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Home » Fitness » Looking to lose weight? Get buff? Stay away from the Fitness Internet – The Boston Globe

If your circadian cultural rhythms are synced to consider signing up for spin classes, cardio-kickboxing, and CrossFit due to the new year, please know that youre not alone.

I can verify this. There were like 500 of you at the gym today. Its actually become part of my own circadian rhythm as a meathead that I expect your numbers every January like slightly chubby swallows to a clanging Capistrano only to see most of you scatter and disappear like a blown dandelion by spring.

So, mind you, none of what follows is meant to be taken as discouraging words from a cranky gym-dude in a string tank who wants you to put down your phone and surrender the pec-fly machine before I get huffy (though, that too). I actually welcome newbs to the gym, just as I was welcomed so many years ago as a trembling twig of a person. I love seeing people embark on their journeys to swole, learning that before they can pick up a weight, they must first drop the burdens of guilt, shame, and fear. Had I my druthers, I would have all of you stick around and lift with me and drink shakes together forever.

But thats not how it goes. Theres another force beyond your self-doubt that is working against you as a beginner, making you feel like youre not doing the right workout, or not wearing the right clothes, or doing the right things, or doing the right things right. Failure is the goal of every workout, and yet most of us are terrified of not failing correctly.

Where are we learning this uncertainty about our own bodies? Well, Im not one to try to assign all the blame for a massive, collective, cultural, and psychological phenomenon on any single ... just kidding, its the Internet.

I spend a concerning amount of time online, and I spend an equally concerning amount of time lifting weights at my local fitness center. But after decades of mindless repetition in both venues, Ive learned they should never overlap though my algorithms beg me to let them.

After all, there is an entire Fitness Internet out there. A super-jacked, devoutly-keto, meal-prepping, dawn-greeting, Lycra-swaddled society of 24-hour gym freaks, snapping selfies, cranking burpees, and issuing a never-ceasing stream of information and images.

The Fitness Internet was extraordinarily helpful to me in its infancy, when I first ventured onto its rickety HTML 1.0 message boards and chat rooms. I watched the Web (as we then knew it) pump itself up into a virtual mega-gym for the still-esoteric subcultures of bodybuilding and powerlifting, giving its far-flung enthusiasts a means to connect and swap flexes. There was this strange confluence of the primal and the digital that made both aspects more fascinating than obnoxious.

And as network speeds increased, I watched as the Internet matured into an invaluable resource of exercise demos, diet guidelines, and program info. (It was in some fusty locker room of a web forum that I first learned of Arnold Schwarzeneggers literally transformative Golden Six.) Training the body has become, in our times, a form of expression; and the Internet was giving millions the means to learn its language.

But and its a big but Ive also watched as the informational pools and tributaries of the early Internet converged into something more like a feed-flooding deluge. Once Facebook or Googles algorithms whiff any search regarding your vague quest for abs or boulder shoulders, you can expect to encounter the Fitness Internet at full intensity and its not pretty.

Be taken not by the countless websites and social media posts that purport to answer some essential question that only years of toil in the gym can properly resolve (i.e. Want to burn fat and gain muscle at the same time? Click here!). Remain undeterred by the hundreds of articles that claim the same vegetable will make you either a titan or a twig. Scroll past the Instagram images of daily flexers, progress pics, sponsored supplements, and guilt-stoking hashtags about #doingthework and #noexcuses. (There are excuses, you will use them often. Its fine.) Minimize the conflicting arguments about which programs work and which dont, and why youre inevitably stupid for believing in either.

So much of what happens on the Fitness Internet appears to be about success or achievement. But the secret to know about every fitness journey is that its really and quite literally more about failure. But #failure has never been the hottest trend on social media, which is far more concerned with #winning. Thus what we encounter in our feeds is a parade of quasi-inspirational illusions what I like to call results, visions which give the impression of a goal reached or a height attained. (Which never actually happens.)

As any seasoned meathead (Ive been told its akin to cumin) will tell you, you never really reach the top of the hill, you just keep pushing the rock. Theres always a heavier weight; always an immovable object, always a stoppable force. Its the promise and the punishment of gymming. Thats the workout youre signing up for; it is, at once, both plan and result." No winning, just heavier ways to lose.

Does that sound discouraging? It wasnt supposed to. The point is, your challenge isnt just to find your way in the gym, its also to find your way in your body and thats a very personal journey. The Fitness Internet can be understood as a vast tangle of these journeys; and while its rich with ideas, its richer with evidence that there is no Unified Theory of Swole, no One Way to do things (though I can tell without even looking that your squat is iffy).

The best way to go is to just go; get out of your own way and let your body lead you; find what works and what doesnt; feel your way forward; but just go. Put down the phone and go. (No seriously, Ive been waiting for this machine for like 20 minutes.)

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.

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Looking to lose weight? Get buff? Stay away from the Fitness Internet - The Boston Globe

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Home » Fitness » Looking to lose weight? Get buff? Stay away from the Fitness Internet – The Boston Globe