EDUCATION VS INDUSTRY

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.