Current Thoughts
Fitness marketing is a two edged sword. On one side, the marketing must be attractive enough to entice people to take action. Often, this requires what I call “breaking down the wall”. People are very good at building walls to prevent them from taking a step in the right direction. If their wall is built around time, then marketing will try to help break down that wall to make a step forward easier. For example if their wall is built on limited time, marketing might target three short 30 minute workouts a week. If they build up a wall around not being able to eat certain foods, marketing will focus on portion control where they can eat the foods they enjoy.
The other edge of the sword is that often the actions that are marketed won’t get the results that someone is looking for. Often fitness marketing focuses on “magic wand” solutions; wave this thing and POOF it undoes the last 20 years of unhealthy habits. That’s not how it works. And despite the fact that most people know this, they’re still intrigued by the next “magic wand”. Unfortunately, after people have spent enough time and money on magic wands that didn’t work, they give up. They become hopeless or worse, cynical.
There’s probably been no more precise portrayal of what it takes to be fit than “Fitness in 100 Words” by Greg Glassman:
“Eat meat & vegetables, nuts & seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise, but not body fat. Practice & train major lifts: Deadlifts, cleans, squats, presses, C&Js, and snatch. Similarly master the basics of gymnastics: Pullups, dips, rope climbs, pushups, situps, presses to handstand, pirouettes, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, row, swim, etc. hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.”
If you do that, you’ll be fit and you’ll reap all the rewards of being so. Honest fitness marketing.
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Colton Englebrecht just pulled the heaviest deadlift of all time at 1144 lbs.