Bias and Favoritism
2 March 2007If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
One common phenomenon in the world of fitness and physical renovation is the conscious or subconscious urge to justify our likes and find ways to discredit or de-legitimatize modes or methods we don’t like. I call this weird, predictable phenomena ‘reverse-engineering methodology to justify a predetermined goal or outcome.’ When folks come to me seeking advice they nearly always come with prejudiced opinions: their current methods, be it weight training, cardio or diet, are always tainted by their preferential likes and dislikes. How many times in the days of yore did I engage in heated debates with the Arthur Jones Nautilus adherents telling me in pompous platitudes how one-set to failure done on a Nautilus machine was ‘obviously the only sane way to train and anyone who disagreed was obviously a stone-age idiot.’ Like Communism, Nautilus was eventually consigned to the dustbin of history – a bad idea that died a legitimate death because it flat didn’t work. Sure it produced results on untrained beginners for the first month but as soon as that initial burst of progress faded, nothing of any physical significance happened. The Nautilus crew pointed endlessly to the Mentzer Bros (RIP) and Casey Viator as examples. Casey later recanted and the Bros had chemical assistance that produced results that only they achieved. I used to drive the well-spoken, immaculately groomed, Messianic Nautilus types crazy by letting them go through their fundamentalist spiel before asking the lone question they could never successfully answer: if the system works so well, how come you have the muscular development of a 12-year old girl?’ How come other than the Bros and Casey, no one could ever come up with any rocked-out physical specimens that owed it all the Nautilus and one-set-to-failure?
The Nautilus Emperor wore no clothes. Everyone thought it impolite to point out the obvious: if this system worked so great how come no one was getting results that equaled, much less surpassed, those obtained using even the most uber-basic 3 sets of 10 reps weight-training regimen using $50 worth of barbells and dumbbells? Jones was a marketing genius who reversed-engineered a “system” to justify the need for his horrifically expensive machines – when was the last time you saw one of the monstrous Nautilus machines in use? It’s been decades since I’ve seen anyone aggressively promote Nautilus. People wanted desperately to believe that doing one set in an exercise, training three times a week for 30-minutes was all that was needed to build a body like Arnold at his peak. Nowadays it seems ridiculous and naïve – back in the seventies the Jones clones were vicious, rude, dismissive and arrogant. This type of bias – bias that allows “wants” to trump reality permeates the world of nutritional supplementation and fitness methodology to this day. People are inherently biased and seek methods that reaffirm their biases: those that hate to eat vegetables and love sausage trumpet the “Atkins Revolution.” Those who hate weight training sing the muscle-building praises of Pilates or Power Yoga. Those who hate to diet say exercise alone can deliver the transformation they seek. Those that hate to exercise relate that diet alone is all that’s needed. Those that hate diet and exercise fall prey to pill and potion hucksters who sell physical transformation in a bottle for a price.
On and on it goes…like picky eaters in a cafeteria buffet line, people walk down the aisle of fitness choice and possibility, rejecting things outside their comfort zone, embracing the familiar and the favored, ignoring the most basic fact of fitness life: staying within that zone of comfort and familiarity will never ever deliver the dramatic physical transformation they seek. To the contrary only by working on weak points, only by consciously stepping outside our comfort zone, only by engaging in new and different and difficult modes and methods can the true transformational trigger be pulled. Sameness begets sameness, ease and comfort yields zero results. Bias is another word for habitual behavior; look long enough and hard enough and you can find someone or something that will tell you that what you are doing and what you like and what you are willing to do are more than enough to trigger that incredible transformation you so desperately want. The only problem is nothing of the slightest significance will happen doing what we like in the way we like. Let’s examine our biases and prejudices and identify weak points. It takes a real Man (or woman) to purposefully step outside the seductive ease of the comfort zone and engage in radically different behavior. While sameness begets sameness, radical departure from the norm leads to radical changes. To favorably reconfigure the human body requires we bust out of habitual patterns of behavior in training, eating – and thinking!
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