What has following the crowd ever gotten you?
Maybe it will get you safely out of a burning building, but even that’s no guarantee for success depending on who you follow.
You may be following some panicked dopes straight into the basement who can’t read an exit sign
With rare exceptions, following the crowd has never improved my life quality or advanced any life metrics for me such as my well being, wealth, health, fitness, love life or my personal and business relationships
But let’s concentrate specifically on your fitness and health success
To be blunt, If you tend to follow the fitness crowd, you will tend to get the same dismal results of the crowd.
And any results you may experience copying the crowd more often than not will be fleeting at best, unsustainable, make you prone to injury/ill health and frustrate you as you get little payback for all your precious investment of time.
Don’t believe me?
That’s OK, but let me present a few examples of crowd following patterns I have witnessed time after time that mostly detract from your fitness and health success.
What The Crowd Does:
Every year the crowd will make an emotionally charged new year’s resolution to become fit and healthy after willfully living an unhealthy, sedentary lifestyle for the entire previous year.
The Result:
The emotional high of the new year’s resolution crowd statistically burns out in less than a month.
They will quit the gym or their workout routine either through lack of discipline, rationalizing returning to their poor habits or they get injured by rushing into training programs that have dubious value or are beyond their skill level.
To make matters worse, after the crowd quickly fails in their annual fitness resolutions, they will often double down on their bad habits and degenerate into an even worse state of health and fitness.
A Better Plan:
Prioritize your fitness and treat it like a valuable life asset to be practiced consistently throughout the year.
Understand that there will be good days and blah days, exciting advancements to your goals and yes – even setbacks.
The key is to be consistent and cultivate some kind of accountability for yourself.
Seek out and practice a total body training program that can be scaled to your fitness level.
Or find a coach that understands how to train for strength, mobility and total body capability that also serves to injury proof you.
Align yourself with motivated people who are vested in your success – Ditch those who undermine your efforts and overtly and covertly sabotage your healthy habits and success.
If you take the blinders off and look closely at your life, you will easily identify your life and fitness detractors.
These are the selfishly horrible people who pretend to root for your success, yet will undermine you as they sit in the weeds hoping to drag you back into their miserable lives and bad habits.
What The Crowd Does:
The crowd will either put zero thought into their nutrition, chase the fad diet of the week championed by the latest phony celebrity or scream to the world they are eating according to some convoluted ideological or politically correct eating principles in order to virtue signal their inflated enlightened social status.
The Result:
The huge crowd who live by these eating habits are some of the most unhealthy people you will ever encounter. Just open your eyes and look at the shape a large cross section of America is in. Some are just plain obese, while others look like they “dieted” their way to loose skin and bones with no underlying muscle to promote a healthy form or physical capability whatsoever.
A Better Plan:
Eat how human beings were evolved to eat on this planet. Limit sugars and processed foods. Go easy on grains, carbs and dairy. And stop vilifying meat as it’s actually quite healthy when you get it from a good source and not commercially injected with hormones, antibiotics and fed crap additives.
When in doubt about your diet, just listen to your stomach. If you are constantly having stomach issues, that is a sign your chosen diet is failing you and your stomach is rebelling against your poor choices.
And your stomach could care less about your politically correct eating habits, so vegetarians and vegans take note if what you’re eating(or not eating) is playing havoc with your tummies!
What The Crowd Does:
The crowd likes to gulp down pills, potions, powders, hormones and the “super food” extract of the week in hopes of instant gratification and fooling their bodies into thinking it’s getting wholesome, useable nutrition.
The result:
At best, you are probably wasting your money for marginal benefit. At worst you may be damaging and over taxing your internal organs and rolling the dice with your longevity in the case of questionable performance enhancing drug use and toxic supplementation.
A Better Plan:
Eat whole unprocessed foods to satisfy your body’s nutrient cravings as evolution has determined that this is how your body will thrive.
Supplement ONLY if there is a factual determination of a nutritional deficiency ideally through a doctor schooled in actual nutrition along with lab bloodwork to map and quantify what is going on inside your body.
Don’t just load up on a particular supplement because the crowd sings its praises or some Hollywood phony swears by it with no factual backup.
If my thoughts, examples and observations as to the pitfalls of following the fitness crowd resonate with you or give you pause to think about your own unique fitness journey, then I trust you will take action to either maintain your quality lifestyle or advance it forward in some fashion.
Related: Are You Supplementing To Failure?
Related: The Moves That Drive Fitness Results
Related: Iron Minds Drive Iron Bodies
I’m Mark Mellohusky
I share, write about, demonstrate and actively practice methods and philosophies that allow me to stay strong, happy, financially secure, lean, move well and pain-free, keep fat off, remain powerfully confident and live a high quality healthy life without boring the hell out of me or wasting my precious time.
I am not everybody’s cup of tea and I don’t pretend to be everything to everybody as that is a loser’s game.
And I don’t follow the flashy and ineffective fitness industry herd – engaging in mindless activity and chasing crazy variety hoping for results that never happen.
At the end of the day, the only person who can persuade you to be a disciplined and productive participant in life is YOU
It’s easy to develop an iron body. It’s harder to develop an iron character.