"Fitness Bloggers" are "Narcissists Among Narcissists"

I get the irony of writing that in a fitness blog. But my point is that if you are going to start from the point of being an uber-narcissist to begin with, what you have to say should be succinct, helpful, technically and scientifically accurate, and largely devoid of confusing jargon. In my case, I also don't expect to reach an audience, this is more of an online journal than a "blog for consumption."

I guess it's just supply and demand. The average trainee can't cope with the idea that success in athletics is 80% patience, consistent hard work, and program compliance--and 20% "special knowledge," so the demand for the consumption of "special knowledge" articles is high. In a lot of cases, I think the immersion in "topical writings" actually helps to maintain the commitment. Cultural immersion can help people to "indoctrinate" themselves into activities and lifestyles, but ultimately "fanatical" activities need to be allowed to ebb and flow in life, like anything else, or else burnout can ensue.

Nobody can maintain the energy to remain the "poster child" for forever. It is the definition of fundamental values that causes real commitment. If you profess to love a thing, you should be able to leave that thing and still know in your gut why you must come back to it. It is part of you. You do not require "constant re-enforcement" of your commitment to keep it alive. You don't need to go down the "cult funnel" by abandoning all friends and family who do not practice the thing you like. As they say, its never the successful people who are posting the image macros of pithy success quotes.

Anyway, back to the excess of "fitness writers." The way to succeed in almost any sport is to train hard in the true strength basics in a gym, and then to devote a lot of time to the technical practice of your sport. Nobody writes articles about that stuff because it's too boring. The three hottest items, the three biggest keys to success in anything--are hard work, patience, and continued compliance.

Then again, the 20% of ongoing knowledge refinement does matter--because people undertake dumb things like "every day is upper body day," or "BJJ doesn't require strength" training programs, and while they may have hard work, patience, and compliance handled, they still under-perform. They may not fall flat on their faces, but their training is off the mark.

The thing is, hard work, patience, and compliance are so important that you can practically apply them to the WRONG things and still achieve a measure of success. A grappler could convince himself that the best way to become a better grappler is to master the goofy elliptical trainer at the gym, and over the course of 3 years of intense elliptical training, he will actually probably amass some incredible cardio that will hugely improve BJJ.

It's sort of like a sail or a rudder on a boat though. Or a steering wheel. You're not always adjusting these things. You orient them, and then most of your time is spent following the course. The waiting and/or rowing, not the steering, is the hard part, and is also most of the journey. Sure, you make course corrections when you perceive something to be flatly wrong, but even a navigator doesn't spend his entire journey with his face buried in the map. The focus should be on moving forward, not falling out of the boat, and making sense of the journey by constantly improving philosophical understanding of why you are who you are. Steering is not the meat of it.