John Romano & George Farrah



Last week sometime, John Romano wrote a thinly veiled article about George Farrah and his contest prep methods. When I woke up the next morning, I had about a million emails in my inbox talking about the article, and telling me it was George Farrah.

The article is pretty good, and talks about the guy’s recruitment methods (*which are absurd and shady), after which it delves into the fact that he makes extensive use of DNP (Dinitrophenol) during contest prep with his clients. I’ve always considered DNP a bit of a wannabe drug…the kind of thing bad contest prep coaches need to use – the kind of thing that caters to undisciplined people.

I’m 100% in agreement with Romano on this one. But more interesting to me is the fact that the article was linked to and reposted all over the ‘net. This is an example of what we call “Power Projection” in political science or “Impact Level” in the scientific community.

As an example, while China is often considered a powerful military nation (they have a huge standing army), but they lack power projection – they can’t do anything outside of their own country, regardless of the size of their armed force. By the same token, Scientific American or Psychology Today are considered high impact magazines by the scientific community. They aren’t cutting edge, and most of their stuff is from previously published journal articles, but if they write an article on Resveratrol, every other mainstream publication will pick it up, and it will impact the market.

RxMuscle.com generally lacks impact and power projection by those definitions. The reasons are many: Nobody cares to read the one word/ one line answers found in Palumbo’s Q&A column, he only posts articles written by somebody else on his forum (*found previously in the mainstream media), and the majority of Romano’s articles are of the “I was cool 20 years ago” variety of anecdotal stories. If the content of RxMuscle improved, I suspect they’re positioned well to become a high impact website.

So the Farrah article was actually very interesting on many levels because it represented a rare example of power projection from a site that generally lacks the ability to be high impact.

The other reason it’s interesting is that DNP is a mitochondrial uncoupler, and currently, there is a woman threatening to sue Dave Palumbo, because her liver failed after using a mitochondrial uncoupler sold by his company. It’s amazing that they’d choose to write that particular article at this particular juncture. The fact that John’s partner almost killed someone with product that works by a similar mechanism to DNP doesn’t make his assessment of Farrah incorrect, just…awkward…

The other reason it’s decidedly odd is that John Romano almost killed Paul Dillet a few years back, while he was prepping the guy for a contest. It seems that Paul showed up holding too much water (could have been his own fault, could have been John’s), and Romano decided to give the guy a bunch of Lasix, a highly potent diuretic.

Well, Paul cramped up badly on stage and had to be carried off and given medical attention. Diuretics are responsible for the death of numerous bodybuilders, including Mohamed Benaziza. It’s pretty irresponsible to just go handing them out to your clients, and it makes me wonder why John is coming down so hard on George Farrah, when John almost killed someone with his own contest prep. Again, this fact doesn’t make John’s article incorrect, and I totally agree with it. It’s just really weird that he’d take this position…

Actually, given the fact that both John Romano and Dave Palumbo have both been nearly responsible for the death of someone who trusted them and their advice, it’s f*cking absurd that he’s going to call someone else out for having dangerous practices. It’s so weird and awkward for him to have written this article, even though the article was well done and highly impactful.

So there you go. I’ve received more than enough emails on this topic, asking me to comment publicly, and I’ve finally gotten around to it. It’s a mixed bag of emotions and analysis on this one, but I hope I’ve managed to keep your attention and make it a worthwhile read.



John Romano & George Farrah | Anthony Roberts