The fitness industry is “fucked up.”
There’s a new fitness book out, released by a major publishing house, and this is how it starts off. By making this statement, which I’m sure they think is brash and shocking, the authors are trying to set the scene for you. They’re telling you that although the fitness landscape has been completely distorted in terms of the training and nutrition advice you’ve been getting, there’s nothing more to fear, because they’re here to straighten us all out.
Coming from anyone entrenched deeply enough into the fitness industry to secure a book deal, this is the very definition of irony.
That’s because the horse has long been out of the barn with this whole “fitness is fucked up” clarion call. It’s total horseshit when it’s coming from people who’ve played a major role in fucking it up in the first place—and it was played out as far back as 1998, when Dave Tate first logged on to a computer and began his then-inadvertent one-man campaign to save fitness from the internet. When Dave said it, it made sense. Now, when you hear someone lead off with this tired-ass mantra, you know they’re only trying to cover their own tracks.
Rather than telling you how “fucked up” everything is, I’d rather just do my own thing and continue trying to find the unvarnished scientific truth. There are, however, some points to clarify with regard to what’s truly “fucked up” about this industry:
People in the fitness industry steal from each other. This is true, more or less, of every industry—I come from a scientific and software engineering background, and it’s certainly accurate there—but nowhere is this behavior more blatant than in fitness.
From people attempting to hijack my diets by writing fugazi “workout plans” to accompany them, to guys putting unsanctioned Carb Back-Loading Q&A sections on their websites as though they had something to do with any of my work, I’ve experienced this firsthand.
Theft is rampant. If you have an original thought in this industry, you can rest assured that someone’s going to lift it and attempt to make money off it. Take intermittent fasting (IF), for example. Multiple books have been written using IF as a nutritional centerpiece—including some recent ones—with every author acting as though they invented the plan. It’s sad, but this is why I’m so protective—and potentially litigious—with regard to my own intellectual property.
Too many “experts” have no fucking idea what they’re talking about. Dr. David Katz wrote a terrific article about this phenomenon on HuffPost Healthy Living the other day. To summarize, Dr. Katz said that for the vast majority of nutritional pseudo-authorities around today, giving nutritional recommendations is about as sensible as someone who’s been a passenger on a plane a few times giving flying lessons to pilots. He couldn’t possibly be more right.
The problem with training and nutrition these days is that you have scads of people releasing information—often sanctioned by misinformed television hosts and publishing houses—without having any education or practical experience in the field. They’ve never worked with clients, set foot in a research lab, or read a study that matters, and yet they’re considered experts because they’ve lucked into securing the backing of someone with some reach. It’s wrong, but that’s the state of the industry today.
Too many fitness and nutrition “experts” are abject money-grubbing narcissists. Let’s face facts. There are too many massive egos in the fitness industry, and unfortunately, this level of narcissism gets in the way of the humility it takes to go out and learn something. Some may actually even know what they don’t know, but you sure as hell won’t ever hear them admit it. There’s no intellectual curiosity when it comes to this shit, because everybody’s claiming to have it all figured out already.
Have you ever gone out to dinner with a group of high-level fitness experts? No? You’re not missing anything. They don’t talk about training, and they don’t talk about nutrition. They talk about money—how much they’re making, and how to separate you from yours.
Very few fitness “experts” know what it’s like to be out in the “real” working world, and their advice reflects their naiveté. We don’t all work in gyms. In fact, we don’t all work in offices, either. And few people have the luxury of making their own hours. In the fitness industry, it seems as though nobody’s speaking to the huge percentage of the population whose obligation it is, every day, to punch a clock and stay in the same place for 10-12 hours without ever leaving a job site.
Real people train in the morning before the sun comes up, or they train at night, long after it goes down—and that’s all they’re getting for the day. Few people I know can leave work in the middle of the day to put in double HIIT sessions or take a yoga class. It’s simply not feasible. People who work for a living—especially people with families and bills to pay—are exhausted, and they need better advice than they’re getting. Unfortunately, many of the “experts” doling it out are incapable of supplying what the general public needs, because they’ve never experienced that kind of life.
Most of what you read is bad advice, anyway. If you want to be a fitness guru who makes his bones by stealing shit from people who know what they’re doing, at least make sure you’re stealing the right shit. If there’s anything worse than lifting someone else’s information and presenting it as your own, it’s lifting complete and utter horseshit and perpetuating that all over the internet. You’re doubling the damage done, in addition to being a scumbag.
That’s why this whole deal is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I don’t worry about the garbage out there that has no basis in scientific truth, because it’s not going to work, and it’s not something I need to compete with. On the other hand, however, it pisses me off when I think about how many people waste their time with nonsense, fooled by slick packaging and chemically enhanced—and photo shopped—fitness models.
Caveat emptor. That’s what’s really fucked up.
AUTHOR’ NOTE: Although some people below seemed to infer I was accusing someone of stealing my work, that is not what I’m implying at all. The book in question actually has very little science and, therefore, very little to do with my work.
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