With the acceleration of online lifestyles, especially over the previous couple of years, social media fitness and health influencers have risen dramatically, most of them offering a solution to a problem you think you have, or a quick fix solution. There appears to be no quick fix solutions so how are they offering these? There are various social media output channels such as, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube, (Facebook, 2022; Instagram, 2022; YouTube, 2022, 2022) with the right knowhow these channels can reach vast audiences of hundreds, thousands, and even millions! Do these influencers know what they are talking about? Are they qualified? Are they delivering scientific proven facts or just opinions? The fitness and health industry are largely unregulated, especially within the United Kingdom, several corporations have attempted to regulate the industry such as REPS, CIMSPA and FitPro (Home, n.d.; Home - FitPro | The Largest and Most Respected Association for Fitness Industry Professionals in the World, 2022; ‘Register of Exercise Professionals’, 2022) to name a few, but to not much avail. Like everything on the internet there is good information and bad information, as a consumer how do you sieve through this information? There recently has been a bit of a breakthrough with fitness influencers having to announce on the post if it is a paid advertisement or if it is a paid partnership with a company, but then if they are claiming that they have used this weight loss or muscle gain product without ever taking it this could be detrimental to younger adults or more gullible sectors of society.
Social media can be a vast expanse of mindless scrolling or a treasure chest of information. The first area we need to identify is why are people following them? The consumer of their information might be taking their information as gospel, if it is good information great, if it is bad information not so great. They could be risking serious injury or in extreme cases even death. One way to spot charlatans on social media is if they use technical language to explain what they are doing or writing about without simplifying the language back down for the everyday person to understand. Are they just using technical language because they do not understand what they are posting about themselves? You must be able to fully understand a subject to be able to explain it! Consumer’s might just be following them for mindless entertainment, scrolling through their feeds for interesting images, videos, or stories. Social media if it is being used for marketing purposes is about making yourself stand out! This leads to influencers posting more extreme content to get noticed. No one wants to see you doing your twelfth set of two barbell back squats. Not when they could be watching you do hurricane bar split squat lunges, on a gliding disk with your rear leg elevated on a gym ball for proprioception, wearing a weight vest, breathing through a straw, underwater! Obviously, this is a very extreme example to make a point! This is entertaining and would make you watch; it fits the purpose of mindless scrolling for entertainment. However, if this is followed with lots of technical language with the stimulus’s being created in the body via this exercise, charlatan alert! Sometimes consumers end up following someone because their friend or college follows them, and they got recommended to the channel. A recommendation is a good start, right, this person must know what they are going on about, maybe I will buy their programme. To be a personal trainer, fitness instructor, coach, fitness influencer etc, there is no legal requirement for you to be qualified, you only need to be qualified to be able to get insurance! This is a scary fact; you could pay money to get a programme from someone that has no formal training. If this programme is badly written and you end up injuring yourself and must take time off work, would they be insured to cover your time off or medical costs? Possibly not!
So how do we identify the information we should be looking at from the information we should just watch for a bit of light entertainment? There is a hierarchy of information with meta-analysis and systematic reviews at the top, and case reports, opinion papers and letters at the bottom. This paper would be a great example of a weak evidence base, it is opinion lead without systematic review but presents a good point and maybe an area that needs attention. Posts on social media will also sit in this bracket, although the information being provided may have come from a meta-analysis or systematic source, in the most case will tend to be opinion based. Is the information you are reading an opinion or is it scientifically backed and referenced back to the source to enable you to have a look at the original information yourself if you want a deeper understanding.
Are they presenting the information in the most complicated language possible? This would be a red flag, they kind of understand (you hope) the information they have presented you but not enough to be able to explain it without using technical language? To understand a subject thoroughly means you could explain the concept to a six-year-old.
Are they trying to make you buy a product or service? If they are just giving you the information without an alternative motive, possibly it is good information, but if it involves buying the next best gadget or supplement, it is probably a marketing stunt.
Are they qualified in the field? This should probably be top of the list, are they suitably qualified to be giving you the information, this can be hard to discover sometimes but if you cannot find anything out about their qualifications, chances are, they are not qualified. A recent social media post saw a job advertisement for a personal trainer to join an online training team, amongst the application requirements was a body fat percentage below 15%, but surprisingly absent was any qualifications to be able to deliver the services offered. You can be the best Olympic weightlifter in the world, chances are you do not understand the training methods that fixed the issues you had along the way, your coach understood the problem and trained you appropriately.
How ridiculous are the exercises they are posting? Unfortunately, the most qualified professionals do not post the most exciting content, and probably don’t look that good in a bikini! This is not always true but if the content is not that exciting, and there seems to be a repetitive nature to what they are doing, it is probably what you should be doing to improve. Mastery of sport, movements or general health require repetition of movement, this is how we progress.
Celebrities put out a lot of the latest fad information, a lot of the time they are paid to promote a product or service and I am pretty sure you know they are not qualified. Hopefully they are giving you good information that has come from their own professional trainers, but sometimes information gets distorted in translation so this would require caution as well.
It is a mine field filled with lots of information, celebrities, experts, influencers, and the everyday Joe. Following the simple checklist of information above should help you identify the diamond in the rough, but you may get stung on occasions. Your safest bet is to contact someone, maybe at a facility near you to consult before you undergo any crazy movements you have discovered on the internet.
Refrence
Facebook. (2022). https://www.facebook.com/
Home. (n.d.). CIMSPA. Retrieved 14 February 2022, from https://www.cimspa.co.uk/
Home—FitPro | The largest and most respected association for fitness industry professionals in the world. (2022). https://www.fitpro.com/
Instagram. (2022). https://www.instagram.com/
Register of Exercise Professionals. (2022). HFE. https://www.hfe.co.uk/blog/register-of-exercise-professionals-reps/
YouTube. (2022). https://www.youtube.com/
(2022). Twitter. https://twitter.com/
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