Shape

I somehow won a 6 month subscription to Shape magazine which is just as well as I would never chose to buy it. This doesn't reflect on the magazine itself, its just that I've never had an overwhelming interest in fitness and health. This aside I was impressed with the magazine and the range of articles and topics that it covered. It tries to encompass all areas of health and fitness and almost succeeds. The main topic areas covered by Shape are - Getting fit - exercises you can do at home, different types of classes that you may not know much about eg Pilates, a weight loss diary of some poor person so you can know that you are not alone in your ...  Read the complete review

Shape is not a magazine I would normally chose to buy, but when a copy ends up in my hands, as it invariably does, I usually flick through before chucking it under my bed where all things that need to be banished from sight but still can’t, for some unknown reason, be thrown away, live. Published monthly by Dennis Publishing, Shape is, as the name would suggest, concerned with all things healthy and fitnessey. They’re a little over the top with their accepting yourself and worshipping life emphasis – all their sections have the L word in the title – love your health, love your body, love your world and so on. Unlike some other ...  Read the complete review

Last year, I was one of the lucky people to receive three free issues of this magazine through a website promotion. I originally wrote a scathing review on dooyoo after reading the first two issues which, to be perfectly honest, didn’t impress me very much. Incidentally, the third one didn’t even arrive. I am not into health in fitness in a big way - well not in a big enough way to buy a magazine about it although I have bought "Zest" a few times. I do the odd aerobics class, have a swim once in a while and on occasions have been known to set foot in my local gym. As a result, I found the issues of Shape unappealing as they did not have ...  Read the complete review

This is not a mag I'd have picked off the shelf. I am interested in fitness and am a regular gym user, but I tend to look for something more in a mag than 101 tips on how to be slim and toned. If you are more serious than me about fitness and health, or maybe just if you have more time for this kind of thing, then this may be a mag you'd want to buy regularly. I admit to finding more of the articles interesting than I anticipated, but still would not buy this. Leading articles include "Burn 1000 extra Calories a week!", which is not as tedious an article as I would have expected, "Christy's Curves", which I couldn't even ...  Read the complete review

You can tell this is an American magazine - simply because it doesn't assume all its readers are downright stupid. It can tell you that an excercise will challenge your obliques, for example, without finding it necessary to interrupt the narrative to tell you what these are. That doesn't mean this is only a health and fitness magazine for experts, far from it - if you don't know where your obliques are, to use that example, there will be a handy anatomical diagram next to the story. This is health and fitness for those who take the subject seriously. It cites a wealth of academic and commercial sources to back up its right on the button stories about what the ...  Read the complete review