Fitness blogs: high quality vs. low quality. A viewer’s opinion.

Today’s post is by Sarah, an avid myomytv reader who wished to tackle the topic of what you should look for in a high quality fitness blog. With so many fitness blogs around, it’s very important to know how to spot the good ones. Thank you Sarah for taking the time to highlight these points for my readers.

Fitness blogs: high quality vs. low quality. A viewer’s opinion.

In the Internet age, fitness bloggers have the chance of showing lots of people all over the world what they can do. But the possibility of profiting from online blogs – through the number of views and consequent value of ads mechanism – has also encouraged lots of people with very little knowledge of fitness but high financial ambitions to improvise themselves fitness gurus (it takes only about 2 and a half months to get an online certification as personal trainer, without having ever trained anybody) in order to take advantage of this lucrative opportunity. The result of this phenomenon? In my opinion, the fitness industry’s image tends to be slightly ruined by these “online sensations”, who spread an extremely superficial and inconsistent idea of fitness and who have very little knowledge to support what they are supposed to be teaching online.

I think that recognizing high quality versus low quality fitness sites is quite simple. First of all, professional fitness experts often share their information with other fellow fitness bloggers: they are not jealous of their viewers, they are not scared to extend their knowledge to other fellow trainers and are not ashamed to ask for their advice if necessary. In quality fitness sites, information circulates in the whole fitness community (other fellow trainers included) and it is supported by evidence, science and extensive experience.
These sites are packed with interesting articles and also questions from viewers: how to perform an exercise correctly, how to prevent injuries, how to progress in strength, how to train in order to get certain results, how to train in case of injuries. And these questions almost always get comprehensive answers from bloggers, packed with valuable advice. In quality fitness blogs exercises are demonstrated with impeccable form, and the reason why form is important is also extensively explained. You can see that these trainers know what they are talking about, you can see that they understand the principles of biomechanics, you can see that they often attend professional update courses, workshops and seminars.
In quality fitness blogs, it’s obvious the main focus is actually on fitness: how to become stronger and fitter, how to become more resistant, how to have a healthy approach towards nutrition and body image, rather than ONLY focusing on how to look “hot in your bikini”.
Quality fitness bloggers tend to back up their assertions with scientific evidence, rather than preaching dogmas without even bothering to say what the sources of these dogmas are.

Some brilliant examples of what I consider high quality fitness blogs are Bret Contreras’ and Ben Bruno’s. But there are lots more, Marianne’s blog included: she shares her own experience, gives good advice, has great tutorials and she’s not ashamed to show her before-pictures which clearly demonstrate just how far she has gone in her fitness journey. The Girls Gone Strong concept is also what I consider quality fitness: a group of professionally experienced women who learn from one another, who get together to train and share their knowledge, who write posts in each other’s blogs (as in the case of Nia Shanks’ recent post in Marianne’s site), who share the same view of fitness.
This is how the “science” of fitness can actually evolve. This is how it can progress, grow and become better.

Needless to say, in low quality fitness sites it’s much more important to focus on the guru’s hair colour, the guru’s workout clothes, the location of the workouts. Rather than fitness blogs, they seem cult of personality blogs or exteriority blogs that cater for the needs of people who desperately need someone to emulate and look up to (usually, this happens with conformist teen-agers who have not fully formed their personality yet, but apparently nowadays lots of grown up people too have this same need).

In spite of this, I am very glad that the internet is full of excellent fitness sites where people can intelligently discuss fitness-related matters. And in case I ever needed some hair colour advice, I’ll know where to find it.

~ Sarah