Great Expectations Part 2 - The Power of Belief, FMS, and the Fitness Industry

Jan 17

Takeaway Points:

In last week’s post, I covered the way that expectancy effects work, and how powerful they can be. Manipulating expectations can be a powerful way to impact the results of any intervention.
In this post I analyze the ways in which these effects can impact our diet and exercise results, and why the fitness industry often intentionally manipulates these effects to its own benefit.

Welcome back! If you haven’t checked it out already, you’ll want to see last week’s post about the basics on how expectancy effects work.

Fitness and Diet

We can see from the above examples, that our expectations have a powerful impact on regulating our response to various treatments. This doesn’t simply apply in medicine - it also applies in our response to new workout routines, diets, supplements, trainers, and so on.

One particularly rousing debate happens in the war over genetics vs effort vs steroids. It’s common to argue in the fitness industry about exactly how much various aspects of our approach will impact our overall results, because we want to be able to use this to assess where best to focus our efforts. This can be both a positive and a negative. If we believe that genetics are 90% of our results, that hard work is 5%, and that smart training is 5%, then we’re naturally going to blame our genetics when we don’t see the results that we want, rather than focusing on improving our training methods, or training harder. Likewise, people like to argue that results are primarily due to steroids when they’re achieved by steroid users, because this makes it easier to accept when your diet/exercise routine doesn’t produce results.

A while back, Greg Nuckols wrote an excellent post on some research which was designed to tackle just this issue. In a study, researchers identified whether trainees had “good” or “bad” variations of a gene which was determined to be beneficial for a specific fitness outcome - then, they randomly told some of the trainees that they had the good or bad gene, (but NOT necessarily the people who were actually identified as such) and then tested them again. In the second testing, those people who were told that they had the bad gene, even when they actually had the good gene, performed worse, simply because they expected to perform worse.

The reality is that while independent genetic factors certainly matter quite a lot, our expectations still have a powerful effect to upregulate or downregulate our results - and this can make it hard to accurately assess our progress. This isn’t to say that you can simply “believe” your way into world-class results, but it does mean that psychology is a vital part of success for serious performers looking to maximize their results, and that often, mindset can be the crucial deciding factor that separates success and failure.

Likewise, other studies have shown “steroid-like” effects on training, simply because trainees were given a placebo and believed that they were actually on steroids. The reality is that belief has a powerful ability to impact everything - our training results, diet results, recovery from exercise, recovery from illness, and many more. In short, while external realities play a huge part in terms of our final results, belief and expectation still matter, especially if you’re trying to be the best possible version of yourself.

FMS

The FMS (functional movement screen) is a system which became popular a while back as a method for assessing and managing injury risk. The system is presented as a simplified approach for non-physical therapists, making it easy for any relatively un-practiced personal trainer to be able to do “physical-therapy-like” coaching.

The FMS consists of seven tests which are intended to identify movement imbalances believed to lead to injury. By identifying imbalances with these tests, the practitioner is then given information they can use to prescribe corrective exercises which are likely to fix those issues, hypothesized to decrease injury risk and improve performance.

For a while, FMS was accepted as a kind of new way forward - all the research seemed to be positive, and this represented an easy way for personal trainers to broaden their skill set, and thus their desirability to potential clients. All that was needed was to do a bit of training in learning how to use the FMS system, and you could start assessing clients and using the system to fix their risk of injury. It’s relatively simple and easy to learn and use, and theoretically has a big benefit to the trainer.

But before long, I started to see a ton of debate about it on the internet, especially from physical therapists, who tended to dismiss it as over-simplified and unlikely to actually predict injury risk (or fix anything with its recommended exercises). Lots of criticism questioned the entire premise of the system.

Around that time, negative research also started to come out, suggesting that FMS may not be as good of a test as initially thought. In tandem with this negative research, the people behind FMS began to try to soften or walk back a lot of their earlier claims about the effectiveness system in order to make it seem more defensible, a strategy which often looked silly given the boldness of some of their earlier claims.

Admittedly, I’m no expert on the topic, and can’t say for sure whether or not FMS is a good system. My buddy Travis Pollen has written significantly on the topic, and certainly knows a lot more about it than me. However, what I can say, is that this seems like a system designed to produce negative expectancy effects.

After all, it consists of a few simple tests intended to screen for injury potential - in short, a powerful way of convincing potential clients that they’re likely to get injured if they don’t pay for the trainer’s services. It has all the trappings of an official assessment, including specialized equipment and knowledge involved in the testing process, which lends a kind of sense of showy performance or pageantry. This gives the trainer a sense of seriousness, the same kind of seriousness as a doctor - that they know more than you, they know that you have problems, they have the solutions, and you would be mistaken not to pay for their services.

Such assessments may have some value in terms of actually improving the end experience for the client, but they also serve to create powerful expectancy effects which could possibly do more harm than good. Often, clients coming to personal trainers know that they aren’t in great shape, don’t move well, and so on - they don’t need to have this hammered in to the extent of making them feel shitty and creating expectancy effects, they just need a good training experience.

I’ve used FMS in the past when working with in-person clients, however, I mostly did it because I was required to by the job I had at the time. I ultimately found that the test was ripe for a certain kind of abuse - making overly bold claims about its predictive power and usefulness as a system. My boss at the time frequently tried to overhype the system and misuse it in ways that confused and intimidated clients.

I also believe (and this is only personal anecdote) that it didn’t really seem to predict injury rates. Some clients got injured and some didn’t, but it never seemed to correspond to the supposed risk profiles generated by the FMS tests. This only further confused clients, who it often fell on me to comfort or talk through their concerns - something which was particularly difficult for me, since I didn’t believe in the system at the time, and also believed that my boss’ training methods (which I was forced to emulate by the terms of my employment) were particularly likely to get them injured in the first place.

Does the FMS work well? Is it a useful tool? I don’t know, and I’m not an expert on the topic. But I do find its entire function a little suspicious, given what I know about expectancy effects.

The Industry

Another problem is that the entire fitness industry is quite literally designed to produce all kinds of false expectancy effects. Gyms, trainers, coaches, fitness equipment manufacturers, supplement distributors - everyone is trying to convince you that their approach will make you bigger, stronger, and more healthy, while simultaneously trying to convince you that their competitors’ products and services will make you smaller, weaker, and less healthy.

These expectations are important for the fitness industry, because they’re a crucial component of convincing you to buy their products and services. Gyms operate on the principle that they need to convince you that you need their equipment to work out, trainers operate on the principle that they can convince you that you need their services to get good results, and so on.

This also often turns negative. When trainers can’t really find legitimate ways to positively differentiate their services from others, they often turn to inventing silly, novel, or simply downright counterintuitive methods simply because they’re new and can be spun as impressive. I’ve known plenty of trainers who worked by trying to “scare” potential clients into believing that they would get no results whatsoever, would be more likely to hurt themselves, and so on - it has a grain of truth in it, certainly, but it also only serves to enhance positive and negative expectancy effects.

For this reason, iconoclastic figures in the fitness industry can often turn into “gurus” similar to religious cult leaders. They gather enough fans who believe in the value of their products, and these fans themselves turn into a further method for spreading those expectancy effects to other potential customers. The end result is that not only can they convince others of bad training and diet advice, but this can also spread further, leading to diet and training fads which take a long time to ultimately die out, without actually being beneficial to the people who adopt these methods.

Economically, it’s also interesting how price tags can influence our thinking. If faced with two products which do a similar thing, one which costs $30 and one which costs $100, our natural tendency is to expect that the $100 product is going to deliver superior results. Luxury goods work in part because we want to believe that they work - otherwise, why would they be priced the way they are?

Some coaches, for example, can charge absurd rates in part because that high price tag helps convince potential clients that they must be able to deliver some added value compared to the coach with a lower price tag, even if they offer similar services. The Equinox brand of luxury gyms works because people want to feel luxurious, even if they’re not necessarily going to get a better workout just because they have fancier surroundings.

It’s difficult to properly assess the value of advice you receive in the fitness industry, because everything is so wrapped up in money. When everyone has a monetary interest in the advice they’re giving you, you can be sure that it’s hard to sort out the good information from the bad - because they have a veiled interest in making it hard for you to find good information so that you rely on them as a primary source.

Wrapping It Up

At the end of the day, learning to carefully craft good expectations, and avoid bad ones, is difficult. Throwing good expectations behind a bad training approach is going to hamper you as much as throwing bad expectations behind a good training approach - and figuring out which is which, is often hard.

Crafting good expectations often means accepting that while you may not have the perfect approach, you know that you will put in the effort, you will improve, and that you will learn to iterate on your approach to make it even better over time. You don’t need to be perfect to improve - you just need to commit to learning from your mistakes, being honest with yourself, and making adjustments as needed to ensure that you continue to improve.

Meanwhile, do your best to avoid sources of information which I call “marketing materials” - biased sources of information which are likely to be highly financially motivated - and seek out independent sources of information with minimal financial interest. These marketing materials are very likely to create both positive and negative expectancy effects, and should be avoided so that you can focus on actually learning the best approach.

Luckily, blogs (like this one!) tend to be better sources of information, because at the very least, longform writing tends to be a bit better at breaking down arguments in a complex way, and coaches are writing blog posts as a way of sharing quality training information in order to attract potential clients. This is a sharp contrast to the sales-heavy atmosphere created by your trainer at your local gym, who is often instead trying to quickly convince you to get a sale, rather than demonstrating their value by creating a lot of good informative content, in a way that a person can leisurely engage with at their own pace and ultimately decide whether or not they want to seek out coaching.

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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