It seems like there’s been a big issue going on on the internet in the last couple of months in the fitness and strength and conditioning world.  The issue has been about people self-proclaiming themselves experts.  People have called out other people about their expertise and/or experience in the field.  It’s a situation that’s really hard to control in 2011 where starting your own blog takes 30 seconds, and with the right tools (Google keywords, SEO pack, etc), and a couple contacts one can gain a decent internet presence pretty quickly.

You don’t need to take a class…

With all the strength and conditioning professionals out there running a blog, I can say without a doubt that it brought our industry to a whole new level!  Mostly for the better because we all have access to so much quality information; smart people can share their ideas, coaches can share their experience and we can all interact together more easily than ever before, especially we the networks being formed on Facebook and Twitter.

But as I just mentioned earlier, there have been quite a bit of controversy about the experts in our field on the internet, or should I say the “experts”.  It is indeed easy to proclaim yourself an expert with very limited knowledge or experience.  It is very easy to lie about your background, your clientele or claim achievements that you have never made .  And I think this is what has been causing some waves.

This guy calls himself a fitness expert because he went to the gym once in 1991

I don’t think there is anything wrong with sharing thoughts, ideas or experience over the internet.  Sometimes people will blame you for making statements, though, especially if you’re lacking the experience to back up your position.  And to be honest, I feel pretty irritated myself when I see people write about training athletes when I very well know they don’t.  We do need to understand that we all have different background; some of us are personal trainers and work with general members, some of us work in college or professional settings, some of us are more involved in the research side of things and we all have a different experience level.  Some strength coaches seem to have a problem with research guys being considered experts because they don’t really train anyone, and some research guys will blame coaches for the lack of scientific evidence behind their methods.  As a coach, I’m definitely biased in the way that I will sometimes have a hard time buying into what a research guy has to say about training athletes if he doesn’t train anyone, but I still understand that we need coaches and we need researchers to work together.  And that’s what makes our industry evolve in the right direction.

In my opinion, we should all keep sharing information via our blogs, websites, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  As long as you don’t try to hide yourself behind a wall of lies or pretend to be something you’re not, we should all share information and opinions with our own background and experience.  However I do have a problem with people marketing themselves as “strength coaches” or “performance enhancement specialists” when they have little to no clients or if their clients are general fitness clients.  You don’t specialize in sports performance training if you’re not training athletes, I don’t care what certifications you have or how athletic you are (and by the way, you can consider yourself an athlete, but can’t count that as training athletes).  But luckily, it’s not the majority.

Bottom line: be yourself, share knowledge from YOUR experience (coach, personal trainer, physical therapist, researcher, etc), don’t market yourself as something you’re not and be ready to face criticism if you do.  There is a way that we can all contribute to making the fitness industry a little better by taking advantage of what the internet has to offer to us in 2011.

What a beautiful concept

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