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.