elitefts™ Sunday edition

State of Fitness

I was sitting around the house over the weekend, drinking, when someone popped in a P90X video. This was one of my non-training friends who bought the thing and wanted to show it to me. I watched for a few minutes, then turned the thing off because I simply couldn't take it anymore. Yeah, the P90X guy is in really good shape, especially for his age, but his constant talking got me thinking about this industry, and what people actually need out of it.

Motivation

I guess as someone who always played sports and always trained for something, I don't understand what motivates so-called "regular" people. I look at all these "Make today a great day!" posts on Facebook, I watch a P90X video, and I hear adherents of the brainwashed cult (you know which one) spout all their dogma (their new thing is talking about rhabdo, which I doubt they'd have even heard of if it hadn't happened to the Iowa football team last year), and it really gets me to thinking about the future of this industry, the future of training, and how people are going to perceive the idea of exercise going forward. I realize I'm a million miles away from being the final authority on anything in life, but in looking at just about every source of fitness information out there, it looks to me like 99.9% of the outlets available to us have it wrong. From magazines to websites to popular training programs, it looks like people simply co-opt training modalities, throw them into programs, and give no thought to the efficient and "correct" ways to use them. Look at some videos of people from the brainwashed cult training, and you'll see exactly what I mean. It's like somebody took a whole shitload of information that previously was only available to serious athletes, dumped it all out on the heads of a bunch of regular people, and what has resulted is this totally dysmorphic mix of people who essentially have no clue what they're doing, showing things they know nothing about to other people who have even less of a clue.

The Gap

The gap in the market, at least as far as I can tell, calls for something to entice the guy who works for a living who doesn't want to deal with all this bullshit. I don't want to be on some kind of "fitness team," nor do I want to watch DVD's with some cheesy dude saying embarrassing shit. That's why something like 5/3/1 was so successful, because it gives you an effective way to get in and out of the gym without having to put up will all that shit. What needs to happen, however, is that it needs to be done on a much larger scale. Stuff that works – the Prowler®, Carb Back-Loading, 5/3/1, etc, etc – needs to be on a much larger stage without going through the whole filtering process whereby everyone gets it wrong. Take kettlebells as an example. Ten years ago, you had to have some kind of serious inside information to even know about kettlebells. Now, every asshole trainer and his uncle has a kettlebell DVD – and although I don't watch any of these, judging from the sources, I'd bet the vast majority of them get it wrong. I honestly have no idea where fitness is going, but I'm thankful every day that we have this site to help fight it off.