Thread: MM2K audio tape series and other ramblings...

Looking Back On The Muscle Media 2000/MM2K days of Bodybuilding...

Will Brink


Talk about a blast from the past! I was digging through some old boxes of office stuff, and found this Muscle Media 2000 audio tape interview I had done back in the mid 90s. I recall I had done a two or three part series, but I forget exactly which. Unless you were part of all that “back in the day,” it’s hard to convey to the reader how much things have changed since then. At that time, Muscle Media 2000 (MM2K) was THE magazine of the time, and by far the most influential. Bill Phillips and crew – which included yours truly – set the standard with MM2k with solid info people could really use to transform their body. They also had an audio tape series of interviews with various people on all manner of topics. These audio tapes were a separate subscription from the magazine and were very popular I recall.



MM2K was a total departure from all the other mags at the time, and writers like Dan Duchaine, Charles Poliquin, Mike Mooney, Dr. X, Bill Phillips and many others broke new ground where other publications feared to tread. This was truly the height of bodybuilding, which shortly after, took a nose dive due to various factors, both social/political and financial.

To this day, I still have people mention the article called the “Anabolic round-table” discussion myself, Dan Duchaine, and Bruce Kneller published. We discussed all sorts of stuff that would never get published today as PC trend took over…Christ on a stick, I hate the PC nonsense that permeates the media – and general society – these days, but that’s another rant for another day….Finding these tapes really brings back some memories! I bet some readers here subscribed to the MM2K audio series and remember them fondly. Oh, the stories I could tell…




I’m a bit of a pack rat: I still have every MM2K, MMI, and the many other publications I have been featured in, in boxes in my basement. I found the Anabolic Round-table issue and took a quick pick..I got a lot O boxes! Some day I really need to go through them…

Remember, mid 90s, the ‘net existed, but was nothing like it is today. Most people had dial up connections, so streaming audio was a clunky process at best. Large scale inexpensive CD burning didn’t exist either I recall, so audio tapes were what most used. I’m sure these great interviews exist on the ‘net someplace as streaming audio, but that was new technology at the time and 56k dial up modems – with a small number using DSL – were the norm, so audio tapes were used. It’s funny, the mid 90s was not long ago, but looking at these cassettes looks like virtual stone- age technology at this point!


That’s my brief look at the golden age of Muscle Media 2000/MM2K and the small roll I played in it. Time sure goes by fast!

Originally Posted by Robert D.

that's pretty cool, I used to work right next door to the EAS HQ when Bill Philips was still there and they had just changed the magazine name, then it all went to shit.

What was the company next to EAS at the time?