Testosterone Muscle: The 10-Year Anniversary
by Lou Schuler

Let me start by saying this about my gig at Testosterone Muscle:
It would be a dream job, except for the crazy, out-of-control egos
of my employers.
Take that 10-year anniversary celebration last May. Have you
ever seen such a display of chest-thumping, pelvis-pumping
self-congratulation? It's a wonder Tim and TC didn't tear
multiple rotator-cuff muscles with all those hubristic pats to
their own ostentatiously hypertrophied backs.
Oh, wait. That didn't really happen, did it?
When I asked TC why there was no celebration of the site's
first 10 years online, his answer was uncharacteristically subdued:
"I toyed with the idea." Which is a humble way of saying,
"It would've been fun, but we had better things to
do."
Like, say, hiring me as editorial director in July, and then
adding staff writer Nate Green in August. We joined a staff that
includes TC, our editor-in-chief, writer Chris Shugart, full-time
copyeditors Matthew Weeldryer and Chris Colucci, and Figure
Athlete editor Olesya Novik, along with graphic artists
extraordinaire Rob Grishow, Corey Blake, and Phil Abel, and Senior
Web Designer/Internet Manager Matthew Rinehart, and Senior Application
Developer/System Administrator Josh Szmajda, and Application
Developer Zac Bradshaw.
Think about that for a moment: seven full-time writers and
editors and a sizable full-time managerial/support staff on a
single-sponsor online magazine that pays for its content but
doesn't charge readers to see it. Nor does Testosterone accept
outside advertising. I can't say for sure that it's a
unique business model, but I don't know of anything else that
comes close. And if I did, I'd marvel that it had survived 10
years.
But not only has Testosterone survived, it's kept 10
years' worth of content free to anyone who clicks on it, never
changed its single-sponsor business model, maintained its
entertaining and iconoclastic editorial voice, and kept alive the
magazine's original "WTF, we'll try anything
once" spirit of adventure.
What originally drew me to the site in 1998 is what made me want
to work here in 2008, and it's the model all of us on the
staff strive to build upon.
To me, that's worth celebrating.


The Poliquin Printables
My Testosterone experience started with a heads-up from Mike
Mejia. Mike was a personal trainer working in Manhattan, where we
did our photo shoots for Men's Health. I had joined the
magazine as fitness editor in 1998, and Mike quickly became our
most trusted source for training information. He also helped us
supervise our exercise photography.
A magazine photo shoot is among the most excruciatingly dull
experiences you can put yourself through. Back before digital
photography became standard, my job at a shoot involved hour after
hour of watching a half-naked male model pretend to lift weights
while a photographer clicked roll after roll of film. The only
thing more boring than watching it in real time was going through
the slides two weeks later to figure out which of dozens of nearly
identical pictures was slightly more print-worthy than the
others.
When the camera wasn't clicking, there were hours of
standing around while assistants adjusted lights or waited for
Polaroids to develop so they could decide if the lights needed even
more adjusting.
The pure tedium of those pre-digital shoots left Mike and me
with hours to talk about training. A lot of those conversations in
'98 were about articles we read on Testosterone.net. After
Mike told me about the site, which launched May 15, I subscribed to
the site's newsletter. Soon I found myself looking forward to
those Friday-afternoon emails, with links to the week's new
articles.
I'm pretty sure I was the first mainstream journalist to
read Testosterone religiously, and it wasn't long before its
influence began to show up in the workout features of Men's
Health.
Before, it was rare to see a truly innovative, interesting, or
even functional exercise in a newsstand fitness magazine.
"New" exercises tended to be silly variations on
movements everyone knew — a cable front raise performed while
lying down in front of the weight stack, for example. (To anyone
who actually went into a gym and tried that one, I apologize.) I
cringe when I look back on some of the workouts that appeared in Men's Fitness and Men's Health on my
watch.
But thanks to Testosterone, things began to change. In the
October '98 issue of MH, for example, an article
written by Mike quoted Charles Poliquin, and featured exercises
like Cuban presses and plyometric push-ups between boxes.



Poliquin saved us from ourselves.
Sometime in the early '00s I had a conversation with a
journalist friend whom I hadn't been in contact with since my
days at Men's Fitness. He was surprised to hear I was
still working the fitness beat, and even more surprised to hear
that I wasn't absolutely fucking miserable with the course my
career had taken.


"You told me that once you get beyond the whole
machines-vs.-free-weights thing, there aren't too many new
ways to describe how to do a curl," he reminded me. "And
unless someone reinvents human physiology sometime soon, you
thought this gig would eventually be a dead end."
The quote was accurate, but it still caught me off guard.
I'd blocked out memories of the days when I viewed training
articles as a monochromatic loop of biceps curls, bench presses,
and ab crunches.
Thanks to TESTOSTERONE, the world I wrote about now seemed
infinite.


There Are No Small Exercises, Only Small Fitness Journalists
The human body, of course, is the same collection of flesh and
fluid that Shakespeare described as "the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals," and, in the next breath, "the
quintessence of dust." (Which description more closely matches
your perception probably depends on how often you listen to AM
radio.)
But my view of how to train the human body had expanded
exponentially. After reading this article,
I knew about Louie Simmons and his radically different approach to
training for strength and power. It took a while, but eventually
phrases like "dynamic effort" and "max effort"
showed up on my workout logs. And not long after that, I hit PRs in
all my lifts. Though my numbers are undoubtedly humble compared to
yours, I thought it was pretty cool to be stronger than ever in my
mid-40s.
Thanks to this article by Ian King, I learned the difference between training to build
your body and training to trash it.
Thanks to any number of articles by Poliquin, I had something
new to try every time I went into the gym. Arm exercises on a Swiss
ball?
Sure, why not? Snatch-grip deadlifts off a platform?
Worth a try.
But if there's a single article that changed my approach to
training — and, by extension, the way I assigned, edited, and
wrote articles about training — it's this one by Don Alessi.
The title is "Booming Biceps, Part 1," but it was the
subhead that grabbed me: "How to unleash your core strength to
achieve explosive arm development." The key to its impact was
this single line: "Once your core is stabilized, priority is
placed on the muscles further up the line."
The article ran in October 2001, and although it took a while
for the message to sink in, the idea that everything we want from
our workouts starts at the center of the body became more important
to my view of training with each passing year. It's why I
jumped at the chance to edit Mark Verstegen's book, Core
Performance,
which came out in 2004, and why the training programs in the books
I've worked on since then have such a strong emphasis on basic
structural development and spend hardly any time on direct work for
the biceps and triceps.


Alessi: a man of core values.