The pleasure from scrolling down on your Instagram page eagerly anticipating what alluring picture could appear at the bottom of your screen is akin to that of graduation day, the smile of your first born child or your football team winning at Wembley.
Right?
Whilst we can plunge ourselves into the world of fitness via social media, and in particular hyperbolic filtered and edited pictures and videos, the world of Instagram is having an alarming effect on the perceptions people assimilate from fit-pros, models and fitness benchmarks.
Those Half-Naked Selfies
The motivation of looking at somebody’s impressive physique probably lasts all of 10 seconds before turning into disheartenment and despair at how one, being just a novice gym goer, can possibly look like these supposed models.
A plethora of flexed, half-naked, X-Pro II-filtered photos slapped on Instagram is swiftly creating an elitist divide between fit-pros and the general public.
Whilst being shared to ‘motivate’ and potentially create business for the individual, the only purpose these photos actually serve is for the professionals to hide their own insecurities and lack of emotional stability.
The average, inactive person no longer feels comfortable stepping into a gym; why would you if all you see is flexed tanned guys and girls showing off at the gym with more hashtags than a Beethoven symphony underneath their photos.
These impressive poses are far less inspiring than many believe and do little to help achieve what they set out to.
Those Rubbish Exercise Videos
There are some fantastic coaches out there with informative, well-versed and viewed Instagram pages (bretcontreras1, soheefit, benbrunotraining and drjohnrusin are just a few of my favourites).
On the flip side there are some truly terrible ones, leading to many gym goers being misled into performing specific exercises and workouts.
An array of donkey kick-backs, tricep pushdowns, ankle weight exercises and comical squat variations crowd the Instagram world and while the professionals doing them look good and the exercises look easy and appear to work, for the majority of people they’re a waste of time.
I saw one so-called ‘pro’ performing box jumps onto a moving treadmill.
My word.
This type of showmanship depicts the wrong image of how people should train and does little to inform people about the best way they can achieve their goals.
You Don’t Usually Eat Like That
To attain the physique most fit-pros possess requires an intense amount of dedication, willpower and planning with food selection.
Often food preparation, the meals themselves and the time taken to eat them isn’t the most exciting feature of fitness; however Instagram is often littered with salivating pictures of cookies ‘n’ cream ice creams, Nutella-packed crepes, large pizzas, brownies and doughnuts being labelled as ‘cheat meals’ and foods that are acceptable to consume on a seemingly regular basis.
Whilst these meals should never be cut out completely and aren’t necessarily always a bad thing, this cavalier exhibiting of indulgences again crafts a negative image as to how many people achieve their physiques through nutrition.
People looking for motivation to succeed with their ambitions are often the ones struggling to manage themselves when it comes to these foods and would struggle to comprehend how readily these foods are supposedly consumed by pros.
The uploading of these photos is ostensibly a means to justify why they can splurge on these foods and again portrays a negative image of how icons reach their shape.
No They Don’t
People don’t hustle, grind, dominate, aren’t on #teamnosleep and whatever other cringeworthy hashtag you want to name all the time. More importantly they don’t train and love their training every day.
Again, these disbelieving hashtags promote a fantasy only the posters want to believe. And again, it puts the regular gym goer off ever going to the gym. The fact of the matter is, the sedentary public hate going to the gym at the best of times, and to hear people loving every second of their training adds to their catalogue of guilty thoughts.
You don’t have to love every aspect of your training. It’s OK to have rubbish sessions. It’s OK to actually miss a session.
Be Careful What You Look At
By all means, survey the plentiful amount of fitness related photos, videos and information available on Instagram but be careful when taking advice and material from the social media site.
Not everything you see will be the best bits of information out there, and just because someone has hundreds of thousands of followers doesn’t mean they can provide the solutions and answers you’re looking for.
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