Social media posing, airbrushing, pouting, and all related silly-ness to gain popularity in the fitness industry.

I like to think that I’m an old fashioned kind of guy, I like to think that there’s some things in life that are sacred. Some things in life are dear to us, should be taken seriously and kept ‘real’. I believe that when things are very dear to us, like family and things that we love, we shouldn’t feel the need to parade them and show them off as it then becomes about our ego and our childish need to look good in front of others.

I’ve trained my entire life in sport, honestly building up my knowledge under some great coaches. I humbly listened to advice from trainers who always led with quiet voices, wise owls who would always be found at the side of the pool or learn against the boxing ring.

I can always remember their actions and voices, every great coach that I ever had always had that tone to their voice and subtle action about them. When I think back to my first swim coach back in Buckley Swimming Club (I’m pretty sure his name was Mike Jones), I can vividly remember him demonstrating how to front-crawl. He would stand at the side of the pool, and with obvious great affection and love for swimming would slowly and delicately perform the pull and catch of front-crawl to us in hushed tones. We would stand in the pool, watch him demonstrate this, he would be watching us, it was like churchgoers intently and reverently listening to a sermon.

When I used to box it was the same, the coaches at Buckley and Lympstone A.B.C. were never boastful or glamorous in their teachings, it was always clinical and direct. They were in love with their sport and it showed in their behaviour and respect for the art they were teaching. Moves, actions, experiences, all part of the magical journey that was there to grasp for ourselves.

So I guess you can tell where I am going with this, the current narcissistic and image conscious trend of ‘fitness professionals’ who, rather than impart knowledge of their sport or chosen field in a way that doesn’t inflate their egos, take endless selfies of their toned bodies or simply just pout like goldfish to gain popularity. Just look around social media and you’ll pretty quickly see what I mean, countless pages of good looking men and women flexing their muscles, showing off their bums, pouting, all in the name of popularity and according to them, ‘fitness’.

Just who are they trying to impress? Presumably themselves.

For the purpose of this blog let’s call this trend – ‘Self-Inflating Behaviour’ or SIB for short.

I do understand the reason behind SIB and I believe it’s a sad one, popular social media pages can monetise their accounts, therefore the more popular you are the more money you can make. But herein lies the problem, in a world that’s becoming more and more self-obsessed by the day, this vain practice simply adds to the daily misery by A. Putting people at risk who are prone to imitating this behaviour, and B. Lowering the self-esteem of people who are out of shape, are prone to depression and may see such images as degrading to them. It’s a very damaging illusion.

So regardless of whether you can make money or not from your behaviour, I think we need to look more seriously at this huge problem, and the implications it has on those taking them and society as a whole.

So just to make that clear, I believe that SIB damages us. Firstly it damages the individual who does it, you can be sure of that. Use yourself as an example, when you take a selfie you instantly scrutinise yourself don’t you? You will study how you looked and maybe take another one just to be sure. Now multiply that by 10, do that 3 or 4 times today and your getting close to the amount of times some of these people must scrutinise and self-obsess about their own beauty daily. It must be exhausting and 100% is it damaging to them, both mentally and physically. Mentally because they are putting themselves under such irrelevant pressure to look good, and physically because, are they truly keeping fit for the right reasons?

Secondly it damages others, so I’m using severely out of shape people as examples here. Currently in the U.K. approximately 30% of adults are clinically obese with probably the same percentage on top of that very out of shape, not eating correctly or not exercising enough. The pandemic is adding to that problem with most of us not going out as much as we used to, then all too often turning to comfort foods and alcohol as a means of comfort. So around 60% or more of U.K. adults are in this bracket. Let’s say conservatively around 2 million of these are on social media, and be even more conservative and say 1 million are suffering with mental problems as a result of their physical state. That means that right now there are possibly 10, 20, heck maybe even 50, 000 poor souls trawling social media seeing these silly pictures and getting even more low as a result of them!

Many of these ‘fitness professional’ individuals will call it something else to try and duck the topic, they will say they are trying to motivate and inspire people to be like them or something similar. They basically want people to follow them. But this is precisely my point and why so many of us are out of sync with reality.

Just to be crystal clear here, It’s not about what people want, it’s what people NEED.

People don’t need to see a more beautiful peacock strutting around in front of them, they don’t need something voyeuristically shoved in their face. I’d say out of 100 people who see these damaging images, less than 10 will find them ‘motivating’, the vast majority will see an unattainable and depressing body which takes them back into the vicious circle.

What people need is to find their own way with direction, great coaching and self-less action from said coach. This puts all the focus on the PERSON. Look back at your own past, I’ll put money on that you can remember a great coach from your past. A Mike Jones of your own. Did they pout? Did they parade themselves in front of you? It’s a great coaches job to empower their flock, not selfishly promote his or herself for money or fame. Go back to your essence and find that love for fitness, you’ll see the good old fashioned feeling I’m talking about!

Maybe I’m wrong and stuck in the 90s! I don’t think I am. Most probably I’m just looking at this from a proper trainers point of view and not a peacocks one.

I hope I’ve made sense, I’d like to finish with a nice quote I found on the Internet, I hope it strikes a cord with you;

‘After you have attained your purpose,

you must not parade your success,

you must not boast of your ability,

you must not feel proud,

you must rather regret that you have not been able to prevent the war.’