The Problem with Health and Fitness

The unfortunate fact is the health and fitness industry is becoming more and more about marketing and sales and less about providing quality information, products, and services. Of course, selling has always played a prominent role in health and fitness, but these days, making the sale is more important than ever.

It is now common people to spend most of their time and energy developing better sales pitches and marketing tactics, as opposed to developing better products and services. In other words, health and fitness is becoming less about helping you succeed in reaching your goals and more about finding ways to manipulate you into buying a particular product or service, regardless if it will benefit you or not.

I know there are a lot of wonderful and qualified people in the health and fitness industry that do put their clients and customers needs first and provide great information, products, and services. However, the problem is most of the information and messages people are exposed to these days does not come directly from quality sources. Instead, the vast majority of the information people see and hear is from businesses or individuals trying to convey a specific message in order to make a sale.

As a result, the information is typically biased and designed to manipulate your emotions and/or reinforce a company or organization's specific point of view. To make matters worse, these messages are often disguised to appear unbiased and informational, even when they are really just targeted advertisements. All this biased, misleading, or blatantly untruthful information just leads to more confusion and frustration.

Another problem is that even when the information is truthful, exercise and nutrition information is often presented in an over generalized way, suggesting things like there is a best way to exercise or an ideal way eat. In truth, there is no single exercise or nutrition strategy that is perfect for everyone, because everyone is different and each person has unique goals and needs. While the one size fits all approach to health and fitness may be appealing, it simply does not work.

It is a shame that so much information is biased, manipulative, or inappropriately used, because a significant portion of the health and fitness industry is constantly learning more about exercise, nutrition, and other things related to how the body works and using that information to help others.

Researchers are constantly learning new information about things like training for specific goals, recovering after exercise or injury, and the affects of specific foods and nutrients on your health. Other health and fitness professionals, including the higher quality coaches, trainers, and nutritionists also use this information, along with practical experience, and pass their knowledge on to others.

All of these people are working to provide valuable information and move the health and fitness industry in a positive direction, but their voices are often drowned by the flood of constant marketing. Unfortunately, there are so many manipulative marketing campaigns, because they are very effective, especially when they prey on people's hopes and desires to improve their health and fitness.

The health and fitness industry is always going to produce some amount of manipulative, misleading, or untruthful information and it can come from anyone, regardless of their level of knowledge or status within the industry. In the end it is really up to us to determine what kind of information we want and expect from members of the health and fitness community.

As it stands now, there is way too much emphasis on style (marketing and presentation) and not enough substance (quality information). There is even a growing sentiment among some members of the industry that people do not want to learn about health and fitness and they only want to be told what to do. I am sure this is true for some people, but it has been my experience that people are eager to learn about health and fitness, as long as the information makes sense and is relevant to their life.

My hope is that people become fed up with great sounding gimmicks and slick presentations and start demanding higher quality health and fitness information. If that happens, the health and fitness industry can really move in a more positive direction and finally be in a position to effectively help people live healthier and happier lives.