The youngins might not know what bodybuilding was like before the internet but when I started getting interested back in 1994, I remember clinging on to every word I read in FLEX, Musclemag and Ironman and Muscle Media 2000. Whenever we had our local show Las Vegas Classic in town, it was big for the bodybuilding community and seeing the pros was a big deal! Obviously, cause I was a young lad, I was impressionable and naive. I knew nothing about the dark side of bodybuilding and didn't even know bodybuilding had a dark side. Until 1996 when my buddy gave me two books called the World Anabolic Review and the Anabolic Reference Guide (old schoolers will remember these). I must have read those books at least 10-15 times and referred to them a countless amount of times.
But after reading them, it changed the way I viewed bodybuilding. I felt like I knew something all my friends didn't by this time I was 16 or 17 years old and was still buying in to Weider's Mega Mass BS. I thought the key to looking like Dorian was eating chicken breast and rice, working out hard and taking my Muscletech Stack, Creatine, Hydroxycut and Acetoblin (sp?). Because of my halfway decent genetics I made it to 195lbs at around 10-12% bf by the time I was 19. After using various other legal supplements with little results and being too afraid and too broke to juice, I knew I had to figure something out.
I really enjoyed reading the magazines religiously and looked forward to the newest articles, contest coverage and gossip. Then came the popularity of the internet. Back in 98 I was lucky enough to have access to the internet as I was stationed overseas. In my pursuit to find out more about bodybuilding and getting bigger, I came across various boards Getbig, EliteFitness, and Anabolex. My world was changed. I found out about what pros were allegedly taking, what they really ate and how much they really ate. I received contest coverage the day of the show rather than the month or two after the show. Theories on training, and contest preparation were exchanged vigerously and year by year after 1999 I found the magazines to be more and more obsolete.
This of course, wasn’t good news for the owners of the bodybuilding magazines because their world they had carefully constructed over the past couple decades was slowly crumbling. Suddenly everyone was telling stories of unsavory activities pros participated in, in their private time to earn money, the insane amount of performance enhancement drugs, the use of recreational drugs, unclean eating that contradicted the magazines, and the very unglamorous life that of bodybuilders that weren’t in the top six in the Mr. Olympia.
I don’t have numbers but I’d love to see the numbers of how many magazines were sold in 98 vs 08 in the big magazines. It’s very difficult for bodybuilding to hide anything anymore, because it’s such a small fringe “sport” news travels very fast on the websites to the gym and then to the general public. It’s good because at least the truth is out there and those that choose to believe it have the info in their hands and it’s bad because young men looking to “live the dream” might take more risks to their health. The magazines and supplement companies, know that suckers are born every min so they still promise results that will never be delivered and use bodybuilders to get this message across. There isn’t too much about the pro and amateur levels of bodybuilding that people don’t know anymore because of the internet and bodybuilding message boards. From crooked promoters, illegal activities, pros cycles, who sleeping with who, who sells drugs or has been busted, shows via the internet and instant contest coverage.
