Behold a true story about how the “Fitness Internet” can ruin your life:
About nine years ago, I was a newly minted personal trainer, plying my trade at a rundown 24 hour gym. (There were literally holes in the weightroom floor under the mats that you would fall into if you didn’t know about them.)
There I met a girl (no, not like that) who fancied herself a bodybuilder.
To her credit, she had done enough damage on the local scene to qualify for a national competition.
The problem?
She was not ready.
For the uninitiated, the jump between local and national bodybuilding competitions is profound. The best non-fitness analogy I can think of is the gap between GCSEs and A-Levels, where you regularly see kids who got As across the board in the former sink like a stone when tackling the latter.
I told her as much but Our Heroine was not interested in listening to Yours Baldly’s sage council. Not when she had an adoring horde of simps fluffing her ego like nobody’s business hoping for snu-snu from their muscle mommy.
And, of course, there was the pernicious influence of the Fitness Internet.
Social media had convinced her that winning her first ever competition “wasn’t good enough” because it was “just” a local show.
Those profound feelings of inadequacy spurred her into a frankly ludicrous training and dietary regime that resulted in her getting progressively weaker and more ill (physically and mentally).
Roughly six weeks out from this national competition, she knocked on the door of the broom cupboard that smelled like the inside of a used train I’d adopted as an office.
The conversation went approximately thusly:
===
Her: “Hey Phil, do you think I’m anemic?”
Me: “Why do you ask?”
Her: “I’m tired all the time no matter how much I sleep and I can’t finish my workouts because I keep getting short of breath and dizzy.”
Me: “What are you taking?”
Her: “Nothing.”
Me: “What are you taking?”
Her: [Reluctantly reels off extensive list of illicit performance enhancing substances that I shall not repeat lest someone read this and take it as an instruction]
Me: “Go see a doctor, you nugget.”
===
She did not go and see a doctor.
She also did that big show and failed to place.
Neither surprised me, if I am being honest.
The story doesn’t end here, though.
She took the loss badly and that, combined with the health problems caused by her drug abuse, resulted in her quitting training altogether.
Last I heard, she gained a tonne of weight and fell down the “body positivity” rabbit hole.
The lesson?
It’s perilously easy to compare yourself to the various personalities haunting the Fitness Internet.
But when looking at their achievements, what you have to keep in mind is that most of them are on drugs of some description and even the rare few who aren’t have their lives set up to facilitate “perfect” training and eating.
So.
If you wind up chasing what they’ve got, using the methods they use, you’re likely to wind up in a position not unlike that lady I used to know:
Burnt out with ruined health and a desire to get involved with creepy sociopolitical movements.
Arguably the best way to avoid this fate is to learn how to train The Phil Tyreman Way.
But I am hopelessly biased, of course.
All the more reason to keep your sceptic hat firmly atop your head as you carefully read the below-linked information about how I will teach you a balanced, sustainable method of training over the next three months:
https://philtyreman.co.uk/programme/
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman