Trust no one.
[quote]jtrinsey wrote:
Christian Thibaudeau wrote:
Thanks, I do appreciate that. I do have quite a few products out there so I was really insecure about your post. 
My goal is to teach people and not make a buck from them. So I do encourage anybody who is not fully satisfied with any of my books to contact me and voice their concerns.
…and I definitly think he’s sincere when he says this.
Class fuckin act.[/quote]
I was about to post the same thing.
[quote]TShaw wrote:
This is where a site like T-Nation can help: post a thread asking for input before buying.[/quote]
I agree 100%.
You’ll get many opinions, and probably contradicting ones too, but one can see where those opinions are coming from, and see if they make sense before forming their own opinions.
I think it would be tough to pull the wool over the eyes of most T-Nation regulars all at once. There’s too much brutal honesty here (IMO).
So far I haven’t wanted to take any product back that I bought advertised here, and I’m extremely glad for buying a few of the products that I did (without sounding too much like I’m kissing butt).
[quote]Dweezil wrote:
This is a site run by a supplement company. You have to remain aware of that. It’s obviously superior to other outlets, but still.
You should let personal (or as close to personal as you can get) experience with a person determine it for you. I’ve experienced nothing but quality with Thib and Berardi, and Neanderthal No More helped me immensely when it was released so I’ve got nuttin’ but luv for Cressey and Robertson.
Also I am convinced Dan John and Mike Golic are the same person, so clearly I trust him (them?) with my life.[/quote]
I dont think i could possible agree with a post more, Thib and Berardi have pretty much been the ones who turned me away from the ass backwards thinking that i got from bodybuilding magazines, and the Neanderthal articles were fantastic.
And the Golic comment, classic.
[quote]StevenF wrote:
Trust no one. [/quote]
Exactly.
Make your own opinion based on the character of the person, the quality of info and the free stuff they offer as samples (Is it any good?). That and word of mouth. If you hear alot of good things from those not affiliated in any way… whether they used it, or they knew someone who has, then its usually good.
If you hear bad, or nothing… STAY AWAY.
My $0.02. That’s what I do anyways. Maybe you should make your own method too.
[quote]brucevangeorge wrote:
StevenF wrote:
Trust no one.
Exactly.
Make your own opinion based on the character of the person, the quality of info and the free stuff they offer as samples (Is it any good?). That and word of mouth. If you hear alot of good things from those not affiliated in any way… whether they used it, or they knew someone who has, then its usually good.
If you hear bad, or nothing… STAY AWAY.
My $0.02. That’s what I do anyways. Maybe you should make your own method too.[/quote]
I’m usually more worried about hearing nothing that criticism for most things.
Sometimes you’ll get criticism for books like supertraining “good information, but crappy structure” which lets you know it may be worth buying if there’s no similar books out.
The other thing that bothers me are people who review these things and are just mad at the world. Check out some of Berardi’s scrawny to brawny reviews on Amazon. Holy cow, they act like he’s killed thier first born child!
If anybody else has read this book and feels differently please say so, but I have found a book that I believe really sucks. I am glad I didn’t pay for it, although somebody I know did.
I got the book off elitefts. It was a rotator cuff book, I think it was called rotator cuff solution.
why it sucked:
- The guy who wrote the book sells it on his site for $10 cheaper as an ebook. You pay $10 more plus shipping and all you get is some pretty crappy copied pages with a cheap spiral binding.
- This book’s content is terrible. You can get 100 times more info from the Neandrethal (sp?) series on this site, for free no less.
- The book offers nothing new and does a poor job explaining what it does contain. It wouldn’t be so bad had not the elitefts description make it seem like a miracle book.
Please purchase this book at your own risk. You have been warned.
[quote]orangecola wrote:
I have always been happy with the products I have gotten from John
Berardi, Martin Rooney, and Joe DeFranco. With that said, I have a complaint about the other strength coaches out there. I will keep this anonymous so it is not considered a flame and thereby deleted.
With all the cross promotion going on out there I no longer know who to trust. Some of the products myself and my friends have recieved recently have been sub par to say the best.
My buddy recently bought for a large sum of money, a book from one of these strength coaches with a “religious” title. The book was “hundreds of pages” long “filled” with quality information. Not!
The book had at least a hundred pages or so of worthless exercise descriptions. The worst part was how the book was stretched out. The margins were several inches out on each side, 3 or more inches in on each side. The book by rights should have been less that 100 pages.
There seems to be a coaching clique out there these days who all seem to follow the same pied piper of marketing. Their motto seems to be “Charge the crap out of people” and don’t care about the production quality or quantitiy of info while at the same time stating it is all about the “information”.
Some of these products seem to cost very little to produce, with poorly printed and binded books with poor photos and home video type production.
It pisses me off.
I would complain about their annoying amount of emails (seeming one every 3 days) anouncing some “new” product they have come up with. I won’t complain about that because if you ask them to take you off their list they are really good about doing that. [/quote]
You don’t know whom to trust.
Not who.
Sorry, this shit drives me nuts.
****Positive review
Joe Defranco’s super strength
Well produced and very informative without trying to impress you with a lot of overly academic information.
When used with the articles on T-Nation and his ask Joe column, this product fills in a lot of gaps. This mainly has to do with the large number of exercises shot real time with his athletes. Comes with a FREE mini manual (something other product pushers should learn from and not try to squeeze every time out of already overpriced products). The manual will also fill in some gaps.
In all, I would say this product is close to being worth the price. It could have been better if it was made out to be a “skinny bastards” DVD which included all aspects of the skinny bastard program (diet, agility and speed work) and not just dynamic warm up and strength exercises.
For the money, it would not have been too much to ask for Defranco to put in an additional hour and a half of footage showing three of his athletes go through a workout from start to finish with Joe or one of his henchmen taking the athlete through the workout and giving corrections or coaching as needed. I feel this would give you a much better understanding of how Defrancos system works and would have made the buyer feel like they got more than their moneys worth.
Outside of the above, there are only a couple real beefs I have with the DVD. During one segment of the video Joe wears a Bada Bing t-shirt and this comes across as very low class, especially since a lot of coaches, parents and kids are probably going to see this.
Joe also bemoans about all the emails he gets on how to do exercises and how people are wasting his time. This did not come off as funny or cool, instead it made him come off as arrogant (not in a good way). Defranco needs to remember that the people who annoy him also contribute the money for him to drive around his pimped out SUV and wear matching red sneakers with his red shorts.
There are different ways to go about saying something and Defranco should have gone another way with it. Also, some of the form in some of the lifts leaves a little to be desired, especially the guy who insists on doing max effort low bar squats with his shirt off. Not only is that dangerous, his squats look like modified good mornings. Plus the whole shirtless thing really screams of insecurity
Last but not least, Joe’s eyebrows are very disturbing. I can’t explain it, you’re going to have to watch the DVD, but they are over styled. He looks like a jacked up version of a bald Angelica Houston. After his admitting he watches blow out, it really makes me wonder.
Keep in mind, you narcissistic bastards, that not every book was written for YOU specifically.
I walk up to CT and ask him for a recommendation for a book, and he tells me to pick up a copy of “Strength Matters” by Joe Schmoe. I read Joe’s book and hate it. OBVIOUSLY it must be some sort of conspiracy between Ct and JS to shill me out of a buck, right?
Wrong. It means it just wasn’t right for me. Hundreds of others may have benefitted from the same recommendation.
So let’s call a toad a toad: if you’re got a beef with an author, say it and quit pussyfooting around. And say WHY. Otherwise STFU.
I don’t have a beef with anybody specifically. There are alot of coaches out there charging a lot of money for products which may or may not be up to snuff, period. This is not a subjective arguement. If somebody is charging $100 bucks for a book, they had better back that up. One of the books I mentioned in the beginning of this thread literly had 3 inch margins on it’s text pages. It all comes down to one thing…money!If you are going to pay a ton of money for something, you want to make sure you get maximal return on your investment.
Unfortunately, most people don’t find that out until too late. I think that guys like Ryan Lee have been a scourge to this field over the last few years, trying to convince trainers they are entitled to six figure salaries. He always talks about his “information products” and now we see the net effect of that. These coaches are making a lot of money off of us and aren’t always delivering on their end. To call one guy out, I find that Even Esh seems to have a new product out every week! I think one of his last products was a picnic table workout!? Maybe the product is quality, maybe it isn’t. Before I put my money in Even Esh’s kids college fund, I want to know the answer to that.
I guess it is alright because guys like Ryan Lee tell trainers they are entitled to it, but there are people like me who are going to call bullshit when applicable. I don’t bad mouth or flame people without reason. Nothing I have said is untrue. I have already given props to a guy like Christian T because I feel that so far he has been very honest and ethical with his “information products”. I can’t say the same thing for every other coach out there.
[quote]aikigreg wrote:
Keep in mind, you narcissistic bastards, that not every book was written for YOU specifically.
I walk up to CT and ask him for a recommendation for a book, and he tells me to pick up a copy of “Strength Matters” by Joe Schmoe. I read Joe’s book and hate it. OBVIOUSLY it must be some sort of conspiracy between Ct and JS to shill me out of a buck, right?
Wrong. It means it just wasn’t right for me. Hundreds of others may have benefitted from the same recommendation.
So let’s call a toad a toad: if you’re got a beef with an author, say it and quit pussyfooting around. And say WHY. Otherwise STFU.[/quote]
[quote]Christian Thibaudeau wrote:
Thanks, I do appreciate that. I do have quite a few products out there so I was really insecure about your post.
My goal is to teach people and not make a buck from them. So I do encourage anybody who is not fully satisfied with any of my books to contact me and voice their concerns.[/quote]
CT, some of your articles on here beat the crap out of anything I have ever seen in print for money. You have some great thoughts on bodybuilding routines!
Positive Review***
Starting strength and practical programming, both by Mark Rippetoe.
Fantastic informaton, good price, over delivers. I can be that anybody who gets these books will be happy.
Dave Tate sells them over at elitefts
****Great way to save cash!
A recent thread about Matt Furey got me thinking. It turns out that Furey charges a lot of money for a Eugene Sandow course that can be found on the web for free. I went and googled a lot of the old time strongmen’s names and found a bunch of websites that have THEIR ENTIRE BOOKS downloaded and for free! I know there are a couple companies out there that are charging money for hard copies of these books, anywhere in the range of $20 to $50 dollars depending upon the dealer and the book. You can get them for free just by googling (sp?) the name.
the first book I found was Hackenschmidt’s “The way to live”.
Search the web and save yourself some hard earned cash!
[quote]orangecola wrote:
There are alot of coaches out there charging a lot of money for products which may or may not be up to snuff, period. This is not a subjective arguement. [/quote]
Yes, it is a completely subjective argument. “…not…up to snuff” is your subjective assessment of the products. Think of it this way: subjective = opinion; objective = fact. Sorry, but the misuse of this is a pet peeve of mine.
I find a couple of errors in your logic here:
- that a book’s value should be based at least partially on the margin size or number of pages.
- Increasing margin size increases the number of pages, which increases the cost to produce a book (more paper = more $ spent).
If money was the main motivator, then logically they would decrease the margins and font size, thereby decreasing the number of pages used, and still charge the same for S&H.
[quote]Unfortunately, most people don’t find that out until too late. I think that guys like Ryan Lee have been a scourge to this field over the last few years, trying to convince trainers they are entitled to six figure salaries. He always talks about his “information products” and now we see the net effect of that. These coaches are making a lot of money off of us and aren’t always delivering on their end. To call one guy out, I find that Even Esh seems to have a new product out every week! I think one of his last products was a picnic table workout!? Maybe the product is quality, maybe it isn’t. Before I put my money in Even Esh’s kids college fund, I want to know the answer to that.
I guess it is alright because guys like Ryan Lee tell trainers they are entitled to it, but there are people like me who are going to call bullshit when applicable. I don’t bad mouth or flame people without reason. Nothing I have said is untrue. I have already given props to a guy like Christian T because I feel that so far he has been very honest and ethical with his “information products”. I can’t say the same thing for every other coach out there.[/quote]
Look, there’s a lot of crap out there and some people are out there to take advantage of others - just look at the number of sedentary ab workout machines being hocked on infomercials. The old adage “a fool and his money are soon separated” is probably as true in the fitness world as anywhere else in the consumer marketplace. You need to pay attention to product details and be a discerning buyer who is skeptical of claims. But let’s be honest here, no one is forcing you to buy books. I don’t buy a book unless I’ve picked it up and thumbed through it or at least read some excerpts from it on a website. Would you buy fruit without visually inspecting it?
DB
Logic and personal opinion… Hmmm.
DB44 - I agree completely regarding the incorrect use of terms (eg - subjective / objective, etc…); having said that, most people do not have the ability to be completely objective. If something ‘works’ for them, then it must also be universally ‘correct’ too.
Oh, and forget about trying to bring ‘logic’ into these types of discussions; while the staff seems quite steeped in doing root cause analysis and really digging deep into the science of bodybuilding, most of the bloggers (even those who are articulate vs. those who say things like STFU) eventually try to pass off logical fallacies as truth.
Good luck in trying to interject some (all too uncommon) common sense into a discussion; just don’t expect anyone to concede anything!
To quote my mother: “Don’t confuse me with the facts - I’ve already made up my mind!”
MIKE
[quote]dollarbill44 wrote:
orangecola wrote:
There are alot of coaches out there charging a lot of money for products which may or may not be up to snuff, period. This is not a subjective arguement.
Yes, it is a completely subjective argument. “…not…up to snuff” is your subjective assessment of the products. Think of it this way: subjective = opinion; objective = fact. Sorry, but the misuse of this is a pet peeve of mine. [/quote]
I think you are missing the point. This all comes down to money. I have no idea where you are going with all your mumbo jumbo double talk, the bottom line is that there are products out there, whether subjectively or objectively, which are not up to par with the price being charged.
You are way off is your one comment about “Books costing more per page”. How much does paper cost???
The book in question came in a 3 ring binder, the extra pages cost next to nothing to print off on a copier and unless the paper is made from some rare tree, I don’t know where you think you were going with that.
A guy can say his book is 400 pages, charge $20 more bucks for it because of all the supposed extra information he is giving, and pay, well, about 2 cents extra at kinko’s.
I have gotten a couple dozen messages about this thread and the funny thing is they are seem to revolve around the same products. Either someone will comment that they know exactly which book I am talking about (without me stating it’s name on the thread) or they will tell me the exact same things about the exact same product, whether that be negative or positive.
Your comment on not buying stuff until you see it also doesn’t fly since that is not applicable to most of the items we are talking here.
For example, while I can review LL Cool J’s book from my local library before I buy it, I cannot say the same for the Louie Simmons Deadlift DVD or Magnificent Mobility. Nor can I say the same for any of Cosgrove, Esh, or Ryan Lee’s materials. Basically I am taking the authors, other posters, and other experts opinions on the product and then still I am taking a gamble on buying it. In a lot cases, these products are not up to snuff despite all the above (Please note that I am not directly talking about any of the above authors, I am just using them as examples). That is something else that ticks me off.
In the effort to keep this from being a flame fest, the names of a lot of the products are being kept out, with private messages taking the bulk of what is being discussed in this thread. I would ask that anybody else who has any questions about any of these highly priced items to send me pm’s, especially before you buy anything. If I have not seen the video or book in question, I will tell you what somebody who did see it said. If I saw it, then I will give you my god’s honest opinion on it.
thanks
Orange
[quote]orangecola wrote:
I think you are missing the point. This all comes down to money. I have no idea where you are going with all your mumbo jumbo double talk, the bottom line is that there are products out there, whether subjectively or objectively, which are not up to par with the price being charged.
You are way off is your one comment about “Books costing more per page”. How much does paper cost???
The book in question came in a 3 ring binder, the extra pages cost next to nothing to print off on a copier and unless the paper is made from some rare tree, I don’t know where you think you were going with that.
A guy can say his book is 400 pages, charge $20 more bucks for it because of all the supposed extra information he is giving, and pay, well, about 2 cents extra at kinko’s.
I have gotten a couple dozen messages about this thread and the funny thing is they are seem to revolve around the same products. Either someone will comment that they know exactly which book I am talking about (without me stating it’s name on the thread) or they will tell me the exact same things about the exact same product, whether that be negative or positive.
Your comment on not buying stuff until you see it also doesn’t fly since that is not applicable to most of the items we are talking here.
For example, while I can review LL Cool J’s book from my local library before I buy it, I cannot say the same for the Louie Simmons Deadlift DVD or Magnificent Mobility. Nor can I say the same for any of Cosgrove, Esh, or Ryan Lee’s materials. Basically I am taking the authors, other posters, and other experts opinions on the product and then still I am taking a gamble on buying it. In a lot cases, these products are not up to snuff despite all the above (Please note that I am not directly talking about any of the above authors, I am just using them as examples). That is something else that ticks me off.
In the effort to keep this from being a flame fest, the names of a lot of the products are being kept out, with private messages taking the bulk of what is being discussed in this thread. I would ask that anybody else who has any questions about any of these highly priced items to send me pm’s, especially before you buy anything. If I have not seen the video or book in question, I will tell you what somebody who did see it said. If I saw it, then I will give you my god’s honest opinion on it.
thanks
Orange
[/quote]
If you ask me, all the info you need to attain your training goals is out there for free. Just search through the articles on this site. There really aren’t any secrets out there when it comes to training. In my opinion, your money is better spent on anatomy, kinesiology and biochemistry books.
DB
[quote]dollarbill44 wrote:
If you ask me, all the info you need to attain your training goals is out there for free. Just search through the articles on this site. There really aren’t any secrets out there when it comes to training. In my opinion, your money is better spent on anatomy, kinesiology and biochemistry books.
DB [/quote]
But let me ask you, DB… is that really where you want to devote your time at the end of a long work day? I see your point and you will certainly obtain a deeper understanding… but sometimes I just want a nice, condensed program I don’t need to think about.
Bump…