 40. You just didn't see many people over 40 at full-time writing and editing positions.

Some graduated out of the field, publishing books or getting other lucrative gigs that spared them the bullshit of day-to-day magazine work. Others tired of the bullshit and lack of opportunities for advancement -- if you're on the fast track, you pretty much know it by your mid-30s -- and went into teaching, marketing, public relations, or some combination.

Some I knew got caught up in a perpetual cycle of failure, going from one financially struggling media operation to another until they ran out of failing businesses to employ them, and were forced to move on to other gigs. The fact they only worked on doomed publications became a scarlet "L" on their resumes. You might be forgiven for working on one losing magazine or newspaper or website. Two made you suspect. But with three strikes you're probably out of the business for good, marked forever as a loser.

(By the way, this is why I always advise young journalists to choose their second jobs carefully, and avoid going from a financially secure operation to one that's deep in debt. The best move is always from shaky to profitable. There's no penalty for jumping off a sinking ship, but if you do the reverse, your judgment will be called into question when you go after that third job.)

Lately, I think the bar has been moved up a bit, at least in magazines. Fifty is the new 40, but the dynamic is the same -- if you aren't happy in your position by your late 40s, you'd better find some other way to make a living, because it isn't likely to improve. The bosses are only going to get younger, and young people, by biological design, have no interest in what people older than them have to say about anything.

A 35-year-old who's just been named editor in chief will look at his middle-aged underlings and see nothing but useless fossils. Even if he has relatively benign feelings toward his elders, the first budget meeting he attends will seal their fate. If he knows he can replace a 49-year-old making $80,000 a year with a 32-year-old making $40,000, of course he'll try to do it. That's $40,000 he can add to his own salary right there. Or he can spread it around to younger staffers whose loyalty he needs as he climbs the corporate ladder. Or he can not spend the money, improving the magazine's bottom line and making himself look good.

It's all a game to him, and the last thing he needs is a bunch of older people on his staff who might not appreciate his magnificent vision.

I bring this up for two reasons:

First, I've been having an email correspondence with a former colleague, a guy my age who's out of the magazine biz. He believes it's dying fast, and the two of us were smart to get out. I'm not privy to inside financial data, so I don't know if he's right about the business in general. But I agree with him on the creative side. As a consumer who's no longer a participant in the business, all I see is deeper and deeper dependence on rigid formulae. Great magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker still manage to surprise readers with great writing and reporting, but most of the lesser titles have given up on substance and banked everything on style.

That, though, is what you get when you systematically jettison people who have reached points in their careers when they're only concerned with content and couldn't give a rat's ass about form.

Which brings me to my second reason for rambling on about this. This commentary by Edward Wasserman starts off with a nod to the fact Dan Rather was recently fired by CBS, and then says this:

Dan will be just fine, unlike the thousands of other news professionals who have lost their jobs in the cutbacks, downsizings, layoffs, early retirements and buyouts that have swept the country's newsrooms in the new millennium. Nobody knows how many positions have disappeared. The website IWant Media.com counts 72,000 since June 2000. Journalismjobs.com, another website, estimates 30,000 jobs lost since February 2003.

True, a great many media jobs have been created during this same period, as websites spring up, blogs find financial backing, new publications open and successful operations expand. Many of those jobs probably involve journalism of some kind. So the net change, if any, in the number of people engaged in assembling and reporting news or offering topical commentary is hard to estimate, and the scary job loss numbers may well signal turbulence, not shrinkage.

But I'm interested in a related phenomenon, which has less to do with overall numbers than with a generational shift.

When you consider who is being discarded in the various waves of right-sizing that the news business has indulged in to keep its owners, if not its customers, satisfied, you stumble on the unsettling truth that the advance guard of an entire newsroom generation is being shown the door, 10 or 15 years before they would, in the normal course of things, have finished their working lives.

Here, Wasserman says, is why that matters:

I had a conversation a year or two ago with an ex-reporter, who had long experience covering national security, about why his newspaper, one of the country's best, had fallen into lockstep in reporting credulously on the run-up to the Iraq war and had underplayed fierce dissent within our government. He said, essentially, that the coverage decisions were being made by people who weren't acquainted with the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the Iran-contra affair, or the other landmark late 20th century instances of official U.S. deceit or ineptitude. So they got snookered.

It's like I said in my earlier post about the decline of history as an academic subject in our schools: There's a price to pay for not knowing what happened when, and for not knowing that we don't know it.

Posted by LouSchuler at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2006

Hucksterism For Dummies

The other day, I noticed something unusual: My three most recent books all had new reader reviews on Amazon.com. Since I'm active on the JP Fitness message boards, I don't actually get a lot of Amazon reviews. Most people who like the books just email me personally or write questions and comments over at JP's.

So reviews of three books in a two-day span is unusual -- and, frankly, a bit of an ego-boost.

Unfortunately for my ego, a common theme emerged in the reviews. Here's what my new fan wrote about New Rules of Lifting:

Having been in this industry for a long time, I have read hundreds of forgettable books on weight lifting. Not the case with the New Rules. As a personal trainer and club owner who has hired trainers for years, I have been disappointed with the basic knowledge of applicants. Now I have finally found a resource for my trainers to make sure that we are all philosophically on the same page. It is now required reading at my fitness center. It is the fastest way I know to get someone 'up to my level' in one book. It is very readable, even by a non-professional. Along with being informative, it is also funny at times, and very motivating. It's not just just recommended reading from me... It's required

I did like the author's suggestion about reducing caffeine intake. I've been off coffee after my doctor told me it caused me acid indigestion. He recommended a book called "The Truth About Caffeine: How Companies That Promote it Deceive us and What We Can Do About It. Highly Recommended..

Here's what I actually said about caffeine in New Rules:

Caffeine does help you power up your workouts, with no apparent cost to your health or sanity.

Then I thought the words of praise the reviewer chose for my book seemed a bit ... familiar. Turns out, they're plagiarized from a review written six months ago by my friend, Jean-Paul Francoeur:

Having been in this industry for a long time, I have read hundreds of forgettable books on weight lifting. Not the case with the New Rules.

As a personal trainer and club owner who has hired trainers for years, I have been disappointed with the basic knowledge of applicants. Now I have finally found a resource for my trainers to make sure that we are all philosophically on the same page. It is now required reading at my fitness center. It is the fastest way I know to get someone "up to my level" in one book.

It is very readable, even by a non-professional. Along with being informative, it is also funny at times, and very motivating. It's not just just recommended reading from me... It's required!

The reviews of Book of Muscle and Home Workout Bible were more of the same. The reviewer seems to have copied an existing review, and then recommended her own book.

I decided to check out this anti-caffeine book that my biggest fan has recommended thrice over. Sure enough, the reviewer has attracted some new fans of her own, as this comment makes clear:

In more and more eyes you are nothing but a liar. People avoid them. They do NOT buy from liars and shameless manipulators. Your reputation is everything you have and with your exposed methods you have probably destroyed it and this will doom your probably good book.

"Probably good book"? Not the words I would've chosen.

Posted by LouSchuler at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

Outmuscled?

Big news in the muscle biz:

American Media Inc. is putting five of its 16 magazine titles on the auction block, as the publisher tries to find the right mix of businesses during months of tumultuous reorganization, people familiar with the matter said.

The titles for sale include Muscle & Fitness, Flex, Muscle & Fitness Hers, country-music magazine Country Weekly and Spanish-language celebrity title Mira! The five titles produced revenue of about $84 million in the 12 months ended in March, and operating income plus amortization of around