”Online fitness advice. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”
The amount of contradictory advice slung online in regards to fitness is immense. (Same as it ever was, the old muscle magazines were bad, too.) Lots and lots of “evidence” amalgamated from rumors, second-hand sources, that old guy at the gym, and teeny tiny studies that have never been replicated.
As you go on a fitness journey (it hurt to type that), you go through decision paralysis, overbearing overconfidence that you know what’s up, and you end up with humility that boils down to “iron ain’t gonna move itself”.
This seems like a notion lots of people have, but I'm not sure it's true. What is the evidence that online fitness is any more fraught with contradictory advice than, say, online finance, or online self-help?
it's not so much that it's contradictory, but rather dishonest. One example is that a lot of athletes hawking supplements are actually taking exogenous hormones and androgenic anabolic steroids and fail to mention this.
Also, it's in the interest of the online fitness community to make their advice as complex and complicated as possible as is re-entrenches their "expert" position while the truth tends to be much simpler, as your parent comment alluded to
The amount of contradictory advice slung online in regards to fitness is immense. (Same as it ever was, the old muscle magazines were bad, too.) Lots and lots of “evidence” amalgamated from rumors, second-hand sources, that old guy at the gym, and teeny tiny studies that have never been replicated.
As you go on a fitness journey (it hurt to type that), you go through decision paralysis, overbearing overconfidence that you know what’s up, and you end up with humility that boils down to “iron ain’t gonna move itself”.