I’ve spoken at length on the rampant extremism that exists within the fitness community. People take polarizing approaches suited to their personal preferences, and even apply that approach to their lives by making it their identity.
Worse yet, if they’re fitness professionals who get paid to coach people for a living, they apply such one-track-mindedness to their clientele, who may end up becoming the same way themselves.
What started out as a serious rehab project ended up turning itself into a self-motivated “experiment”, with the intent of nothing more than being able to say I did it.
As I get closer and closer to biting the bullet and creating an Instagram account for my own business, I still have reservations when I look around at some of the stuff that goes on around me.
In an industry where one weekend of effort can grant you licensure to do this job, lots of stuff can fly. I try to chalk most of it up as nature of the business, but any well-intended coach will agree that it’s hard to let every anger-inducing thing pass without dying a little on the inside.
I’ll be the first to say it: It’s great to set your expectations nice and high, especially when you’re getting into training for the first time, or if you still have youth on your side when it comes to your thresholds, your recovery time, and your gains in general. But the longer I do this job, and the more exposure I get in my field, the more I’ve noticed a pretty significant trend that no one seems to want to address.
The strength and conditioning world has dropped the ball.
In resistance to the revolution circa 2004 which saw every commercial gym under the sun operate on unstable surfaces, smart coaches decided to do more research. Not surprisingly, they noticed that the instability trend was something that had much less to do with “core” and “strength” than many thought. The rise of the importance of ol’school basics began to rear its head, and it made the BOSU-everything programs lose their traction in the training community.
