Maximum Fitness Photoshoot: Day 1

A little background...

Maximum Fitness is a Canadian fitness magazine for men. It's similar to MH and Men's Fitness.

Maximum Fitness (MaxFit) is published by the same company that does Oxygen and MuscleMag. And MaxFit used to be called AHF (American Health & Fitness).

For each issue (they do 4 or 5 per year), I write the main workout for MaxFit. And each time I do so, I have to go out to the magazine photoshoot and make sure the exercises for the workout are done correctly.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how widely distributed this magazine is across the USA. But, you can at least check out some of the stuff online (although they don't post my workouts) here: www.maxfitmag.com (you will find a leg training bit from Alwyn Cosgrove).

Anyway, at these photo shoots, I coach the model and am also able to flip through some of the latest fitness magazines, all while the poor model is photographed for 8 hours.

Fitness modeling is a tough job.

Imagine performing multiple sets of 3-5 reps per exercise, for up to 20 exercises over the course of an 8 hour shoot, and having to hold the bottom position of each exercise for up to 10 seconds (or in the case of a chinup, the top part of the exercise).

These guys are spent at the end of the day. And sore the next day, even though the weights are generally much lighter than they normally lift (and yes, all of the weights are real!).

Too bad the poor model, (a great guy named Zach Titus from Montana), has to come back and do it all over again tomorrow - in order to finish up all the exercises for the workout.

So on Friday, again, I'll be back out in Mississauga (a suburb of Toronto) making sure Zach has perfect form on every exercise so that our readers know how to do the exercises correctly.

By the way, the latest edition of Maximum Fitness should be in stores now. And in this issue, there is a sports theme. So the workout I designed is to help men improve their strength and conditioning for sports (and women - even though its a guys mag, I wouldn't change the workout too much for a woman with the same goals).

And to finish off, here's an answer to one of the most common questions about magazines:

Q: Why are there so many ads?

Answer (that I basically stole from www.LouSchuler.com):
The more ads you have, the more content you can put in the magazine. So even while most of the advertised supplements don't even work, and sometimes are called out as bogus by the magazine articles, it is these supplement ads that allow for the magazine to exist in the first place.

More to come tomorrow,

CB