By Richard Tardif
The latest trends in sponsored advertising and among Broscience is that everything we’ve been doing, we’ve been doing it wrong. The ten exercises men have been doing, they’ve been doing it wrong. Women, never do these eight exercises again. If you start a new exercise, you’ll probably be wrong, and here’s why. Planks, push-ups, squats, bench press – all wrong.
There are a few exercises I never heard of, that, no doubt, I would do them wrong. Some articles protect their behinds using the right words. Five exercises you “probably” or “may” be doing wrong. One never knows, you “may” be doing some right. The best one I read was from 2011, when the fitness instructor wrote, “You need me at the gym to tell you what you’ve been doing wrong all your life, bro!”
Much of the wrong you’re doing in the gym comes from Broscience. Broscience is a derogatory term for misconceptions and ideas of questionable scientific credibility, passed around among laymen by word-of-mouth as if factually true.
That’s the technical term. Here’s the real term. Bro-science is when someone makes a completely unsupportable claim, and when challenged on that lack of support, the person instead points to pictures or lifts, or the well-known actors and actresses he or she has trained.
This term is largely due Bob Hoffman,a bodybuilding promoter and creator of the York Dumbbell company, Olympic coach and founding member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Hoffman also had a supplement business, of which the FDA penalized him for false claims.
The most famous Broscience claim was in 1945 by Charles Atlas,“How a 97-pound weakling became the world’s most perfectly developed man,” in just 15-minutes a day. Charles wanted you to do it his way, because in the text of some of these ads he would write, “You’ve tried others, not try the right way.”
I know what you’re thinking? Mister Always Fit, you’ve done some Broscience of your own? Touché. As with many things that are individual, one size does not fit all, and what works for me may not for you. There is one thing that works for everyone. Just. Eat. Right.
Richard Tardif is a personal fitness trainer, health & fitness author, speaker and an award-winning journalist. Richard’s first book Stop the Denial: A Case for Embracing the Truth About Fitness, challenges, surprises, and inspires you to embrace a fitness lifestyle that will work in achieving your individual goals.
