How to Determine What Authorities Are Credible

Researching for this project, my main concern regarding developing your fitness literacy is how do you know who is credible? Growing up, I thought that the old muscle building books and magazines had no other motive than to promote the idea of fitness and help out the readers. I believed that Joe Weider's muscle building products or Arnold's workouts would be the answer for me, but, eventually, you realize that there is no one route to success. If the traditional ways of building muscle worked for everybody then we would see hundreds of Arnolds walking around, but we don't. Joe Weider had a vision be successful through promoting a sport he loved. He was a businessman who got large genetically gifted men and paid them to say that they used his supplements. I'm not saying that Joe Weider is a bad man by any means, he just took advantage of a great opportunity and made an unbelievable amount of money doing it. He brought bodybuilding to the public, but he did not help people create better bodies.


The sad thing is that is still happens today; the supplement industry still promotes big name bodybuilders and claim that the reason behind their success is the supplements the company provides. Some supplements have been proven to be beneficial, but most of these are just sugar pills labeled with a proprietary blend. Take for instance MuscleTech.

They are currently one of the most successful supplement lines on the market today, but they don't offer supplements any different from other companies. The key to their success is their marketing. MuscleTech has signed some of the biggest names in bodybuilding and are the largest promoter of the Mr. Olympia and Arnold Classic (two biggest bodybuilding contests in the IFBB). The winners of the past six Mr. Olympia Titles have all been sponsored by MuscleTech.

Dexter Jackson: '08

Jay Cutler: '06, '07, '09, '10

Phil Heath: 2011

As you can see, there are still authorities that are completely self interested and will not provide anything credible. Even on a smaller scale, supplement companies or promoters sometimes offer smaller scale trainers and well respected people on forums money or products to help push their ideas or supplements. This is where it becomes so difficult in determining what source is credible.

During my research, I came across this one article on a fitness website that I frequent (T-Nation.com). The article illustrates the importance of reading for yourself and figuring out how to learn what information could be credible through actively reading and improving your fitness literacy. Written by Dan John,  "Why Can't Gunter Read: How to Improve Your Fitness Literacy" incorporates increasing your fitness literacy through what we read on the internet. John initially writes about the beliefs on how to build muscle that he has been raised to believe (eerily similar to my beliefs when I was younger): Eat a high protein diet, always lift heavy, and stick to lifting three days a week. Eventually, he found that this didn't work to build the body that he saw in the magazine; he knew he'd have to figure out things for himself to keep improving. The point of this article is very simple, as he mentions it in the first couple of paragraphs. He says that there is a world of information in all the books, magazines, and articles on the internet that will give you all the answers you will ever need. But the key is developing the ability to figure out what information is valuable and what information is useless. He mentions that many people are intimidated of bookstores because walking in there clarifies the fact that there is something that you don't already know. In order to improve your fitness literacy, you will need to read opinions and theories you don't agree with to enhance your knowledge and learn something you hadn't previously know. Kohn continues on to mention that many great ideas and theories will always contradict each other, so you must be an active reader to determine what to listen to. I beleive this article is very valuable because with how many "experts" there are behind the keyboard, posting on forums, you have to work hard to figure out who's got real knowledge and who's making something up.

A New Way of Talking with Our Words

Critics of the internet and social networking such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs/forums have been claiming that this is causing a decline in our reading and writing capabilities since we skim a lot of what we read and write in more fractured sentences online. But these new mediums are providing us with more information than we have available to us than ever before and I believe this is the key to developing our fitness literacy even further.

John McWhorter writes about this new form of writing we partake in in his New York Times article, "Talking With Your Fingers." In the article, McWhorter writes about keyboard technology in a very interesting way because, while, initially he writes about the common belief that texting and emails are the end of formal writing, he goes on to mention that there are only around 100 of 6000 languages that use large amounts of writing at all. He continues, mentioning that the way we speak through emails is less poetic than the letters soldiers would write to their loved ones during the Civil War. Admitting that texting and emails are simply handier, he believes that they are a new form of conversations, fingered speech, in a sense. In many fitness forums (as well as any forum) people writing will not write with correct grammar and punctuation, all the time. Experts (or those labeled as experts) usually post a lot and will get out the information as fast as possible. As long as it's legible, that's all that matters. Forums and blogs are much like conversations; I know that I don't speak with perfect grammar all the time and know that my posts on forums don't need to either. In regards to fitness, as long as the information is out there, it doesn't matter how grammatically correct it is.

Fitness: A Literacy Being Mushfaked

Dante Trudel: DC Training

With new theories on training, dieting and supplementation arising everyday, visionary trainers are developing their methods with no real expertise that can be derived from fitness certifications or even educations in sports medicine. They are taking these pieces of information they've learned from magazines and books, as well as what they've learned from others in the gym and are creating a Mushfake Literacy. In Social Linguistics and Literacies, James Paul Gee writes that, “For many of us not acculturated early in life to ‘mainstream dominant Discourses, but who have lived large parts of our lives in them, we come to realize, I believe that a significant part of our success’ in evading the gatekeeping efforts of our society is due to ‘Mushfake’” (Gee, 178). Gee suggests that those of us who haven’t acquired mainstream dominant Discourses, but are surrounded by them, will be at a disadvantage because the elite will act as gatekeepers within our society. He believes that mushfaking is the greatest tool we have to succeeding when a dominant Discourse isn’t learned.

Neil Hill: Y3T

 

Hany Rambod: FST-7

I believe that Mushfaking has become the key to succeeding in the fitness industry. Many of    these trainers don't have formal educations (in anything fitness related) but have developed methods based off trial and error using themselves and others to experiment with their methods that haven't been backed by any literature before it. These trainers above have developed some of the most successful training methods that bodybuilders use today, but none of them look like bodybuilders (Neil Hill used to bodybuild). They are successful because they knew that there was more to building muscle than what the training institutions and books/magazines that Joe Weider provided.

Now, these are some of the people who've benefited from these nontraditional methods of training.

Cedric McMillan: DC

Flex Lewis: Y3T

Jay Cutler and Phil Heath: FST-7

DC Training

DC Training is another method that was created by a guy who struggled to build muscle using traditional training methods and force feeding himself tons of food. Dante Trudel eventually started to stay away from traditional ideas on building muscle and convinced himself that people lift entirely based on their egos. Traditional training often features many lifts for each body part with a large amount of sets and repetitions, ensuring that the muscle is thoroughly stimulated. Dante believed that this was just beating the muscle more than it needed to, delaying the recovery process even further.

His high intensity training style focuses on one lift per body part that includes only one set per lift. He believes that if you do one set to complete failure, followed by rest pauses to take your body beyond failure, it will leave your muscle thoroughly worked and not beat down to the point that it needs a whole week to recover. Dante often has people work the entire body with three different workouts, split on a Monday/Tuesday/Thursday/Friday schedule. With this regiment, you will work every muscle on Monday through Thursday (Mon: Chest, Shoulders and Triceps, Tues: Back and Biceps, Thursday: Legs) and Friday will be the Monday workout once again, where you will try to beat your previous bests.

If this sounds confusing and thorough, it's because it is. It's one of the most complex training programs I have ever participated in. Besides that, it's not for the faint of heart; there were times I've almost passed out taking my body beyond what I previously thought possible. Also there will be times where you think you haven't done enough because one set of one lift per body part goes completely against any traditional beliefs on lifting.

DC Trainee Cedric McMillan

DC Trainee David Henry

What makes Dante Trudel so unique is that he has never wanted to be a trainer. He has made an incredible amount of money creating a supplement company. His company, True Nutrition sells bulk supplements very successfully. Since he doesn't advertise, endorse any athletes, or package his products in bottles with fancy labels, he sells his product at a fraction of the price of his competitors. What's even more interesting is that most of the supplement industry pays him to create their supplements for him. Every year he gets thousands of people trying to be trained by him, but he will only select 3 or 4 guys to train because he feels an obligation to.

He hasn't given up on his contributions to helping people, however. He is a moderator of the boards on Intensemuscle.com and provides as much information as he can to people. Dante has sponsored many aspiring bodybuilders, providing them supplements his company produces to help them with their careers. I have read endlessly on DC Training and it has all been written by Dante Trudel himself. Many bodybuilders have become what they are today because of the advice that this man has given them. A couple guys he still trains are: David Henry and Cedric McMillan.

Mountaindog Training

Have you read everything you could on training and listened to what the big guys at the gym tell you to do, follow it to a t, and find yourself making no gains? This is what John Meadows claims happened to him for many years. The creator of Mountaindog Training knew that he didn't have the genetics for a huge and muscular body like the ones we see who compete professionally today, so he needed to find another way of training that worked with his body. This man is a visionary because he doesn't believe in typical lifts such as bench pressing, squatting, deadlifting, or shoulder pressing because they have never worked to build his body the way that they were supposed to. This is when he started playing around with different motions and inventing new lifts to target the muscle different than any lift had before.

Apart from using new exercises that will shock your body and various additional techniques (hard contractions, slow descents of weight, partial repetitions), he believes in starting with a moderate amount of volume and slowly increasing over a few weeks to progressively higher volume.

Here is a typical arm workout that he puts his clients through.



I recently found out about this training style because he is a well respected poster on one of the fitness forums I frequent. He is very active online and gives out a ton of information and is always willing to answer any question regarding his training and dieting methods. In addition, he writes articles for T-Nation and has his own Youtube channel that he uses to demonstrate the various lifts that he creates. These videos just give you an example of some of the unique lifts that he incorporates into a clients
regiment.



John Meadows is a national level amateur bodybuilder and believes that through hard work and the right kind of innovations and tweaks to one's lifting styles, anybody can improve beyond what their previous bests were through these training techniques. He is also very well versed on diet and has an atypical approach to dieting for bodybuilders. Health is his number one concern and the way he diets reflects that. John believes that a body will perform much better if it is healthy. For the purposes of this project, I won't go into depth on his dieting approach but more information can be found on his website, Mountaindogdiet.com.

Digital Literacies and New Ways to Build Muscle

Since the internet took off, people have been swimming in a sea of information that was never available in books or magazines before. New training methods have taken off and there seems to be new ones coming out everyday. Some of the ones that have gained noticeable notoriety over the past few years are:

HIT Training
Mountaindog Training
DC Training
Y3T
FST-7
5x5
German Volume Training

More information on these methods and others can be found here.

The last two have been around for decades but didn't reach mainstream lifters until the time of the internet. All of the trainers behind these methods have gone against the methods that have seemingly worked for ages because they found them to be less than optimal for the average person. For the purposes of this project, I will be highlighting Mountaindog Training and DC Training because they have been proven to be extremely successful in building the bodies of their clients, but differ from each other greatly.

Golden Era Training

For the most part, training from the 1950s all the way to the 2000s were very similar. They relied on high volume and frequent training. It wasn't uncommon for Arnold and others during his time to train multiple times a day for 2-3 hours at a time. Nowadays, that would be considered overkill and counterproductive to building muscle. Although today, training more than once a day isn't suggested often, training methods in magazines such as flex are still very similar.

Here is an example of a typical week for Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the '70s. 

Arnold's Routine:

Mon, Wed, Fri 

Chest:
Bench press 5 x 6-10
Flat bench flyes 5 x 6-10
Incline bench press 6 x 6-10
Cable crossovers 6 x 10-12
Dips (body weight) 5 x failure
Dumbell pullovers 5 x 10-12.  

Back:
Wide-grip chins (to front) 6 x failure
T-bar rows 5 x 6-10
Seated pulley rows 6 x 6-10
One-arm dumbell rows 5 x 6-10
Straight-leg deadlifts 6 x 15

Legs:
Squats 6 x 8-12
Leg press 6 x 8-12
Leg extensions 6 x 12-15
Leg curls 6 x 10-12
Barbell lunges 5 x 15

Calves:
Standing calf raises 10 x 10
Seated calf raises 8 x 15
Oneplegged calf raises (holding dumbells) 6x12 

Forearms:
Wrist curls (forearms on knees) - 4 sets, 10 reps
Reverse barbell curls - 4 sets, 8 reps
Wright roller machine - to failure

Abs: 
½ hour of a variety of nonspecific abdominal exercises, done virtually nonstop. 

Tues, Thurs, Sat 

Biceps: 
Barbell curls 6 x 6-10
Seated dumbell curls 6 x 6-10
Dumbell concentration curls 6 x 6-10  

Triceps:
Close-grip bench presses 6 x 6-10
Pushdowns 6 x 6-10
French press (barbell) 6 x 6-10
One-arm triceps extensions (dumbell) 6 x 6-10 

Shoulders:
Seated barbell presses 6 x 6-10
Lateral raises (standing) 6 x 6-10
Rear-delt lateral raises 5 x 6-10
Cable lateral raises 5 x 10-12

Calves , Forearms & Abs: 
Same as Monday, Wednesday, Friday workout 

Originally shown in http://www.trulyhuge.com/news/tips63jb.htm. 

This style of lifting was incredibly successful for Arnold, but most people would not succeed consistently training so frequently. Arnold was part of the genetic elite so he could get away with training all the time. He also dedicated his whole life to bodybuilding, eating 5000 calories a day, and making sure to sleep 8-10 hours a night, not to mention the supplements he took to aid recovery. I've tried this same method when I was younger and it felt great for a couple days, but after a week, I was burned out. There was no way I could rest or eat enough to recover from so much lifting. Unless somebody is in the top percent of genetic ability and possibly taking performance enhancing substances, they won't likely build much muscle training this much.

This is where the internet has made such a big impact on fitness and what we know to be the best ways to eat, train, and supplement because it's full of real people giving the information. The magazines in Arnold's time would feature what was probably the real training and diet of bodybuilders such as Arnold, but these guys had/have amazing genetics that allow them to train or eat less than optimally and still build great bodies. It's the people that have to innovate new methods and train and diet perfectly in order to build a respectable body that should be looked upon as an authority.

A Community Through a Computer Screen

Apart from doing homework, I would say I spend around 90% (rough guess) of my time on the computer reading about fitness and participating in forums and blogs. There are familiar screen names that I talk to from day to day and I can tell you how they lift, what kind of diet they usually eat and whether or not they compete in bodybuilding or lift for the fun of it. Yet, I cannot tell you most of these people's real names and I have no idea what a few of them even look like. Maybe we'd get along in real life, but we could also hate each other; that's how the digital literacy has changed the fitness world. Sure, we still learn things at the gym and talk to the largest lifters and ask how they got so big, but instead of reading muscle books and magazines (which we still do, just not nearly as much) we participate on forums.

Steven Johnson has written extensively on this subject. In his article, "Dawn of the digital natives", he analyzes the decline in reading amongst the youth of the country. The article shows statistics, clearly highlighting a decline in the amount of novels we read, but doesn't account for the reading we do online. This is interesting because, even though there is a decline in the amount of books the youth is reading, test scores on reading have only dropped minimally. This is due to the fact that screen based reading isn't shown on these studies. This article ties into my project because there are over a million people that have bodyspaces on bodybuilding.com and many of them are active on the forums. Activity on the site shows that many also spend hours reading posts and trying to find out as much new information about fitness, exercising, and dieting as they can.

Social networking is huge within the fitness community and Steven Johnson writes about its implications on literacy, as well. In his article, "Yes, People Still Read, but Now It's Social", he highlights the fact that we are reading more with the social networking abilities of the internet and inventions such as the Kindle and the Ipad, yet losing some of our focus with all the multitasking as a positive rather than a negative because it is enabling us to read more than we did when the television was our main source of entertainment. A passage of interest is when Johnson writes that a linear, literary mind threatens to become yesterday's mind with the advances in technology. I think that, for myself, as well as many that actively participate on forums, we spend hours reading and contributing information and consider it a form of entertainment. Spending hours reading theories and ideas of others, I am involved in a very social environment, even thought I am reading and writing.

Learning Through New Mediums

While Weider's magazines such as Flex, Muscle and Fitness, Men's Fitness, and Shape are still major publications today, people can look elsewhere for more information on building muscle. Today, we have Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and various forums and blogs that allow anybody with a keyboard to voice their opinion and beliefs. Regarding fitness and muscle building, never before have we seen so many theories. The ever popular bodybuilding.com is a supplement website that features member profiles, forums and blogs through their bodyspace section.

This is just one example of many fitness sites that promote people discussing fitness and theories on how to improve their bodies. The owners of this site make their money selling supplements and do not spend their times on the boards pushing any products. There are many articles written by trainers, as well as training regiments featured on the site. The downside to a site like this is that everyone with a keyboard and a screen name can claim to be an authority. Someone browsing a site like this needs to be able to determine what source is credible and what one isn't.

Another medium that has gained notoriety in the fitness community is Youtube. Many trainers and bodybuilders have started channels on this site to either promote their ideas and themselves in order to gain clients or even endorsements. This site gets a little trickier, however, because it can be very easy to follow someone's fitness channel who isn't necessarily credible, but is entertaining to watch or have a good body. I know that there are some channels I watch because I enjoy listening to the person for entertainment purposes, but wouldn't take their advice.

Here is a video from CampbellFitness on Youtube. In this video, he is demonstrating his workout, following the Wendler 5/3/1 training method. In previous videos, he discusses what the method is and provides more information on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. He is someone who has a career in something outside of personal training and bodybuilding, yet has an abundance of knowledge and gives safe and sound advice. He is somebody who I would say is very knowledgeable about fitness and working out and would trust the advice he gives, despite no "real" credentials.

Twinmuscleworkout is another fitness channel that features two twins giving workout, diet and supplementation advice. These guys are incredibly popular, but don't have any "real" credentials either. They largely give advice on what works for them and will briefly read about a topic and speak about it. In their defense, they never claim to be an authority and will always say at the end of their video, "It's just advice, do whatever the f*ck you want to do." This is a fitness channel that I personally will watch for entertainment purposes only because they are funny guys, but take what they say with a grain of salt.

Formula No. 7 Investigation and Others

Formula No. 7 Weight Gainer

Plato believed that having a sole authority over a text would potentially lead to a death of dialogue and Joe Weider exemplified this within the bodybuilding community. Sure, he has promoted many people and helped many achieve great things within the fitness world, but has done it to benefit himself. For example, Weider went under investigation in 1972 for his Formula No. 7 weight gain shake. In the ad, Weider claimed you could gain up to a pound of muscle a day drinking this shake. Investigators interviewed Weider and Schwarzenegger and realized that there was no proof to this claim. Once they did, Weider was forced to edit the claims made on the product and advertisements.

Advertisement for Formula No. 7 in Flex Magazine

Again in the '70s, Weider was forced to refund over 100,000 customers who bought his "Five Minute Body Shaper" after claims stating that one could lose significant amounts of weight using it for five minutes a day. Again, these ads featured unrealistic before and after photos with very misleading claims.

During the '80s, the Federal Trade Commission charged Weider, stating that Weider's Anabolic Mega-Pak (containing amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and herbs) and Dynamic Life Essence (an amino acid product) had been misleading. It was dropped in 1985 when Weider decided to remove claims that stated these products could build muscle and effectively be a substitute for anabolic steroids. He also had to pay $400,000 in refund.

Advertisement in Flex Magazine for Weider's Anabolic Mega-Pack

There is a concern over establishing one sole authority to determine what's valid and what isn't. As you can see, Joe Weider, despite achieving great things for bodybuilding, had a personal agenda and worked endlessly to further his career. People have spent thousands of dollars trying to find that edge that Weider claimed to have with his products and methods and, more often than not, they never backed up claims made about them.

Plato's Problem with Authorities

James Paul Gee is a writer and researcher who has spent time working in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. He is the author of Social Linguistics and Literacies in which he spends much of the book researching discourses and how people acquire and use them within society. Gee also introduces Plato's dilemma regarding writing and how authorities can kill a text in his book. He discusses, acknowledging, "There have been many facile attempts to get out of Plato’s dilemma: the dilemma that literacy seems to require some authority that determines what interpretations count (or all count and there is no meaning), but that authority can be self-interested and kill dialogue. But there is no easy way out (Gee 53)." Plato despised writing; he believed that writing would hinder one's memory and kill a conversation. He believed that without a discussion, writing would take out any aspect of discussion and could easily be misinterpreted. His answer to this would be to establish a single authority to interpret texts, to figure out their meaning. The problem with a single authority is that they can be self-interested and interpret texts to only promote their ideas.


Further reading on James Paul Gee.