The other day I was emailing about the fitness world with a guy I know who is in marketing.
I mentioned my long-standing belief that the fitness world is saturated beyond redemption. I mean to the point that even specializing in sub-niches and sub-niches of sub-niches is like competing for leftover bait with sharks.
You can sell remedies for sacral joint pain to female CFOs of banks in the northwest who are between the ages of 42 and 46 and you will still have a circle of vicious sharks fighting you for the scraps.
Well.
He offered some gentle push-back to disagree with my belief in total over-saturation.
Who is right?
Here’s the evidence in my favor:
Item 1 – Post online anything about getting in shape, losing fat, improving your physique or health, eating better, or anything remotely related to how the body works, feels, or looks.
You can expect an avalanche of tips, tricks, tactics, hacks, dogmatic idiots, and fanatical True Believers blow up your inbox.
It doesn’t matter what platform you’re on. EVERYONE knows exactly how the problem works and what will fix your pains. It doesn’t matter how visibly out of shape they are, or how out of sync their advice is with their own lives. They will be ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENT of how correct they are.
Item 2 – Every tip, trick, tactic, and useful tweak, fact, nugget, gem, and method that I know of is less than a Google search away.
All you have to do is scroll the feed on whatever mind-rot you’re addicted to (aka social media) and it’ll be force-fed to you in 30-second increments.
With the AI plagiarism machines out there, it doesn’t even take that.
Lastly, the killstroke is that our email exchange which prompted this gentle rant ironically proved both points for me.
My email pen-pal mentioned a nagging pain of his own. He ended up getting his inbox slammed with tips and hacks, most of which were shared from the True Religion of the Believer offering his salvation from on high.
Worse still:
The very correct diagnosis and advice I gave him turned up not 30 minutes later, almost verbatim, in short video that came in in MY feed.
Which makes me wonder a few things.
First of all: What exactly do I, or any expert, bring to the table?
The situation as I have described it is, however true or false, how I perceive the fitness world.
Too many people offering opinions, too sure of themselves, and no standards for separating the good from the bad from the terrible.
That perception is the major reason why I rage-quit all those years ago. It brings out the Joker in me. Not the campy Cesar Romero Joker from the 1960s Batman, either. If it’s to be chaos, then let’s have chaos.
But that’s no way to be. You can destroy yourself by hanging on to that bitterness and anger. And anyway those responses really mask a deeper frustration:
I genuinely want to help people. By all accounts I do have things to share which can make other people’s lives better. At least some of what I contribute is truly superior to the bottom 80% (or 90% or 95%) of hocus-pocus, absolute nonsense, and “information bombs”, which range from useless garbage to the rantings of fanatics of middling intelligence.
And you’re telling me I have to turn put on a red nose and rainbow wig as a dancing clown to even get seen by people who might benefit from my ways of thinking and doing… while competing with 100s or 1000s of other dancing idiots who are just as confident and authoritative in how they present themselves… in a medium where there are NO guard-rails to distinguish excellence from crap?
It’s a real Catch-22 that left me wondering more and more why I should bother.
Secondly: I have beaten this drum to the point of going deaf, and will continue to beat it until ears bleed if needed, but…
If all this “information”, all the “knowledge bombs”, all the “value” that is shared online is REALLY effective…
Then why are so few people getting anything done with themselves?
The correlation runs in the other direction. More advice, more information, more supplements, more workouts, more diet plans…
…and the quality of health is on the decline.
You got people out there that can’t even get the fat off their bee-hinds without taking a pill with who-knows-what side effects.
“But Matt you don’t understand it’s hard out there without the Oh-zem-pick”
You value your health so much that you won’t experience even the mild discomfort of minor lifestyle changes to fix it.
Get outta here with that.
And stop lying to yourself.
The Third:
Who do YOU trust for advice when you have a pain or frustration that you want solved?
It’s noisy out there. How do you decide who is worth listening to?
Why?
What gives you that tingle of truth that makes your insides say “this person and this message are trustworthy”?
Hop on the email list, hit reply once you’re in, and let me know.
Matt Perryman