In the following article we will present you 5 rules that you have to follow if you want to become a successful in the fitness industry!
- If you are a trainer of celebrities, you will tell reporters and anyone who listens that your program can work for anyone, if they buy your book and DVD.
You will gloss over the fact celebrities eat exactly 50 calories per meal and work out with you for hours daily. Your revolutionary fitness program will turn out to be the same exercises everyone does: lots of lunges, crunches, jump rope, blah blah. You will pretend your plan is different than everyone else’s. You will not let people know that working with a trainer makes a difference in how people work out, that having someone pushing and cheering and coaching tends to make ‘em work harder than they might work on their own. Instead, the thing you will push is your DVD, which you again will claim can work for everyone.
- If you are selling a diet program, you will use some dumbass example of how people in such-and-such region or blah blah period in time ate this way and were fine. Often you will neglect to mention that people from that place or time were about two feet tall and had a life expectancy of age 25. The historical-biological context will add legitimacy to your crackpot food plan somehow.
- If you are selling a new way of exercising, you will open a studio in L.A. Your new way will likely be an old way made over to look new, or two things combined, like hockey and step aerobics–horobics. You will pray every night that some celebrity likes your method and becomes your poster child. If no celebrity does, you will pay one to endorse you, though it will most likely be a C-lister. You will promise that your program is fun and effective. You may add some pseudo-spiritual element to horobics or whatever, but it’s not essential. The most important thing is to get your new way to take off and become a gym staple for six months to a year, after which it will most likely fade into obscurity, supplanted by the next new thing.
- If you sell fitness products by catalog, you will only use stiff, awkward models with 80s hair. All your models will smile in a scary way even though no one has ever smiled while doing, say, lots of crunches on a Swiss ball. If you sell these products to personal trainers, you will have a trainer standing in the background, smiling, and looking benevolently at a client with bad 80s hair. No one will look particularly sweaty.
- If you sell boxing or MMA equipment by catalog, none of your models will smile. At least three of the guys will have the obligatory tribal arm band tattoo on their bicep pumped up with steroids for mass from steroidninja.com. Even though you sell stuff to women as well, like boxing gloves and chest protectors, only one of the women in your catalog will actually be in anything resembling a fighting stance. The others will be pouting skankily as they mime pulling off their tank tops or my personal favorite, hooking one thumb through the belt loop of a denim skirt and pulling down a little bit as if to say, “omigod, it’s so hard to get your clothes off, hee hee pout pout”. In fact, one of these catalogs will actually list sizes as “mens” and “girls”. Bloggers looking at this will wonder who the target audience is for these tank tops–are they just there to give the guys wood (in which case you’d be better off looking at pictures of naked women) or is there a large contingent of non-fighting skanky women who order from these catalogs?