I am not by any means the ideal as far as personal training or strength training goes, but I have learned a great deal over the years. Many were through mistakes I made or a dogma of presuppositions I had about health and fitness. That being said, it reminds me of a lesson I learned from my grandfather’s humor. It was something he said to me when we were headed to a casino after I had turned 21. We were driving up to the Casino and he pointed to some cars leaving and he said. “Hey look at all the losers leaving the casino.” He was doing it to be funny because if you didn’t know my grandfather he was always very sarcastic about a lot of things. It made me laugh pretty hard to think that he was right they were probably losers, the same losers that were likely sitting in the car headed into the casino.

I’m probably reaching, but this story kind of relates to how some fitness people will approach clients where in some ways they are not wrong, but in a lot of ways they are not right. There is a belief as a coach that carry is, “Well I’m fit because I work out, and you’re not fit because you don’t.” However in many instances this coach that is fit has something going for him that the neophyte client does not. They have likely been active all their life, and have not picked up as many bad habits along the way. Fitness people usually run with a crowd that share a common type of systemic lifestyle that supports health and wellness. These thing are in a lot of the reason they are successful and these are often the people that will promote a broscience/infomercial/gimmick/placebo effect. I have in some times in my past supported similar gimmicks, however in some instances depending on who you talk to I may still support things that have scientific basis, but others might say are bunk. Regardless of this tangent placebo effects do work otherwise they wouldn’t be placebo effects. Some things can be overlooked in favor of the process because some people can be told, and in other instances a person has to experience something in order to learn. Trial and error has always been how science finds new facts to support new theory and illuminate new ideas. That being said it is important as a coach or individual to self-evaluate dogma that they hold to. In some ways these trainers were correct people do need to exercise to be healthier in other ways parts of the individual’s lifestyle like sleep/diet/stress management need to be taken into account. Like they say in history “learn from it or we are doomed to repeat our mistakes,” or in science “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.”