For the longest time I despised the fitness industry. I hated it for the way it certified people who had never trained with weights or achieved any sort of athletic accomplishment. I hated that out-of-shape people were given the same formal recognition as World Champion athletes. I hated that the content of the Fitness training course is utterly irrelevant, horribly obsolete and almost cannot be failed. I hated that the Fitness industry shunned intense weight training while promoting rehabilitation exercise for people who don't need rehabilitating. In short, I hated the institutionalised mediocrity of the Fitness Industry.
But then one day it dawned on me that the problem was actually my misunderstanding of what ‘fitness’ is. Like most people, I thought fitness was all about being in the best physical condition you could be. I thought it was about having an exceptional body and athletic ability.
But fitness is none of those things. Being ‘fit’ is to be ‘adequate’ or ‘suitable’ to perform the most basic functions a human should be able to fulfil. Being fit, in a general sense, is being able to walk, sit up, jog lightly, throw a ball, crawl etc. It isn’t about being an athlete. It isn’t about being best, brilliant, exceptional or even good. To have ‘general fitness’ is actually to be the LEAST a human can be without being sick, injured or handicapped. ‘Fit’ is simply: to not be ‘unfit’; to not require rehabilitation. To be ‘fit’ is to be average; mediocre; exceptionally unexceptional.
Realising this simple fact was hugely liberating for me. Suddenly the fitness industry made sense. Suddenly it made sense why all those personal trainers were prescribing therabands, swiss balls, walking on treadmills and other low intensity rehabilitation exercise that is utterly useless for improving the body. Suddenly I understood why Personal Trainers worked in parks doing primary school PE exercise with their clients. Suddenly I understood yoga, Pilates, bosu balls, ab rollers, the endless Les Mills franchises and fitness fads. None of it ever was about creating a great body or athleticism. It was all about the masses of fat, unfit people achieving the lofty heights of mediocrity!
I have realised that there never was a problem with the fitness industry when it came to delivering the average-ness 'fitness'. In fact, given the disastrous physical state of the majority of Australians, the fitness industry has never been more relevant! The problem that remains is the general misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what ‘fitness’ is.
I am not the only one who has mistakenly thought that ‘fitness’ was synonymous with ‘body recomposition’. In fact, almost every single person I have ever spoken to – inside and outside of the fitness industry – has never considered fitness NOT to mean body recompositioning. Worse still, the vast majority of people I have ever spoken to - inside and outside of the fitness industry – have never even considered what the definition of fitness actually is at all!? I cannot think of another aspiration that is so widely sought after yet so amorphous that hardly anybody paying for it can even define what it is?!
So the greatest fault of the fitness industry is not that its education program is full of content that is irrelevant and obsolete for body recomposition. It is not that the so-called ‘profession’ of Personal Training is one of the most unaccountable vocations with a staggering 95% failure rate for body recomposition. It is not that the fitness industry aggressively directs people away from the type of weight training and dietary practices required for efficient body composition control. No, the greatest problem with the fitness industry is its ongoing, mendacious implication that fitness IS body recompositioning when nothing could be further from the truth!
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