Planet Muscle

There seems to be an enormous amount of exclamatory ads in bodybuilding, all shouting, nauseatingly, at the top of their obnoxious lungs. Every damn ad promises to slam 50 pounds of muscle on you in 2 weeks. Everybody yells in print over everybody else. It’s kind ofridiculous Jeff, and your magazine, really, is not too much better, although no one beats the women you have in Planet Muscle, that’s for sure! But, it's hard (no pun intended) to tell product wheat from chaff in the advertising. By the way, you must have balls to write what you do about the IFBB. Does BSN make as good of products as their ads imply?

Big balls? I started using steroids at age 27. While I benched close to 600-pounds, my testicles left me before I got to 500-pounds.

Ronnie Coleman certainly keeps getting bigger and bigger on BSN stuff so they have got to be doing something right. BSN is doing a bigger promotional campaign (with Ronnie), than Weider ever did, with anybody. BSN is the big ofthe big. They own hardcore and it’s where hardcore guys buy. They advertise in all the magazines a lot, but they have risen incredibly fast,not because they throw money around. There are plenty of companies that do that and are in stagnation or decline, for varying reasons.

BSN seems to me, to have a definite edge in product quality, but even that is not it. I mean DYA, SST, Beverly and Brandenburg are regarded as top of the line in quality. But, to grow large, fast, you need an aggressive model, but with effective and targeted marketing. More important, you need critical vision on what to do and what to become. BSN is very much in touch, very fast, faster than anybody else in fact, with what lifters and athletes demand product-wise. They really have led the way with nitric oxide technology. BSN has several parties who have this vision and intelligence. Rob Thoburn is there now and Rob has worked in the industry for most of the big companies over the years, including MuscleTech and MET-Rx. He told me