T-Nation 2009 Kinda Begins to Suck

[quote]GuerillaZen wrote:
Chris Shugart wrote:
No worries. We’ll be sure to give Mr. Level 0 a full refund… And his other username too.

I don’t necessarily agree with the OP and I don’t even come here for the articles, but his opinion has merit regardless of his purchasing history. It is very unprogressional, in my opinion, for a member of the staff to be taking this stance. Basically, what you just said was “we might have given you crap, but at least it was free crap.” I am a level 3 and have purchased things while not actually logged into the site as well, does that make my opinion more valid?

When you run a business there is always going to be criticism, no matter what. Comes with the territory. You would be better served to handle it with class, maturity and dignity, or not bother responding. Whipping it out and trying to measure doesn’t prove anything.[/quote]

Yes your opinion as a customer is more valid.

what do you do for a living?

[quote]GuerillaZen wrote:
Chris Shugart wrote:
No worries. We’ll be sure to give Mr. Level 0 a full refund… And his other username too.

I don’t necessarily agree with the OP and I don’t even come here for the articles, but his opinion has merit regardless of his purchasing history. It is very unprogressional, in my opinion, for a member of the staff to be taking this stance. Basically, what you just said was “we might have given you crap, but at least it was free crap.” I am a level 3 and have purchased things while not actually logged into the site as well, does that make my opinion more valid? When you run a business there is always going to be criticism, no matter what. Comes with the territory. You would be better served to handle it with class, maturity and dignity, or not bother responding. Whipping it out and trying to measure doesn’t prove anything.[/quote]

I probably would have responded in the manner Chris did also. I mean who does the OP think he is? If the content doesn’t appeal to him. There’s many sites, where he would be better off…sherdog.com, rosstraining.com.

Plus there’s only so much you can write about, like many have mentioned most info/articles are recycled all the time from years ago. There hasn’t been anything real ground breaking at all. I, Bodybuilder sounds interesting, yet seems like the op has many other goals then bodybuilding. Which is what this site is primarily about…well for most of the vets I mean.

Wow, Shugart being called out for unprofessional conduct! What an unexpected turn of events.

[quote]anonym wrote:
Wow, Shugart being called out for unprofessional conduct! What an unexpected turn of events.[/quote]

When this thread is over, someone is gonna have their membership revoked. And it won’t be me! Be damned if the SAMA forum is taken away from me!

hides

[quote]GuerillaZen wrote:
Chris Shugart wrote:
No worries. We’ll be sure to give Mr. Level 0 a full refund… And his other username too.

I don’t necessarily agree with the OP and I don’t even come here for the articles, but his opinion has merit regardless of his purchasing history. It is very unprogressional, in my opinion, for a member of the staff to be taking this stance. Basically, what you just said was “we might have given you crap, but at least it was free crap.” I am a level 3 and have purchased things while not actually logged into the site as well, does that make my opinion more valid?

When you run a business there is always going to be criticism, no matter what. Comes with the territory. You would be better served to handle it with class, maturity and dignity, or not bother responding. Whipping it out and trying to measure doesn’t prove anything.[/quote]

It’s Shugart, he’s fanatically defensive, but we all tend to love AND hate him anyways, he writes well, has some cool recipes, but hates on bb’ers over 200lbs. Who says you have to love everything about a person? I respect the Shugart’s hammer, and I think he has some solid observations on life, love, happiness, bodybuilding, and nutrition. TC is still my favorite staff member, but we all have a place in our hearts for Chrissy boy. - but not the V-Diet :wink:

As for the OP, reguardless of the qualitity of this years articles, (I haven’t been reading them as much myself to give full honesty) if you’ve been reading the site since 2005, you don’t have much more to learn bud. All that’s left to do is get big and strong and figure it out for yourself. No articles are going to fix anything you can’t figure out with hard work in the gym, kitchen, and bed. You also forget there are hundreds (thousands?) of articles in the archive that are “better?” Please don’t tell me you’ve read them all, because if you have, why the hell aren’t you huge yet?

Ha, one of the article armchair critics graced a different part of the site. Surprising.

[quote]GJA_BOSTON wrote:
Take the bad with the good and be happy Tim and TC dont start charging for monthly access, I would be surprised if they haven’t at least thought about it. [/quote]

They should charge a penny a post…good lord…think of the money they’d make off of Mak, Print and Imhungry!

yes because i, bodybuilder sucked. rolls eyes

[quote]Kerley wrote:
yes because i, bodybuilder sucked. rolls eyes

[/quote]

I got my Anaconda in the mail today…but it ate my dog :frowning:

good old internet

I don’t have a problem with Chris or any other author on the site (probably because I rarely read the articles anymore), but Biotest has good products that stand on their own. My point was simple: if this guy doesn’t like the articles that have been posted - who cares? He’s free not to read them. He should also be free to express his opinion. He is not going to hurt Biotest or T-Nation in any way whatsoever and there is nothing to be gained by staff attacking him. That is all.

[quote]GuerillaZen wrote:
I don’t have a problem with Chris or any other author on the site (probably because I rarely read the articles anymore), but Biotest has good products that stand on their own. My point was simple: if this guy doesn’t like the articles that have been posted - who cares? He’s free not to read them. He should also be free to express his opinion. He is not going to hurt Biotest or T-Nation in any way whatsoever and there is nothing to be gained by staff attacking him. That is all. [/quote]

You obviously don’t run a business…

OP - find somewhere else that puts out better shit and report back.

Good luck

[quote]KenMahler wrote:
most articles this year sucked big time…
bodypart-splits, 3 sets of 10 best for hypertrophy and dropping your O-Lifts all the time…pulease![/quote]

I have to think that maybe an MMA fighter/pro wrestler/actor who (based on pictures) may or may not actually lift weights isn’t exactly the target audience for the articles on TMUSCLE.

I’m leaning towards yeah, it’s you.

Bud, you’re a fighter and I respect that you have the balls to step into the cage… but… don’t come into this house and attack the articles that, from what I can tell, are either providing info you don’t need or are giving advice you’re simply not following.

You want to make more of a case and say what you don’t like, that’s fine. But don’t throw out a weak, baseless attack like an armchair critic. (Try to) take the author’s to task with specifics of the points you disagree on.

I don’t think there was any hole in Chris’s response. He didn’t say the articles were crap, he didn’t insult the OP, he basically just encouraged the people who spend hours on the internet hunting down hilarious pictures of jesus giving people the middle finger not to get too worked up. I don’t see anything unprofessional.

There’s going to be someone out there who is on this site 12 hours a day screaming “You bastard! I worship every author on this site! If you know so much that their articles are irrelevant, where are your legions of successful trainees? OR even your own training success! I’ll eat your children for this!”

And Shugart expected it, smoothed it over for the maniac, and responded to the OP basically by saying, “If you don’t like it, fine.”

That said, there are a couple of things I would like to see changed on T-Nation. Particularly, I would like to see more Scott Abel articles. He seems to advocate a near-vegetarian diet of some kind on his site, but T-Nation hasn’t published any articles on diet from him beyond an allusion in the “5 things that drive me nuts” article, which was apparently edited for length - which is apparently common among all his articles.

I would like to see Charles Poliquin’s cock sucked less. I would like to see more articles on complete programming: options on how to compose a program for this year, as alluded to in Cosgrove’s recent article where he talks about deciding what he wants this month, then this week, then today instead of obsessing over which exercises for which bodypart are going to be used today.

So far, I’ve read about undulating periodization borrowed from Westside and Accumulation - Intensification - (maybe, for performance athletes) Explosion from CT. I would like to see more author’s takes on that. It is another hole with no bottom, but at least it hasn’t been beaten to death as much as high protein diets, different forms of “workout enhancing secrets” like cluster sets, wave loading, and so on.

I would also like to see the physical layout of the site changed so that the pictures are displayed inline with the text again. TC’s articles always have some picture(s) of some ridiculously hot women in them, and when they were in WITH the text, at least I could scroll past them and actually read the article… or had the option.

As it is, I have pretty much stopped reading the articles themselves because, I mean, why? TC’s articles are mainly for inspiration and contemplation. Not much is more fun to contemplate or more inspirational than that last picture of Jamie Eason.

I don’t read the articles but I’d be willing to bet 2009 articles > 2009 members.

LOL @ Lanky… I KNEW I should have joined earlier instead of just lurking all those years… now I’m stuck as an '09 member forever… hopefully the 2010 class will be worse (is that possible???)

[quote]1ranger3 wrote:
LOL @ Lanky… I KNEW I should have joined earlier instead of just lurking all those years… now I’m stuck as an '09 member forever… hopefully the 2010 class will be worse (is that possible???)[/quote]

Why would you wish the end of humanity upon us? That’s extremely selfish of you. Just for that you belong grouped in the oh-niners clan :wink:

[quote]BigBartDawg66 wrote:
OP - find somewhere else that puts out better shit and report back.

Good luck[/quote]

And in the meantime don’t worry about coming back and complaining some more.

Polo, my apologies for my selfishness… that was extremely thoughtless of me… hangs head