Beware: The Fitness Content Creator

You can't step foot in a gym these days without tripping over a tripod, walking through someone filming a set, or getting evil eyes from an entire crew filming their shapeless friend doing bullshit 5kg 1 arm lat pulldowns or some equally pointless glute exercise.

All of that content will be edited, filtered, chopped, filtered again and then uploaded to a variety of social media platforms. Spanning out across the globe to the poster's loyal followers who apparently hang on every empty deep and meaningful quote, calculated product placement and the aforementioned, pointless exercises.

Phrases like, inspirational and motivational are thrown at the poster for every reel they make and they thrive off the dopamine rush, much like a crack addict sucking on a pipe.

Like the addict, it becomes about getting more. It's not even about the training. Although for many it never was.

Their entire reason for going to the gym is to film their workout, post it and let their followers know they trained and they “live the life” all in the name of getting more followers. More adulation.

More. More. More.

The addiction must be fed.

It makes me want to puke. Quit training. Kill myself and then puke again.

Before I continue, yes, I film my training. I film it more for my own reference and to see how I’m doing things so I can make changes next time if needed. Then I may post some of those videos. Do I post every exercise? No. Because who cares? Seriously. Who cares about a set of rope pushdowns? Who cares about your useless cable glute kickbacks? If it wasn’t for NASA technology used in gym wear these days to lift and contour body parts or the camera being angled to look directly at someone's asshole do you really think people would even watch a video of someone doing a straight arm pulldown? Of course not. It’s not impressive. The exercise, not the asshole.

Posting used to be about showing things that matter. Big lifts. Squats, Deadlifts, Leg Press, Military Press. The exercises that took work to achieve real progress, were inspiring, and actually changed someone's body.

Then things changed and the internet turned into a cesspool of hate and criticism where even if a guy does a 500kg deadlift at 50kg body weight, some asshole who never trained will criticise him for slightly rounding his back or god forbid, using straps. Now a girl showing her pussy, and tits at the same time if she is really good with the camera, doing bodyweight hip thrusts gets praise for being something amazing.

Therein lies the problem, quantity trumps quality. Posting the same thing over and over again becomes boring. No matter how impressive or how many records a person breaks, an Instagram feed full of 500kg deadlifts doesn’t excite people.

Which brings me to the points for this post.

Think of content creators like the media. At times they report good quality information that enriches our lives. Some of it is informative. Some educational. Some entertaining. And some of it, yeahhhh none of those.

Again, a feed full of deadlift posts is boring. But the 500kg deadlifter isn’t a content creator. They are a lifter. Their interest isn't in gaining followers. Their interest lies in lifting big weights. If people choose to follow, great. If not, they’ll still be lifting because that's what they do. On the other hand, content creators gotta create. They don’t do anything of any value or substance, so when they run out of new things to post they start bombarding us with the media equivalent of an old lady sitting in a chair looking at a wall. Filler.

There is only so much news that can be reported that’s newsworthy and when the well runs dry, make it up. The media does it all the time. They have (or at least had) a solid reputation of providing up-to-date, critical news so no one will know.

So when it's a slow content day for the fitness influencer, they do exactly what the news media does: they make it up. They start inventing new exercises or new ways of working a muscle. They take the same old information, repackage it by talking about different angles and ranges and send it out as something innovative. And people lap it up.

I don’t want to speak ill of the dead but a recently deceased influencer had the world singing his praises for being a training genius with his training tips. Watching his videos made me want to stab myself in the eyes. His content always pissed me off because the level of bullshit was off the charts! Sure, he looked awesome, but he didn't have any special muscle compared to anyone who didn't do his exercise variations. For example, I watched a vid of his on db curls. It's a fucking db curl! It doesn’t matter the angle you hold your arm on, it's a curl. The biceps' job is to lift the forearm up. If your arm curled, the bicep did its job. I'm all for variety in the name of keeping things somewhat interesting and less repetitive, but if you honestly believe that curling from 75 different angles makes 1 iota of a difference, step this way, I have some magic air to sell you with this 1-time offer.

Social media is now full of creators telling us that what everyone has been doing for decades is wrong. The same techniques used to build some of the most legendary physiques are wrong. The same exercises that have been building muscle for generations of pros and casual lifters are suddenly wrong. Yet many of the creators pointing out the errors with these exercises have less muscle and worse physiques than those they are criticising.

I saw a 10 min video from a creator on how to do a leg curl properly. I thought a leg curl was fairly self-explanatory. The explanation is in the name: Leg Curl. Apparently, despite all my years of training, I was wrong. The video went to great lengths talking about the importance of lifting your chest and bracing your back to push your hips into the bench. It spent more time talking about lat contraction and pushing the quad into the pad than curling the leg.

It completely overcomplicated a very simple exercise where really, it’s lay down, hold on, and kick yourself in the ass. Need more info? Kick yourself in the ass until you can't kick yourself in the ass anymore. The other 9 and a half minutes of the video were unnecessary fluff. But a 30-second clip saying squeeze your hamstring to curl your leg doesn’t sound complicated enough. There is no scientific study thrown in there linking lat contraction to hamstring muscle fibre damage if the hips aren’t pushing into the pad at the precise angle rendering the rep a failure. My god, just curl your leg ffs!

The last time I did leg curls I didn’t worry about anything other than laying on the bench and curling my legs up as many times as I could until I couldn’t curl anymore. The lactic acid, burn, following pump and weak legs were indications enough that the muscle had done its job.

Bodybuilding, in whatever form you choose to look it, be it casual or professional isn’t that complicated. Despite what gurus, influencers and science-based coaches will have you believe, in its basic fundamental form, it hasn’t really changed since it was first created.

You need to create a stress to the body to make it think its survival is threatened, and the only option it has to avoid self-destruction is to build new tissue. You then need to feed it a large surplus of food so it can use those calories to build said tissue. Basically, lift weight, eat food, and build muscle. Rinse and repeat. It’s not complicated.

But that's not exciting.

Before you get caught up in your favourite creator's latest exercise variation, keep in mind their very existence relies on them getting more followers and more views. In order for them to do that they need to consistently come up with new and exciting content.

As many of them are so young with limited training experience to call on, they will literally say anything in order to grab your attention. Doing barbell squats with the bar rolling up and down a wall for example. Why? Other than fucking a wall, introducing a whole range of issues as to how to get the bar on your shoulders with any kind of weight and why not just squat? What benefit is there to squatting with a bar rolling up and down a wall? But if they happen to have an awesome physique it gives credibility to what they are saying and people think that's how they built their body. When in reality they did what every person with an awesome physique has done for the last 70+ years. They lifted big weights and focused on simple compound movements. Unfortunately, most of their followers don’t know this so gyms will soon have ruined walls from people trying to squat while leaning against them.

There is obviously more than one way to skin a cat when we are talking about training, but so much of what is being put out on social media is straight content filler. Here’s a challenge, show me the person who has some abnormal muscle never seen before from doing some abstract angled exercise using a machine designed to work an entirely different muscle. Show me one. Even the pros, who are the genetically gifted, the top 1%, the elite of the elite on more drugs than a German Olympic team don’t have any different muscle from you or I. Bigger, yes. Different, no. Show me one person. You can’t. Because there are none. Because it’s all bullshit.