OK, let me get it out there, I believe that there is a shortage of Muscle Magazines today. Like it or not, they played a vital role in the gym scene through the 1990s. I would say that they did the same through the 2000's but I spent all of the 2000's in my home gym either in The USA or in Cyprus so I really don't know.

The 1990's were defined by many things but one of them was the explosion of it's very own Information Age that came through magazines. Let me try and explain the importance of this role to you because it may seem irrelevant today and even back then we thought it was a little childish BUT... If you are taking the time out of your day to read this, you should understand. You are reading this because you have time to spare and you are thinking to yourself "How can I get better at lifting?". You may have many goals but at some point in the last few seconds you have chosen to click on something that took you to this page so you can hopefully learn something. Now, imagine that you were just sitting wherever you are right now and there was nothing for you to click on or search for? Imagine if the only places for you to find answers to how you can get better are:
1) Your gym
2) Talking with a friend or making a friend
3) Books and magazines from the shelf at your local store

No Google, no facebook, no Instagram gurus filling your mind with meaningless motivation and hashtags, no Twitter accounts telling you how you should spend less time online as they post 30 new posts per day. You had to get out and physically search for information!

At our local store there would be two, maybe three magazines on the shelf every month. Actually for a while they carried four or five and those were our only outside sources of information. So the group of guys that would train together would all run to the store when we had money and buy every magazine on the shelf and split them all between us. We would take them home (if we didn't hang out somewhere and talk about our new plan of attack for greatness) and read every page over and over trying to decide if this month's Grow Coconut Shoulders Routine was going to be THE ROUTINE for me...again this time. As soon as you'd finish your magazine you'd pass it along to your buddy the next time you saw him at the gym (or at the buffet or when you met up at SAMS to buy 10 lb bags of chicken and turkey breast) till you'd been through all of that month's magazines and routines, then you decide who gets to keep what, and then you repeat this all again the next month.

Now, remember...this information didn't come free! Every magazine was pretty much a solid $5 which meant you had to make a financial investment into your goals. As much as people like to make fun of online coaches "with all the free information out there" they seem to forget that I came from an era where every bit of information cost you something. Magazines, books, gas money to visit a new gym, and I can't tell you how much money I spent on gas just driving to a friend's house on off days so we could all sit around and talk about how we could get better. Everything required commitment, no free clicks.

Does this sound really boring and like it is leading to an information overload with programs after meaningless programs that don't do a doggone thing?

Then tell me what the difference is between getting 12 chest programs per year vs going to Google and searching "chest building routine" and see how many results show up from stick figure sized people. Just start scrolling and tell me that you aren't being fed an insane amount of information that is impossible to read through, to understand, or to have any idea who is feeding you pure crap and who is feeding you actual result based information. Freaking ANYONE can write a program now and post it online and because they have a big InstaTwitter following they can have any new gym lifter believing that this is THE PROGRAM for them. What makes this worse? The online guru can feed you with so much crap on a DAILY BASIS that you never get exposed to anyone or anything else simply because this guru knows how to market to the new and not knowing. Yes, I know that most of the magazines were not perfectly on point but a few per year were just GOLD! And...nobody else has that MUSCLE AND FITNESS / FLEX edition with Arnold from cover to cover with all of the black and white photos in it? I had three copies! Or the Muscle Media where Dan Duchaine released that little secret of how to dissolve pellets in DMSO? I have that one too.

In the 1990's we all had THAT ONE FRIEND that had a copy of Supertraining by Dr Mel Siff, but they wouldn't let it leave their house so you had to go over and sit down and read. Read...at their house...which meant that you'd have in depth conversations about everything that lifters talk about. Getting huge led to getting strong which led to the discussion of "does increased size lead to increased strength" which led to you guys discussing if muscles really knew if they were being worked by machines over free weights, chins vs pull ups, and next thing you know you are reading the section on contrast baths and you've made plans to get a small fish pond, increase your whole egg intake, and get serious! And that was just TODAY!

I remember being in the gym and there were a group of guys in their 30's and 40's (remember I was in my teens) who were passing around a book like it was some super secret. What was so special about this book anyway? Why was it that they only shared it with each other and they were all twice my age? I was the hardest working kid in the gym so why didn't they share it with me? What I found out was that I had to earn my way into each information group in the gym. I may have trained hard but I had not earned THEIR trust enough to be a part of whatever that they were sharing and those guys were my friends! After months, they let me SEE the cover of the book but did not let me borrow it. Looking back, if you were 40 years old and had an important book (remember, there was no Amazon or fast shipping back then, books were not easy to get or replace) would you let some teenager in the local gym borrow it? Remember, there were no cell phones, no wifi (I didn't know anyone that even had internet), much less camera phones back then...so I took my training notebook out of my gym bag (next to the framed picture of Tom Platz I'd look at between sets of squats for motivation) and wrote down the name of the book on a piece of paper. "MUSCLE: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder" by Samuel Wilson Fussell. I went straight to the local book store and ordered one. I still have it today. I shortly went back and bought two more for my friends to have as well. After reading it, I now understand why they didn't share it with the young teenager.

There was FLEX, IRON MAN, Muscle Media, MM2K, Muscular Development, Muscle and Fitness, and every once in a while someone would show up with something rare like MILO, Muscle Mag International, NPC News, Hardgainer, etc... When someone brought in a magazine to the gym it brought everyone together and if you were mid session and couldn't go over and look at the magazine with everyone, you'd simply yell "Hey, don't leave. I want to have a look at that. I've got 6 sets left!". Normally the person who had brought it in had found (or remembered) an article or program in an old magazine and wanted to bring it in to share it with someone younger that needed some help.

Don't you see, magazines were the way for the older generation to communicate with the younger generation back then. People would see you killing yourself in the gym, earning your progress and their respect rep by rep and they would literally go out of their way to come over and help you. Sometimes the advice of a crazy old person in the gym that is past their prime wasn't enough so they backed it up with the publication that they'd learned it from "way back when". Or maybe it was just someone trying to help and they found a golden nugget idea in last year's MuscleMedia. Magazines were OUR Encyclopedias and even though they sold us supplements that we didn't need and they didn't always get things correct...at least they were filled with information that we could hold onto and share among us. It was a way for each of us to have our very own "Google Search Engine" filed under things that did and didn't work for us and our friends. You wouldn't have to worry about if the InstaTwitter guru was legit or not hiding behind his fake name, fake personal, and paid clicks.

Over the decades in the gym I can't remember how many times someone much older than me has decided that they had something that I needed to read or that they needed to share with me and it was either a story or some type of actual magazine or book that they had been holding on to. Heck, I've passed around my copies of The EliteFTS Bench Press Manual more times than I'd like, as well as the Squat Manual, The Dynamic Effort, etc...

The 1990's were not only a time where I have a lot of great memories of waiting and acquiring the newest collection of photos, posters, and programs from the store shelf but it was a time where handing a book down to someone meant more than just handing a book down to someone. I was constantly trying to earn my way into the best gym groups in the area, and I lent out a few prized magazines myself to people I'd seen busting their tails in the gym that looked like they could use a hand as well.

Maybe this weekend I'll venture off to the local book store and see if they have any decent Muscle Mags in English that I can pick up. Maybe I'll lend out my copy of "Muscle: Confessions..." or maybe I'll let my training partner borrow my recent purchase of Eddie Hall's book. Maybe. He will have to earn that one first.