As soon as I wrote the title for this I realized the irony that this article will eventually become. But I will only ask that you bear with me because in the long run, the information presented will outweigh the irony of posting on the internet about how the internet is wrong. So truth of the matter is that what I’m about to explain is something I’ve learned out of my own experience and now wish to pass on, although to ignore this advice and continue to travel down the rabbit hole known as the internet is quite alluring as the internet claims to have the answers you are looking for, whether they are true or false.
So I guess I’ve let the cat out of the bag. What I’m talking about today is the amount of misinformation that runs rampant on the internet. It is something that I believe has become quite the problem. The internet is an amazing tool to finding information, don’t get me wrong, yet the issue exists when just anyone can come along and for a mere $8/month design a very professional looking site and write whatever they feel like writing and even attach various titles to their name. Now, personally, why anyone would want to do this, I have no idea, but the more important thing is that it happens and I’ve experienced it firsthand.
It’s a very attractive thing to find a site that claims to have all the answers to your problems, and the first avenue of such information is what I find in the fitness world. This is honestly probably the most guilty market for false claims, invalidated information, and in general just a group of people basing things on anecdotal results. While this is slowly changing, and people are doing creditable research, it is a slow moving process. Furthermore, the problem surrounds you like a cockroach, smash one set of false claims and there are hundreds more to take its place. I want to illustrate this with a couple examples I have come across.
So in my younger years, when I was first getting into the world of fitness, I had received zero educational knowledge on the subject. Rather, it was so much easier to pick up a magazine or visit an ad-laden website claiming to house the best bodybuilding information on the planet. As a novice, it was a no-brainer to type in the search box that I was looking for a mass-builder workout. Up pops a series of workouts for me to choose from and I had no idea how to know the false from the truth, so I did what any sensible teenager would do… I picked the workout based on the picture attached to the article. I had no idea about body types and the effects it has on composition, or about specific rep ranges that help induce muscle growth or even how much of a factor that diet plays in the whole thing. I ended up picking the article that had Brad Pitt’s picture from Fight Club on it, copied down the workout without question and got to work for 6 weeks. After those 6 weeks were up, I repeated the process. Results were not what I was expecting, so I went to the forums. I figured if these people knew what was going on maybe they could help me to achieve my goals. Well, what I got in return was the target of laughter by people I didn’t know and more links to other articles of the same nature. I was spinning my wheels in the mud and no solution in sight.
I ended up getting lucky to make friends with someone who knew what they were talking about and someone who could set me on the right path, but other people aren’t always so lucky. We’ve all seen the guy in the gym doing the same “new age” exercises because he read them on the internet. I mean, come on, there are entire 5 min long YouTube videos of these people. But comedic relief is not the point, because these people believe they are doing themselves good.
I ended up going back to all my old workouts once I got a couple of years of Kinesiology under my belt, and I almost had a coronary attack. They were so bad, and based on all the principles I was learning in textbooks and through scientific studies, my workouts were just plain dangerous at times. It made me realize the importance of credentials, which I now check whenever I read an article or watch a video.
At first I believed that this was pretty localized into the world of fitness, but unfortunately, it is not. When I began to experience Colitis attacks, I had a pretty hard time accepting that my next stage of treatment was to take an injection that LOWERED my immune system and gave me a higher risk of getting some pretty nasty stuff on top of my colitis. I fought it tooth and nail, and decided to take things into my own hand. I went on the good ol’ trusty internet. Instead of trying to figure out alternative methods of treatment, or some logical options to discuss with my doctor, I find myself on the Paleo website. I was reading case after case of how these people cured their diseases (some of them Ulcerative Colitis) by living the Paleo way, and I decided, with nothing but anecdotal evidence, that this would work for me. I read every case I could, I read every article online that I could (but never a scientific study, nor did I once contact a Naturopath or Nutritionist during this stage), and began my journey. Long story short, I wasted three months of my life eating like a bird, losing ten pounds (while already being a skinny guy), and ending up on the immune suppressant drugs anyway. I had emailed a representative that claimed to be on the “Paleo team” and they always had an answer for what I was doing wrong. One time they even claimed it was that I wasn’t sleeping in a room with black out curtains… The excuses went on and on.
I could truly go on and on about these kind of stories. You can see them all the time on Facebook, Twitter, and really any social media outlet where people are trying to push an agenda. It has made trying to pursue anything really difficult. One statement I heard and have since abided by continuously was that when you become an expert in any field and then go back online and look at the things being posted, you realize what kind of garbage is being put on the internet for people to follow. I’m paraphrasing quite poorly here, and I am in no way an expert in either of the aforementioned fields, yet I have learned that the majority of things out there are garbage. It’s kind of like why teachers and professor don’t let you cite Wikipedia. That is the attitude you need to carry when reading just about anything on the internet nowadays; as if the Internet is one giant Wikipedia.
Yet, I don’t want to end all doom-and-gloom, so one more paragraph, I know this is a long one. But how about we end on some pointers to avoid the mistakes I made and keep you from wasting your time or getting your hopes up. The first and probably most important pointer I can give is do your homework. Find out who is writing the article and see what credentials they have. If someone without an MD is giving you medical advice, well chances are they are just repeating something they heard from someone else, and it becomes a game of broken telephone. But even MDs can be mistaken, so I’ve also gotten into the habit of doing additional research and seeing if I can find two or more articles claiming the same thing. That’s usually a good sign. It’s also a good sign if the information in the article or video is referenced, with plausible data to support it. In the long run, I hope I’ve made it visible that the stuff on the internet requires some work to decipher. You should never just follow any sort of remedy or treatment you heard online without doing some serious homework and asking the opinion of professionals. I’ve made the mistake of believing in the quick fix mentality, and all I did was go nowhere fast. It may be alluring, and may appear pretty with a nice big bow on it, but the truth of the matter is that the bow is usually there to distract you from the crap it’s covering (a metaphor obviously). So don’t buy into something the first time around, do your homework, work hard, and tackle things with an intelligent frame of mind!