The New York Times has a great article this week about the food industry and their use of science and marketing to create highly successful and highly addictive foods. http://nyti.ms/11TOoSR
How do we as fitness professionals develop our products?
The article is a great piece of journalism and lays out in fourteen pages a pretty clear picture of how the food industry used ad uses science to boost their sales. They have studied everything from human taste preferences to children’s psychology looking for ways to optimize the consumer’s desire to purchase, and continually purchase, their products. The method has been to find what people desire most and give it to them, regardless of health and nutrition. If sugars and fats are what we want, they find a way to give it to us. Some of the main personalities discussed in the article have expressed sympathy for the public and regret for the approach that has been taken by the industry. Some of those sentiments got me thinking about the fitness profession and wondering how we approach giving our clients what they need vs. what they want.
Do a google image search for “fitness DVD”. If you look at the images that come up you will get a pretty clear picture of what our industry’s lures for people are. These lures are the equivalent of sugar, salt, and fat and they sell fitness products.
I’d say the number one lure that we present is body image. Almost every fitness product, no matter what it is designed to target, displays a picture of someone with a nearly perfect body. Those perfect bodies make the product attractive, never mind that they are professional fitness models. They are paid to work-out, eat perfectly, and dehydrate themselves for pictures that will then be airbrushed to increase definition and remove any last blemishes.
The next lure we have is intensity. Each product presents itself as the key to finally getting into the shape you’ve always wanted. This program will have a unique ability to target and eliminate your weaknesses. Just like sugar has dozens of names so does intensity – look for words like extreme, super, fast, shred, burn, hot, ultimate, or simply the letter ‘X’.
And the final lure is ease. No one really wants to work hard for a great physique. We want shortcuts – the same way we want a quick and easy meal. Many products offer the consumer huge rewards within a matter of weeks, or an all in one fitness routine to address everything the body needs in one easy workout. Something I always find amusing is that often the fitness guru who is offering the one easy workout can be found on the cover of dozens of exercise products (I thought all I needed was the one workout??)
Exercise is much more complex than the convenience products would have us believe, the same way that healthy eating is more complex than convenience food would have us believe. We in the fitness industry have to weigh how we present our product to the public. We know how to create something people will naturally be attracted to. Producing an alluring fitness program is as easy as adding sugar, fat, and salt to a meal, but in the end, have we helped our consumer? Do we give them what they want – a dose of high intensity easy to complete work that will make you look like a fitness model – or what they need – a dose of reality?
If you are new to fitness understand that it doesn’t come down to what workout you do. What matters is that you remove bad habits one at a time. Going through a workout in the gym is the easy part. The hard part is changing your diet when the odds are stacked against you, or getting an extra hour of sleep when you have kids and a busy job. The hard part is learning to squat when you’d rather just hit the leg press and feel like you’ve accomplished something. The hard part is learning why your current routine is hurting your back and how you can fix it. If you can hit some of those goals you’ll be much further along than any DVD can take you. We in the fitness industry, I hope, will do our part to help you get there, rather than sell you the easy way out.