The Standard American Diet of Fitness

Part I of a series on how trends in popular fitness programming are hurting the progress towards health.

At this moment, our culture is quite fascinated by resilience. The ability to withstand stress, hard times, inequality and injustice to not be broken by that which is determined to do so. And while I applaud and agree that this is an important characteristic of any successful generation, I think its important to not limit ourselves to just be resilient. In Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, he describes a specific spectrum: “in the presence of chaos…fragile dies, resilience resists decline, and anti-fragile grows”.

Are we pushing ourselves to become more fragile in our current fitness trends? Photo by Stephane YAICH on Unsplash

This book was written in 2012 and the term was brought to my attention shortly thereafter in the context of sports science and how we do not want to just build resilient athletes but ones that are anti-fragile. The important detail is “the presence of chaos”. I think we would all agree that “chaos” is inevitable in both life and sport and the demand to thrive in these stressful environments is of great importance. If you were to give one gift to your offspring in order to guarantee a happy and healthy life, would this not be at the top of the list?

Let’s bring this to our pursuit of fitness and think about how we can begin to build our routine to develop anti-fragile qualities. To put this in other more familiar terms, we are talking about building our ability to increase longevity by increasing life span (years of life) and healthspan (quality of life) amongst the chaos or disorder of the current world. From nutrition to work and social to financial…we encounter our own stresses on a daily basis. But are we really creating anti-fragile in our current pursuit of fitness or are we making it harder on ourselves?

We have all heard of the perils of the Standard American Diet, often referred to as SAD due to the overconsumption of processed and refined foods. Although the solution is quite controversial and argued many times over by experts and non-experts alike, nobody disagrees with the fact that the current state of nutrition by most Americans is less than abysmal. Direct and correlated evidence to diseases like cardiovascular, diabetes, and some cancers point directly to the consumption of these foods. So there is little to misinterpret or misunderstand about how we are eating ourselves into fragility. But what people do not talk about is how our current fitness consumption may be just as misguided…that’s right, our current fitness is making us more fragile.

Over processed and refined fitness could be the next health detriment. Photo by Christopher Williams on Unsplash

Like the SAD in the nutrition world, I believe that the Standard American Diet of fitness can be paralleled.

Fitness today is being optimized for the mass market, ignoring the formal physiological research and principles that we have known for decades. Just as fast food entered our nutrition and created its own market, so too has fitness chains and boutique studios entered into fitness and has thrust the factors of quick and pleasing, over effective and sustainable. I see this SAD of Fitness focused on including 4 main characteristics:

1. Economics — this is not in reference to the price of the fitness program (most fitness programs are actually rising in cost) but rather the fact that the business of fitness is smarter than ever and doing more revenue with less overhead
2. Duration — the most popular brands are touting 50, 45, and even 30-minute programs citing the same effects as a full hour of training.
3. Sensory Effects — if there is one factor that is rising above them all, its the notion that music and setting are being intelligently designed for consumer experience. With this, the prevalence of lactate pushing circuits being touted as “high intensity”, is leaving consumers with the feeling of fatigue, aches, pains, and soreness mistaken as an accomplishment.
4. Scalability — going back to the business models, this is where the most successful programs, in terms of growth and revenue, have made their marks. It’s this priority…or OVER priority that has made the SAD of Fitness an ineffective and unsustainable and even dangerous model. Over another post in this series, I will analyze 4 different characteristics of the issues with scalability.

• A low standard of coaching expertise
• High attendee to coach ratio
• The low hurdle to entrance — no prerequisites or consumer learning curve
• Cookie-cutter approach — no personalization and very homogenous programming

I will close this post out by emphasizing that I truly do not believe there is any intentions of the market, industry, or the professionals involved in the programs that I am making reference towards, to trick or mislead the public consumer. However, it does not excuse the fact that the information and research is available and whether naive or misinterpreted; we need to work through the truth and find solutions to the problems…just as our fight with solutions to the nutrition crisis continue.this moment, our culture is quite fascinated by resilience. The ability to withstand stress, hard times, inequality and injustice to not be broken by that which is determined to do so. And while I applaud and agree that this is an important characteristic of any successful generation, I think its important to not limit ourselves to just be resilient.