Trainers, coaches and teachers who deliberately connive to fool their clients, customers and followers are “charlatans”. There is a special place reserved for them in the gym of the underworld. They will be subjected to all manner of torture, forced to use the leg press and Shakeweights whilst listening to “Crazy Frog” and watching re-runs of Sex and the City over and over as Gillian McKeith administers a coffee enema. Let’s not worry about them.
No, let’s forget the sleight of hand, the smoke and mirrors, the neologisms and obfuscation. There is a problem closer to home and it goes something like this…
Someone recently suggested to me that “any press is good press”. Well in the days where that flow of information was controlled by just a few, we might have been able to convince ourselves that it just might be true. Hey, that’s the entire tabloid industry right there. But unless you have been under an atlas stone for the last few years you will realise that everyone, and I mean everyone, has access to the media. So not only can anyone write about you…dammit you can write about you! No problems there. Let’s face it, of the four hundred or so million blogs online, we are not going to see too many of them. But those that rise to the surface, those that engage an audience, those that wind up with influence need to take that responsibility seriously.
There are endless recommendations on how to get people to your blog, with numbered lists, controversial article titles, clever tags and relevant keywords. But all of this is irrelevant if your content is simply a party trick to get folk to join you online. You need to share your thoughts, your ideas, your opinions. And if you don’t have any, it’s not acceptable to co-opt other peoples or simply repeat what you see and hear.
But here is the real issue. There is a cascade effect at work. It’s like Chinese Whispers. Someone sees a You Tube clip of some apparently interesting drill or move and decides to replicate it. They maybe see a training tool or method and think, hey I am a resourceful guy, I can do that. And so it begins. We see a simulacrum. A version. An interpretation. No deep practice, no deep learning, no sense of ownership, just a mad dash to the camera and ten minutes later “we are live”, uploaded and tweeted for all the world to see. And that audience you’ve so carefully nurtured, they respect you, they take it all on board. Next thing you know we have a whole bunch of folk doing their version of your version of something you saw online.
Six degrees of separation later we have the bastardised mutant half clean, inverted snatch twist from hell. And this is not reserved for kettlebells, body-weight, clubs, sandbags, Olympic bars or anything else you train with. Just look at the mess of horrendous martial arts clips or even worse the appalling and potentially lethal self defense advice that is given out.
Don’t get me wrong, share, teach, learn, experiment, explore, make mistakes, evolve. But if you are going to hold yourself up as, in the parlance of the Internet marketing world, a “subject matter expert” make sure you honour the source, learn from the best, fill the gaps in your knowledge, understand, deeply. Deep learning. Deep training. Deep knowledge. Deep enough to add and discard as you see fit with the confidence of someone who has put in the time. Anything less and your are simply creating more static online. Anything less is either arrogance or stupidity and more likely a mixture of both.
And for all of us, lucky enough to engage across the world, we need to keep our critical faculties to the fore, we need to respectfully question the things we don’t understand or agree with. Take each other to task, make each other think! We could stand back and do nothing, but where is the fun in that?
And for those who say, lighten up, it’s just a push up, it’s just a kettlebell, it’s just a video clip, you are part of the problem and I leave you with this…
In the words of Bruce Lee - “Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”
