Peer Review Committee

I have an idea. With ALL of this talk about newbies getting steered the wrong way and our experiences with the goofiest routines known to man, I have decided we need a peer review committee to decipher what is useful for bodybuilding and what is not.

With this committee, each bodybuilding article on here, not the strength and conditioning ones, will be reviewed and deemed worthy or worthless for bodybuilding purposes or just simply commented on.

The aim of this committee will be to provide a safeguard against newbies literally having their time, money, effort, and even their passion thrown in the trashbin of history!
It will also serve to protect more experienced lifters to steer clear of being tricked into trying some new goofy routine that will set their bodybuilding progress backwards.

It will serve in the same way certain organizations put a stipulation on what can be viewed on television, to avoid people being exposed to or brainwashed by certain media and information.
I will serve as Minister of Propaganda. Other positions are available.
People, reply with your ideas if you are not totally afraid of the high powered gurus. Our bodybuilding movement is in danger!

First of all, interesting idea.

Where I don’t quite agree is that a certain program, even if it could be considered “goofy” or better suboptimal for a certain person at a certain stage of his lifting career, will necessarily set a trainee’s progress backwards, turn training into a nightmare (I got that one from a post of yours on a different thread), etc.

Any program which follows basic principles like heavy lifting, progressive overload and the like, is executed with a decent effort and accompanied with sufficient nutrition should lead to progress. Even if another program could have yielded better results, the program will have provided a different stimulus, a learning experience and taken the person one step closer to knowing what works well and what doesn’t for him as an individual and his goals.

Long story short: I believe it’s not all black and white, there definitely are different shades of grey, though. If this thread helps shed some light on those, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

Looking forward to some of the reviews…

Thank you very much. I would like Professor X, Der Candy, Motok, and Mr. Popular to serve on the board.

We will review only the bodybuilding and nutrition articles.
Feel free to propogate ideas as well that are not provided here on T-mag. This review board will only be about steering people in the right direction.

Feel free to comment also on any bodybuilding events attended. I know I am going to the New York Pro (formerly Night of Champions) on May 10th. Anyone else going? I will also be at the Natural Long Island Experience in the Fall.
Our bodybuilding movement is in danger, folks and we will send anyone who tries to take it away from us…STRAIGHT TO HELL!

Bricknyce
Minister of Bodybuilding Propaganda
T-Mag Bodybuilding Forum

Thanks for the invite, however i feel i must decline - for the time being at least.

I have only 153 posts, 1 friend and 6 days under my belt!

I think the task should be saved for a longer serving resident.

Thankyou for the compliment.

Joe

I, too, agree that this sounds like an interesting idea. And michael’s opinion about the basic fundamentals making one succesful is also very valid. Perhaps something of an organizational commitee that outlines what category a person fits into and what type of programs (nutritional or bodybuilding) they should pursue.

I too think it’s an interesting idea, though honestly I don’t think that newbies are the audience that needs to be “warned”. Newbies will pretty much gain on any program (due to the shock that just getting in the gym and training will give to their system).

It’s more the intermediates who are a risk. Once those newbie gains are gone, then it starts to matter what program one is doing (and one’s goals will start to become more fine tuned as well).

One thing though is that without actually trying a program yourself, you really don’t know how well or poorly it will work. So, people on this board would have to be willing to actually give the program a fair shot.

Either that, or the board could just say something like “there is no proof that this program works, and to the best of our knowledge has not produced any noteworthy bodybuilding results” or something along those lines (which some of us have been saying for quite some time now).

If the author actually provides proof that their workouts work however (and by that I mean pictures of their clients who have built impressive, from a bodybuilding standpoint, physiques using their program/method), I think that even if it might not be what we might choose to do, we have to at least respect those results.

The newbies who want it bad enough don’t need a committee, especially one with Der Candy on it.

I never read any of the articles anyway; it’s not like you need anything more than the basics when it comes to bodybuilding. I’ve never seen pro’s (or any big bodybuilder for that matter)do things other than the staple exercises (and if you need a list of them then you’re not into bodybuilding).

[quote]Bricknyce wrote:
Thank you very much. I would like Professor X, Der Candy, Motok, and Mr. Popular to serve on the board.

We will review only the bodybuilding and nutrition articles.
Feel free to propogate ideas as well that are not provided here on T-mag. This review board will only be about steering people in the right direction.

Feel free to comment also on any bodybuilding events attended. I know I am going to the New York Pro (formerly Night of Champions) on May 10th. Anyone else going? I will also be at the Natural Long Island Experience in the Fall.
Our bodybuilding movement is in danger, folks and we will send anyone who tries to take it away from us…STRAIGHT TO HELL!

Bricknyce
Minister of Bodybuilding Propaganda
T-Mag Bodybuilding Forum[/quote]

Sorry, but how will having newbies on the board protect other newbs from bullshit, when some people have hardly a clue what they’re doing in the first place. No need to mention names, you know who you are.

Anyways, nobody is going to take my bodybuilding experience away, and I can say with 6 months of basic lifting, and a halfway decent brain, the avg trainee can decifer what is total bullshit, and what works. Sometimes the best advice is to stick to your gut and not even read the articles or follow authors programs.

I, and anyone with any sense, will ignore anything to do with Mr. Popular.

[quote]Sentoguy wrote:
I too think it’s an interesting idea, though honestly I don’t think that newbies are the audience that needs to be “warned”. Newbies will pretty much gain on any program (due to the shock that just getting in the gym and training will give to their system).

It’s more the intermediates who are a risk. Once those newbie gains are gone, then it starts to matter what program one is doing (and one’s goals will start to become more fine tuned as well).

One thing though is that without actually trying a program yourself, you really don’t know how well or poorly it will work. So, people on this board would have to be willing to actually give the program a fair shot.

Either that, or the board could just say something like “there is no proof that this program works, and to the best of our knowledge has not produced any noteworthy bodybuilding results” or something along those lines (which some of us have been saying for quite some time now).

If the author actually provides proof that their workouts work however (and by that I mean pictures of their clients who have built impressive, from a bodybuilding standpoint, physiques using their program/method), I think that even if it might not be what we might choose to do, we have to at least respect those results.[/quote]

I really agree…! Newbies have not a worry in the world, advanced trainers know what works for them and train accordingly, but intermediates are just out of newbie status often times, and they are learning how their body responds and recovers. This is a very long, difficult venture, and involves alot of patience as well as an extreme mind/body connection.

They need as much help as possible!

Im reading this article in a 501/302 tempo,while simultaneously hogging 2 other message boards. I learned this from the “TRUE” Master of Disaster. Can you guys help me? I have to go cause my stop watch says so…

How about you just go to the gym and train?

You really need a committee for that?

Dumb idea.

Der candy? The guy that ate like shit, didn’t train properly and then blamed the program creator?

[quote]rainjack wrote:
How about you just go to the gym and train?

You really need a committee for that?

Dumb idea.[/quote]

I agree… sounds like an excuse to give yourself a title to me. If someone is driven enough to do the work it takes to succeed in the gym, they will also be driven enough to do adequate research on their own. Plus the forum is here for people to ask questions. Just ignore, or take with a grain of salt, the answers from those that you don’t believe are very credible.

Also, people could become too dependent on such an innitiative, and rob themselves of some great findings if only they searched on their own.

[quote]CantStop wrote:
Der candy? The guy that ate like shit, didn’t train properly and then blamed the program creator?[/quote]

No, it was CantStop, the guy who read 1/3 of the text in a thread and then decided that he would rather tell people that the thread was about something different than what it actually was.

[quote]JFG12 wrote:
rainjack wrote:
How about you just go to the gym and train?

You really need a committee for that?

Dumb idea.

I agree… sounds like an excuse to give yourself a title to me. If someone is driven enough to do the work it takes to succeed in the gym, they will also be driven enough to do adequate research on their own. Plus the forum is here for people to ask questions. Just ignore, or take with a grain of salt, the answers from those that you don’t believe are very credible.

Also, people could become too dependent on such an innitiative, and rob themselves of some great findings if only they searched on their own.[/quote]

I do think that both of these are valid points. Simply observing what the big, strong people do (and even better yet, actually training with them) would go a loooooooong way towards reaching one’s goals of being big and strong.

No, you don’t actually need a committee for that. And simply understanding that very simple concept would/should eliminate most of the confusion that seems rampant in the BB’ing community these days.

“If you want to know the best way to the top of the mountain, ask the man who goes there every day”. Or, in this case, if you want to know how to get big and strong, ask the people who have gotten big and strong.

The problem with that though is, how many articles could you really write about it? I mean, basically you would run out of material in no time flat.

And, since just having a handful of articles to read doesn’t keep the attention of readers as well as having a couple thousand (arbitrary number, I don’t really know how many articles are currently on this site), the authors have to keep coming up with new ideas/programs/methods to write about.

Unfortunately, the rate of invention/innovation often exceeds the rate of actual testing those new methods/ideas/programs. In other words, the authors might be having to come up with programs at such a pace that they don’t really have the time to test their effectiveness. Compound that with the need to stand out, be original, give people something different, and constantly try to re-invent the wheel and you get a whole lot of confused and overly informed readers.

Only really advanced trainees will be able to wade through all of that information and decide what is useful for them (based on their goals, experience, preferences, etc…) and what isn’t.

For most they’d most likely be better off not reading the articles and just following the big guys’ lead. But, then this wouldn’t be much of a website if every article just said, “look at the big, strong (I’m purely talking about BB’ing, but pretty much any attributes could be inserted here) people do, and follow their lead”.

You idiots,
First off, I can’t believe that you guys thought that this was FULLY serious. Who in their right mind would, without joking, name himself Minister of Propaganda, as if I am the Joseph Goebbels of the bodybuilding world. :wink: And that I was going to send people to hell. I am not god either. LOL.

Anyway, I was HALF serious. And yes, SENTOGUY has a very important point. It is the intermediates that are in the most danger. As a beginner, thinking back, I actually did things pretty good. I followed a full body routine (and this was before I saw T-Mag) similar to the Arthur Jones and Ellington Darden routines that I made up myself. Then I switched to a Bill Starr routine. Then I switched to a bodypart split. I should have kept on that bodypart split.

The trouble started when I saw a Muscle Media issue featuring Charles Poliquin. I then typed his name into a search engine and found T-Mag. Although I learned a shit load from T-Mag throughout the years, this is when the trouble started. This is also when T-Mag had a few authors bashing bodybuilders. Then I thought to myself, these guys know what they are talking about, those bodybuilding guys do not.

I specifically remember an article titled Question of Strength in which Poliquin was asked why he did’nt shave his forearms. He said if he did shave them, he would also have his eyebrows done by Eduardo of New York and would hang out at bodybuilding contests, where the audience has an IQ of 4 or something and that it took 5 to bark, indicating that bodybuilders are morons.

That is pretty bad to hear for a kid who wants to be a bodybuilder at 18 years old without proper guidance. Then I tried his routines, Ian King’s routines, Don Alessi’s routines, Bryan Haycock. As stated in other threads, these were lost years. People in my gym thought I was withering away and I was.

Some guy in my gym once wanted to beat the shit out of me, my friend told me. It was this big jacked guy. He said I was making him nervous as hell with my frantic pacing between stations, looking at the clock, and just looking like a general nutcase!

I also read Pavel Tsatsouline, who was constantly going on and on about how bodybuilders are idiots too and that it’s all about doing scientific shit like creating myofibrillar hypertrophy and that sarcoplasmic hypertrophy is shit, amongst other scientific foo foo dust.

You had guys like Bryan Haycock and Scott Abel stating that HST and Innervation Training were the only vaild forms of training in the entire world! I am not lying. Scott Abel once said something to this effect years ago in an article. I might be able to find it. My training had spun out of control. I went from being the guy that people called “who Brad? the gym guy?” when describing me, to a guy that hardly worked out properly. It was awful.

Sometimes I did not even work out for weeks because nothing was happening.
After awhile, I started to notice that Poliquin was publishing his same articles in various magazines. He would have the same Q&A article running in Mind Muscle Power, Iron Man and T-Mag at the same time or at various times. Then I heard how this guy was banned from training certain NFL athletes!

I followed Ian King routines. People would see me doing 1 & 1/4 reps, 1 & 1/2 reps, 8 second eccentrics, skipping on one toe, supersetting, giant setting, drop setting, etc. Shit was just out of control!
You had Poliquin speaking of parenteral (IV) vitamin C therapy, jacking up the T levels of athletes from <300 to 1000+ ng/dL from boatloading on zinc, of having female athletes with thighs bigger than those of Tom Platz and Ronnie Coleman, of outlifting juiced to the gills IFBB pros that are 30 to 40 lbs heavier than him, of having new information products that never come out on time or never do come out, of cavemen eating monkey brains, of shelling out loads of money for bison burgers.

Poliquin won’t even talk to you while he is eating his salad at a seminar you paid him to go to. He’ll look back at the clock and say “what time is it there?” No joke, someone told me this.

You got talk of guys stating that you do not need curls and tricep extensions. You got Pavel stating you can build a nice body on a routine of only deadlifts, bench press, and curls three times per week. He had he Bear Routine. I had to go to a chiropractor because of deadlifting three times per week with 5 rep sets. Your body would be an absolute mess, wrought with injuries and postural imbalances.

I also once developed muscle imbalances that sent me to the chiro after doing weeks of German Volume training.
You got this guy Pavel and a host of others stating that bodybuilding is the worst thing to happen to strength training. Meanwhile these guys would be out of a job, considering that nearly all of their articles appear in bodybuilding magazines! Isn’t that something?

You got guys that wanted me to count the tempo of reps. I lost my mind and couldn’t even concentrate on my sets. You had Mentzer, who wanted you to do a 5 set workout every 4 days. You had that Power Factor thing by the Cisco guy.

You had Dan Duchaine, who was pretty good, stating that you could get big on low calorie, high nutrient diets. Dante said he followed that diet and gained 1 lb of muscle in one year.
My training life spun out of control for about 5 years. I know a lot of other guys whom this happened to as well, some that are even well known! Some of them wrote for this site. They said the more complicated they made things, the worse their clients progressed.

You got Pavel stating you do not need a warmup before a max set because people could respond to the KGB knocking on their door without a warmup. How would this feel with 500+ on your back or in your hands?
You got Paul Chek, I saw him speak personally for personal trainers. No one knew what he was talking about. He showed a slide of him doing an overhead squat on a Swiss Ball. He looked like a fuckin’ nut! He basically ripped the bodybuilding world into shreds during his lecture. He said the bench press was not functional too.

I heard this guy got hit in the face with a dumbbell during a Swiss Ball exercise. You got this guy talking in interviews about the qualities of our shits, our feces.
You got this guy Dr. Mercola stating we shouldn’t swim in pools, shouldn’t carry cell phones, shouldn’t shave our faces with a razor, shouldn’t use a microwave, and so on.

You got this guy Waterbury recommending to lift at >90% of the max for ten sets. Your CNS would be fried! 17 sets of singles would put some powerlifters in the hospital.

Your post is far too long for my processor to handle.

[quote]GetSwole wrote:
Your post is far too long for my processor to handle.[/quote]

Haha, yeah, paragraphs Bricknyce. Remember? Paragraphs. :wink:

Poliquin on shaving his forearms:

Shave my forearms? If shaving body parts was my thing, I would be parading around the EAS booth at the Arnold Classic with plucked eyebrows and hair groomed by Eduardo of Manhattan, saying stuff to my cronies like, “Get the plane ready.” This would no doubt impress many members of the bodybuilding audience, many of whom have an average IQ that’s lower than that of a WWF audience. That is, an IQ of 5 (it takes 6 to bark).

Its amazing how this guy is still held in high regard by fans of bodybuilding and training like one.

The funny thing if you look at his popeye pic from a few articles ago that TC posted,his forearms are shaved.

I have to go pump the gf in a decided 2112 tempo ala Poliquin and Rush.