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Exercise magazines are made to inspire people to build muscle or improve their fitness. But a new study says they may be backfiring in certain cases.
Some gym owners don't like keeping muscle magazines around. They might fill people with false hope.
Jordan Valley Athletic Club owner Ranae Plumb said, "Maybe one person can take an article and achieve great success with it, and another one can do the same thing and not achieve the same success because of their own body make-up."
Plumb says she's seen clients ask for certain supplements, hoping to see the results they see in magazines. Those clients usually end up disappointed.
"They're not going to achieve it unless they do exactly what is done in that magazine," she said.
Some of the people pictured are paid to work out several times a day. A University of Wisconsin in Whitewater study says women who read exercise magazines while working out feel more depressed and anxious, which could make them not want to work out. But, University of Utah Exercise and Sports Science doctoral candidate Nick Galli says men feel it, too.
"We have similar studies that show that men who are exposed to the idealized male body, that being the wide shoulders, big arms and six-pack abs, they actually do have higher depression, higher anxiety after they view those images," he said.
Galli says many people understand that either the pictures in muscle magazines aren't real, or that the people pictured might be taking illegal substances to look how they do. But other people don't take that into account.
"If men are looking at this, and they have it in their head that this is actually attainable, there could be a problem," he said.
Human performance consultant Dr. Bruce Jackson said, "There's always somebody thinner, always somebody stronger, always somebody richer and always somebody smarter."
But, that's not to say reading these magazines have any inherent dangers. Jackson says you just need to train your mind not to compare your results with what you read.
"You have to set the stage when you read a magazine like that to say, ‘What's inside a magazine like this [just] shows me what's possible for the human body,'" he said.
Jackson says if a man starts to compare himself to a picture he sees, that man should try to remember he may be better than the model in other aspects. Who knows, maybe the man in the picture has an I.Q. of 60.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
