Can you handle the truth? If not, then don’t continue reading!
I have a love -hate relationship with the fitness industry. I love it because it has changed my life and has allowed me to do the same for others over the past 15 years. That said, I hate the fact that the money involved in the fitness industry has ruined the information people receive. Every year it seems it’s a new fad, a different myth, “fact”, or a ground-breaking study that takes us further away from what really matters.
Let me give you a brief history and then discuss a few trends I hope go away.
The equipment industry plays a huge role in ALL of this. The original gyms started off as dingy, dirty smelly places with some barbells and dumbbells. They attracted men while ignoring women for the most part. Even today, the ‘womens’ area of the gym is typically a tiny area that is cluttered with small pink dumbbells. These gyms attracted people that knew what they were doing and who were already in good shape. This was a very small market.
Enter Arthur Jones, the man who invented Nautilus equipment. Following him, there were others, like Dr. Darden, who promoted these machines and even had a 5 minute workout using the concept of ‘one set to failure’.
If you put Dr. before your name, people take it more seriously and tend to listen. Darden, Oz, and Dre. Machines changed the fitness industry forever, in both good and bad ways. We started to see more women and beginners showing up to gyms and people felt safe doing the machines because they felt like they “knew what they were doing”. The machines allowed for places to be open and built everywhere and all the while, they could hire lower quality staff as the gyms pretty much ran themselves. Right before our very eyes, the commercial gym industry exploded!
If you want to see more detail about machines, please check the article below where I went into far more detail.
https://resultsperformancetraining.com/realizing-the-benefits-of-free-weights-over-machines/
Let’s just say it will work for a few weeks and then your body will adapt. In the long-term, they are not that effective at all.
So you do one set to failure, completing a machine circuit, and then hop on the treadmill for 30 minutes. Their goal is to get people in and out fast without injuring them. They don’t care about results at all and these places don’t get them for their members. If the people actually showed it would like look the first three weeks in January all year. Let’s not even mention the fact that after they take your money for that membership, you will never hear from them again.
Joe Weider is another business genius who shaped the fitness industry. He hired bodybuilders and fitness models to promote books, supplements, equipment, and his magazines sold all of this and more. Sex sells and that will never change. Unfortunately, it sells terrible information that has ruined our industry. Here is a quick overview of how this works….
1. The magazine makes money off supplement companies who pay them for ad space.
2. The bodybuilders are getting paid by supplement companies to say “I look this way because I take ‘X’ supplement.”
3. The supplement company takes your money.
4. The magazine then gets some popular athlete or guy taking steroids (not the supplement) to write an article (if they even write it). 9 times out of 10 the information is terrible but yet, it lives on
