Shoutout to Rob Simpson over at T-Nation for posting something in my training log that sparked this bloviation, because it was at that moment that I had a realization that ultimately should have happened about 25 years ago, but suffice to say I’m a slow learner, and that relates directly to what I’m going to discuss here. There is confusion in the physical transformation space ultimately regarding the function of influencers and the fitness industry in general, as many seek these individuals/institutions as sources of education when, in fact, their entire existence is premised on the exact OPPOSITE of education. These sources seek to UNeducate you, for doing so is 100% in their best interest, whereas education works against their very existence. Educators remain outside of this sphere and, in turn, typically need to be sought out, for they are NOT hinging their existence upon you discovering them but, instead, working ultimately toward the goal of you not NEEDING them. In my discussion regarding gathering around the communal fire, these are the keepers of lore, whereas the industry are the gossipers, the former needing no one else to perform their function, the latter requiring the existence of others, for how can we have gossip without people? But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself here. Let me go back to my own education, wherein I learned that, in order to have a discussion, we must first operationalize the terms OF the discussion, so that we all are in agreement over what the words mean before we try to discuss the words. I believe, you will find, in most matters of online “debate”, it’s simply a matter of people using non-operationalized terms, wherein the words mean one thing to one side and another thing to the other, ensuring there can be no agreement because there is no actual discussion occurring. So first, let’s talk education.
A fine example of when industry met education
What is
education? Well, already, it’s a noun
AND a verb, but let’s use it as a verb here, and let’s use it to mean “the
process of taking the complex and making it simple”. COULD we define it as something else? Most assuredly, either something else
entirely or, at least, something more nuanced, but I feel like for the sake of
my discussion here, that definition works very well. Think back to your elementary education (for
some of my readers, that won’t require thinking very far back, whereas for
others [myself having turned 40 this week], we may have to dust off the
cobwebs). When you arrived at school,
their initial goal was to take the complexity of reading and make it simple
enough for you to gasp, and they did this by first teaching you the alphabet
(through song, because historically man has done much better remembering stuff
through song and story vs straight memorization) and all the sounds the letters
could make. This built up into combining
letters to make other sounds, and eventually culminated into being able to
sound out long strings/chains of these letters into words and being able to
read them in print, and now here you are reading the bizarre ramblings of a
madman. They did a similar process with
mathematics, teaching you the basics of arithmetic before you cruised through
courses on algebra and geometry onto your way through calculus and beyond (or,
if you were like me, tapping out at statistics). Now consider the fact you were around 5 or 6
when you entered elementary school: it was the function of these educators to
take complex concepts and boil them down to something a 5 year old can
understand…THAT, my friends, is education!
But think
further: WHY was it that you were getting an education? As much as we’d like to believe it was out of
the goodness of the state (assuming you went to a publicly funded school,
please forgive my cultural bias here), it was, ultimately, so that you would
not NEED these educators. Fundamentally,
the function of state funded education is to produce INDEPENDENT members of
society who are able to function as adults without extra assistance and,
specifically, be able to CONTRIBUTE.
Nothing is for free, and the state invested time and money into you so
that you would produce MORE for them.
Education’s function was to make you independent and capable, and this
theory of education dates back to the Ancient Greeks and beyond, and prior to
that it existed on a tribal level, wherein the young were trained by the old so
that they could one day grow and become contributing members of the tribe. Historically, in all instances, the function
of education is to create independent people that are able to contribute back
to society, and this is achieved by taking the complex and making it simple
enough to grasp at a young age so that it can be incrementally built upon.
Although sometimes they instilled discipline in us too
The fitness
industry does NOT want to educate you.
Doing so completely serves AGAINST their best interest. Why?
Because it’s in their name: the fitness INDUSTRY. They are an entity that makes money by people
NEEDING them in order to achieve fitness.
Because if there is no need for the industry, then there is no money
being put toward it, which means it cases to exist. So what does the fitness industry do? The OPPOSITE of education: they make the
simple COMPLEX. They take concepts that
should be fundamentally simple to grasp, and portray them as exceedingly
complex and unapproachable, and then they SELL you “the solution” to the
problem that THEY have created. And,
specifically, they sell you ONLY the solution to the problem: NOT the method
used to discover the solution. Oh no,
THAT is a tightly guarded “industry secret” that only THOSE “in the know” are
allowed access to (which, if you’re willing a pay a premium fee AND sign a
non-disclosure agreement, you may be granted access to). You know who else did this? Nintendo, with the call-in 1900 number
wherein they would tell you SPECIFICALLY how to beat certain sections of their
video games (which secrets that literally could NOT be figured out without
outside help), but never did they actually TEACH you about the game. Answers for sale, but never education.
Because
physical transformation is simple.
Starting from a baseline of nothing, literally ANY physical activity
will achieve results. Yet, we have
members of the fitness industry that want to SELL you the idea about “wasting
newbie gains” or “optimizing your first year of training”, because the new
trainee is ESPECIALLY easy to prey upon.
They don’t have enough experience to smell bullsh*t when it’s nearby,
and influencers know how to make their object far shiner than an educator
can. The same is true of nutrition. With the current state of how we eat, the
simplest AND most effective nutritional intervention is to eat single
ingredient foods and drink only water.
Even without calorie counting or macro training, I literally just wrote
THE most effective diet possible in one sentence, understanding effectiveness
here to mean achieving 80% of the desired outcome and leaving the 20% for a
more nuanced approach. But we have
influencers out there who seek to tell trainees that they are actively
sabotaging their results by NOT consuming some manner of hyper-overpriced and
overprocessed junk supplement and that eating single ingredient foods are
making them fat, slow, old and sick.
They sell that it is CRITICAL to track every single bite of food that
you take, and THANKFULLY they just so HAPPEN to sell an app that does exactly
that, alongside a protein bar with the highest protein the calorie ratio
(which, of course, they sell you is an absolutely critical element to achieving
physical transformation success). These
people CREATE problems and sell solutions, whereas educators IDENTIFY problems
and give you the tools to solve them.
But sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease
Because,
again, refer back to the function of education: to create independence. What is the function of industry? To create DEPENDENCE. An industry NEEDS customers, and, therefore,
it must go out and create a NEED for whatever it is that they sell. Tobacco did this by literally getting people
addicted to their products, creating a biological need for it that they were
all too willing to provide. The fitness
industry does this by taking the simple concepts of physical transformation
(hard work, consistency, time/patience/compliance), turning them needlessly
complex, and then selling a solution to a problem THEY created. The tobacco industry created a new problem
for it’s customers: suddenly they had an addiction they needed to satisfy. The fitness industry created new problem as
well: we used to know how to eat right and work hard, but now we’re lost. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a
day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for the rest of his life” is a
rallying call for educators and a warning for influencers.
But how can
you tell who you’re dealing with in this landscape? Who is out there looking to educate vs
influence? It can’t all be about money,
because even my favorite authors, such as Dan John, Paul Kelso (RIP), Jim
Wendler, K. Black, etc, charge money for their products. But look at the end results here. You buy one of their books and you legitimately
have the tools you need to train and eat for the rest of your life. You are educated: their product gave you
independence. An influencer is going to
sell you a monthly subscription, or a product that “runs out” (it’s why Bob
Hoffman switched from selling power racks to protein powder, because people
only ever bought ONE power rack, but they’d buy a new tub once a month. It’s also why Glenn Pendlay[RIP] went
bankrupt selling THE greatest weightlifting equipment in the USA), or simply
“answers on demand”. They’re not going
to set you up to be educated: they’re going to set you up to be
co-dependent. But for the REAL test
here, go back to your elementary school education. As much as you may have thought your
undergrad professors were brilliant MINDS, your kindergarten teacher was a
brilliant EDUCATOR, because they were taking the MOST complex concepts and
boiling them down to the SIMPLEST of ideas so that your 5 year old brain could
grasp it. Someone who actually KNOWS the
material they are discussing will have that ability. The greater one understands the material, the
simpler they are able to explain it, whereas the more tenuous one’s grasp, the
shallower their explanation, to the point that, if one does not understand it
at all, and is simply parroting ideas that they’ve heard, upon being
challenged, they will lash out at the question asker rather than thank them for
the opportunity to further explain. You
all know this first hand. I know that if
my kid asked me why the planets revolve around the sun and don’t just fall out
of the universe, I could give them a passing explanation of how gravitational
pull works before I eventually say “let’s go read Wikipedia together”, but if
they asked me to explain transubstantiation, my 8 years of Catholic education
would kick into overdrive and we’d spend WAY too much time on the subject. Because people who actually know things can
talk WAY too long on the subject, and most often will need to be cut off from
it.
You either die a hero or live to become a meme
Don’t go to
the fitness industry seeking education.
That’s not what it is there for.
It’s there to make money off YOU, and if you go to THEM, you’re doing
their work for them. It’s their job to
make a sucker out of you: don’t meet them halfway. Fight them off every step of the way by
becoming EDUCATED. Seek out educators,
living on top of mountaintops and shouting out their prophecies to all who will
listen…and listen to them. Let them make
you independent, well informed, and able to cut through the crap. Let them save you money and time by giving
you the tools you need in order to be able to succeed WITHOUT anyone else. Don’t let them give you answers: let them
give you the tools you need to make your OWN answers.
