Runner's World, Men's Health and Road & Track Paywalls: How to Read Hearst Magazines for Free

Hearst owns a stable of enthusiast magazines that share one website platform, and over the past few years it has moved the most useful content on each of them behind a membership. Runner's World sells Runner's World+, Men's Health sells MVP, and Road & Track sells Track Club. A training plan, a workout breakdown or a long motorsport feature now stops partway down with a prompt to join. This guide explains how those gates work and how to read a full article on any of the three.

How the Hearst magazine paywalls work

All three titles use a membership gate rather than a monthly meter. Day-to-day news and shorter pieces are open to everyone, with the usual advertising. Longer features, training plans, gear tests and columns are flagged as member content, and a non-member sees the headline, the opening paragraphs and then a panel inviting them to join. Each magazine runs its own membership, so joining one does not open the others.

The gate is applied in the browser. Hearst wants search engines to index every feature in full, so the complete article is delivered in the page, and a script then checks for a membership cookie and hides the body if it finds none. A crawler-style reader that never runs that script receives the whole piece. It is the same platform and the same mechanism behind Esquire and Popular Mechanics, both of which already load in full.

Our tests on 5 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,941-word Runner's World training plan taking a beginner from walking to a first marathon loaded in full, all 37 paragraphs.
• A 1,901-word Runner's World guide to getting marathon peak week right loaded in full, all 35 paragraphs.
• A 1,053-word Men's Health tutorial on back squat form loaded in full, all 23 paragraphs.
• A 1,036-word Men's Health feature on the 3/3/30 method for building muscle in three short workouts loaded in full, all 43 paragraphs.
• A 1,034-word Road & Track report on the collapse of Brad Keselowski's negotiations with RFK Racing loaded in full, all 3 paragraphs.
• A 460-word Road & Track story on Michael Jordan's Ferrari 550 Maranello selling for a record price loaded in full, all 14 paragraphs.

Read a Runner's World, Men's Health or Road & Track article in full

• Copy the article link. Hearst links look like runnersworld.com/training/a12345678/headline-slug/, with the same pattern on menshealth.com and roadandtrack.com. The number after the letter a identifies the article.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The article appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and body text. Embedded workout videos and product carousels are not included.

Other approaches

• Library access. All three magazines are widely available through PressReader and Libby at public libraries, with the full print edition free to card holders.
• Newsletters. Each title's free newsletter links to a mix of open and member stories, and the open ones can be read on the site directly.
• Private windows. Membership checks rely on cookies, so a private window shows the same gate but resets any related limits.
• Membership offers. Hearst runs introductory offers on all three memberships most of the year, and a membership includes the print magazine and the full digital archive.

How they compare with other magazines

Hearst's platform behaves the same way across its titles, which is why Esquire and Popular Mechanics also work. Women's Health, another Hearst title, was not tested. Condé Nast's magazines are split: Vanity Fair, Vogue and GQ load in full, but Condé Nast Traveler blocks the reader outright. The difference between a gate applied in the browser and one enforced on the server is set out in our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls, and the full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

If you follow a marathon plan week by week, train from Men's Health or read Road & Track's racing coverage every weekend, a membership is the honest way to pay for that work. The introductory prices are low, the print magazine is included, and the writers and testers behind those features are funded by it.