99% Of Fitness Content Is Garbage
Takeaway Points:
There’s a finite amount of information that can be shared about fitness and a limited number of ways to say it.
Only a small portion of the fitness industry is doing research into actually new ideas and methods. Those who aren’t doing that either produce - at best - fluff content or - at worst - misleading or unverified information.
When they get bored writing about fitness after a long time, many of those in the industry start including non-fitness content into their feeds, building into lifestyle blogging and generic flashy influencer content.
Be thoughtful about the people online who get your time, attention, and money.
I’ve been in the business of making… well, ‘fitness content’ for a decade now - in the form of blog posts and youtube videos and everything else.
In the past, I’ve come up against walls where I feel like I’ve written everything there is to say. As a small humble brag, I’ve now written over 200 blog posts for this site, keeping to a schedule of 1-2 a week for a decade. Sometimes, I get exhausted of it. Sometimes, I get tired of coming up with new things to write about, new ways to spin the same old crap, new ways to rephrase essentially all the same stuff that’s been written a hundred times before.
The reality in the fitness industry is that at the end of the day, there are relatively few people out there doing cutting edge stuff - they’re doing the research, interpreting it for the masses, and helping to propagate new information.
Then there’s a lot of people who just aren’t at all concerned with, well, the truth, for lack of a better term. They’re mostly concerned with showing off, looking cool, and selling whatever training programs/supplements/etc. they make a living off of. They want attention, clicks, likes, cpm’s, whatever you want to call it. These folks may or may not be willfully “evil” in any sense of the word - some of them certainly know that they’re full of BS, and are just trying to make a quick buck, but many of them also legitimately believe in the value of the garbage stuff they sell - they just either haven’t looked closely enough at it or don’t have the right sources of information to make proper assessments of the values of their methods.
A lot of these people fall into what we might call the “influencer” group. They’re jacked, they’re strong, they don’t actually have to be informative or useful - they just need to show off their physiques or their strength, and they’ll get a following because they’re just genetically gifted, or willing to use a lot of drugs, or a bit more on the charismatic end. They make videos showing off, they dunk on people they perceive as weaker or less jacked than them, and so on.
Then there are a lot of people in the third camp, which is me! This is people who are, to some extent or another, resistant to the usual hype cycles and trends that drive a lot of diet and fitness program popularity, and instead focus on the right sources of information for “good knowledge”, while at the same time, are not those cutting edge people putting out genuinely new stuff.
To be honest, that’s not a terrible position! I’ve managed to make a living writing for this blog, and it’s been immensely personally validating and fulfilling to be able to work from anywhere in the world, writing for myself, and helping to reach the kinds of people who don’t often want to go anywhere near the fitness industry. As a coach, this blog has absolutely changed my life.
But at the same time, there’s a certain... pattern that often develops in terms of people in this third group: they run out of stuff to say.
I’ve seen it happen constantly. I’ve been in this industry for a decade, and in that time I’ve met a lot of other coaches, bloggers, instagrammers, youtubers, content creators, etc. Without fail, many of them have reached some kind of ceiling when it comes to the kind of following that they can gather by simply recirculating minor variations on the existing knowledge.
There’s only so many times, for example, that you can tell people that calories actually matter, that fruit isn’t likely to cause weight gain or health issues, or that people need to generally eat more veggies, lift heavy weights, and get in regular cardio. There’s ultimately only so much to be said, and only so many ways to say it.
What most people do, is that at a certain point they start pivoting to something else. I’m guilty of it myself, to some extent. I started off with fitness blogging, had an epiphany that I was getting bored out of my skull only writing about fitness, and started writing more about other topics like language learning, philosophy, human psychology, and so on - whatever was most interesting to me at the time. Then of course I got into making youtube videos, and I’m also in the process of trying to get my fiction writing dream off the ground.
Other coaches have shifted in other directions. One tried-and-true method is, once you’ve developed a successful business, to start teaching others to do the same. People are generally willing to spend more money if they think that it will help them make money - and if they’re setup as a business, they can write it off as a tax deduction, so you can often charge higher rates and get away with it. Successfully building a following online is always potentially monetizable, and so knowing how to do it is a valuable skill.
Another that I’ve seen a lot, is people who transition into making content about their incredibly awesome sex lives - after all, they’re probably jacked and attractive in the first place, because they’re fitness people, and from there they just have to have decent enough social skills to date some other hot fitness folks, and then they can write about it. Sex has always sold, and long, honest revelations about your sex life can be a draw if you’re young and attractive.
I’ve seen people pivot in a ton of other directions too - tarot, cooking, you name it. At the end of the day, it’s all content, and if you’ve honed your skills on fitness content, you can use those skills to develop in those other directions with some degree of success.
Those people who do stay in the fitness industry forever, do tend to also change from group 3 into group 2 - they stop making content that’s about educating people, and more making content that’s about showing off. There’s nothing more that’s valuable to write about, so they start making fluff, or endlessly repeating the same content over and over.
I also get exhausted of seeing those kinds of fitness content that are just a person sharing themselves doing a bench press for the hundredth time, or showing off in their workout, or whatever. While sometimes this can be useful if the person then breaks down and analyzes why they’re using certain movements or variations, how they’ve contextualized this in the rest of their plan, etc., it’s very often just “oh boy, here’s a guy bench pressing again”, and that’s not terribly useful.
It also conditions us to think that the value of our workouts lies in the kinds of movements that we’re doing, which is generally less important than the way in which we progress our workouts over time. Effective workouts are built around careful progressive overload over a period of months or years, and figuring out ideal progressions to do that - not endlessly debating about which kind of bench press will be most effective. This isn’t something that’s easy to convey in an instagram post, so it rarely gets taught.
This is all not to mention the endless fitness content that just revolves around infighting - coaches critiquing other coaches, poking fun at those group 2 influencers who don’t actually know the science very well, and so on. This could be considered useful and meaningful in that it often involves mythbusting and dialectic/argumentation, but it can also just turn into a lot of bad faith navel gazing.
The point is, at the end of the day, a lot of it turns out to be pretty useless. I’ve always tried to make useful content, but then again, a lot of what I’ve made is probably not terribly useful to a lot of people. That’s just how it goes!
This isn’t a blog post that has a neat and tidy ending, I think. I don’t really have a solution to the problem, because the problem is that a lot of this is just human nature. No one can really make the same kind of content forever without being bored, especially if new stuff will get you a bigger following and help you grow your business. People will always be attracted to certain kinds of flashy, exciting content over boring, meaningful content, and this then encourages would-be influencers to deliver the kind of content that they want. In short, it’s not really something that has an answer or a solution - that’s just kind of how humans are.
Which is all to say, hopefully this post has been helpful to you. If you’re in the market for a coach, I’m taking on a few more clients this month, and you can apply here. If you’re interested in the best summary of all my knowledge in a decade of coaching, 15 years of lifting, and a lifetime of self-improvement, check out the Better book series. And of course, you can follow my mailing list to get updates on all the latest posts, discounts, and more.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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