Just spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Juan Carlos Santana, who I've been wanting to interview for awhile. For people who don't know, Santana is a big gun in the fitness world: he runs a gym called the Institute for Human Performance in Boca Raton, FL, where he trains everyone from grandmothers to high-level athletes. I first saw him speak at a Perform Better conference back in '07. Like the best fitness coaches, he really knows his stuff, and can talk science to you all day long, but at the same time he knows that, fundamentally, it's all about hard work and common sense.

Anyway, we were talking about treadmills for an article I'm writing: what they're good for, what they're terrible for, how they can be applied well, how they're misused (there are some pretty great YouTube videos demonstrating the latter...check this one where the guy and his shoes go flying everywhere, like Charlie Brown getting hit with the baseball.) In passing, Santana made an interesting caveat emptor point about the fitness world.

In essence, what he said was that there are lots of programs, products, and services out there that exist not because they're truly worthwhile or useful but solely to make money for the creator. This is a huge no-brainer, of course, but it means that you and I, as consumers of fitness products and services, need to especially careful with our fitness bucks. I've been told more than once that I need to get some products out there in the marketplace. This is, I suppose, good counsel, and the people who have suggested I do that have only my financial welfare in mind when they suggest it.

At the same time, I'm not going to publish an ebook simply to publish and ebook. When I have what I believe is something truly innovative to add to the fitness conversation, I'll say it. Till then--here's my blog, which you can read for free, and the article archive at left, also free if you're willing to wait a few months after the articles are published to get them online. 

The other day I was having a conversation like this with one of my clients illustrating this exact point. For some reason--nostalgia, I hope--there's an actual ThighMaster at one of the gyms where I train. I pulled it out and showed it to her, explaining that Suzanne Somers made some truly SICK amount of money peddling these things (according to Wikipedia, the heir to the RJ Reynolds tobacco company fortune was the real guy behind this, which is a bit like making money in cotton candy and having a side-business as a dentist). 

I then put all my expertise to use in trying to figure out how to make the thing work: squeeze it between your thighs, between your knees, put the hinge forward, put it back, shift it up and down. It didn't make a difference: in practice, the Thighmaster was a bust.

But guess what? It didn't matter. Suzanne Somers, who, as far as I know knows about as much about fitness as my one-year-old, is a ka-zillionaire because of this thing, as are R.J. Reynolds' kids and whoever built and marketed it who had a slice of the profits.

So what does that say about us, the buyers of fitness stuff? We're suckers. It doesn't matter if something is effective, or useful, or true. We'll buy it anyway.