Bodybuilding forums can be a great place to try and learn about specific aspects of training that interest you, such as exercises, diet, supplements, and so forth. But the problem is, they can also be a huge waste of time and lead you astray.
True, it’s easy to get sucked into the forums, and endless hours disappear; time which could probably have been spent doing more important things in life, but that’s not what I mean. What I’m saying is, there is simply so much junk involved in bodybuilding forums that, unless you’ve been around for a long while and trust the people your taking advice from, you can be seriously misled.
I’ve seen all kinds of strange things in bodybuilding forums. Some of it is absolutely ridiculous. Yet, what is most surprising to me is, peoples willingness to accept the impossible.
Many times I’ve seen people come in making outrageous claims. Natural gains of 60lb of solid muscle mass, no body fat, in less than a year and so forth. Yet… rather than ‘flame’ those making the claims, which to anyone with any common sense at all are absolute nonsense, people seem to love to believe it’s all true. I put this down to the fact that people involved in bodybuilding, are so desperate to make better gains, they’d rather believe anything is possible than to believe simple facts and listen to logic and reason.
It’s a problem which runs right through bodybuilding, and is amplified by forums. People make claims, people lie and mislead… and it all happens on forums. Not only do you have to contend with the multitudes of obvious steroid users who would never, ever admit to getting their physiques through artificial chemical assistance, but you have people who know absolutely nothing about bodybuilding, dispensing advice, giving reviews of products they’ve never tried, and vouching for people who are talking garbage.
Forums can be very misleading, and also cause you to lose a great deal of time because they constantly present new workouts and ideas to try out. While that is a good thing in a sense, it can encourage newbie’s to skip from one program to the next, week in week out, following a mishmash myriad of routines without any solid regime whatsoever. And inevitably, their progress will suffer as a result of it.
My advice would be, forget the forums for now. Get on a good, solid regime which is proven to work, and when you learn more about bodybuilding, what’s real, what’s not, then checking out the forums and weeding out the nuggets of information which ring true to you will be much easier. Otherwise, you can find yourself just wasting your time.