Fitness is now playing out like a scene from Fantasy Island. The images that pummel your eyeballs on social media, while intoxicating, are about as authentic as a Lance Armstrong interview on sportsmanship. Young men, juiced up like genetically modified watermelons, ‘flexing’ with all the grace of a catamite that has endured Caesar’s civil war, anavar and Trenbolone seeping through their pores like sweat from Bill Clinton’s palms at a teen beauty pageant. Women, who have earned their fifth dan in the dark martial art of Airbursh-Fu, ‘sculpting’ their physiques with the aid of some Silicon Vall ..read more

Two things every bloke in the gym wants: the biggest biceps and the biggest bench press. Well, believe it or not, these two things actually synergise quite nicely. I know what you’re thinking, “Do you even lift bro? Bench pressing doesn’t work the biceps!” Well hold fire with the hashtag GymFails and save your judgment until you’ve read the facts. Not just a one way street We asked an actual expert for a view (yeah we do know a few) and Craig Salmon, master tutor from Premier Globals Online Personal Training Courses says, “Firstly, anyone who has really, truly maxed out on their bench press h ..read more

I remember it like it was yesterday. One afternoon in my university gym, when I probably should have been in a lecture or spreading E. Coli around a lab, I had just finished my third drop set of triceps pushdowns and I thought I was THE MAN. But immediately after I’d finished I turned around to see one of the rugger buggers incline DB pressing the 40kg dumbbells for reps. Shit. It seemed no matter how much I pushed trough high reps of bench press, dips, flyes and pushdowns, I couldn’t progress my strength on the big lifts. I say big lifts, I was OBSESSED with a big bench press at the time. Thi ..read more

Until fairly recently, protein powder was marketed to a very specific demographic: men who read bodybuilding magazines, could quote scenes from Pumping Iron verbatim, and would happily bathe in a bucket of badger shit if it meant adding an extra inch to the circumference of their bicep. These days, protein supplements have achieved mainstream appeal, and pills and powders crowd supermarket aisles along with cereals, cans of baked beans and bog roll. Products from Optimum Nutrition, Grenade and Maximuscle are just as likely to be found in the shopping baskets of wide-buttocked, chain-smoking ho ..read more

You know that kid at school who wore a cape, dressed his rabbit as Hitler and once, as a dare, took a shit in his own backpack? Well that’s basically YouTube. These annoying tossers on a global scale, chasing their moment in the spotlight, blighting the internet with videos that would insult the intelligence of a brain-damaged warthog. A great deal of this sewerage falls under the label of ‘fitness’, hence my previous article/diatribe. Although uniformly wretched, I did, admittedly, find some of these preening pricks oddly watchable, but in the same way that, say, a slow-motion ..read more

Approximately 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. As anyone who’s clicked “filter by recent results” will testify, the vast majority of this content is proof, if it were needed, that humankind is hurtling towards its inexorable demise, and that 200 years from now the last of our knuckle-dragging descendants will crawl back into the sea, never to be seen again. While this soul-crushing avalanche of dreck does not discriminate (all languages, ages and topics are catered for), one of the biggest contributors is, without doubt, the fitness industry.    If this content ..read more