This was originally sent to my newsletter list. Most of my writing never makes it to the blog – so subscribe at the bottom if you want more of this type of thing.
As someone who has been a chronic disparager of social media and its impact on our lives – it’s tough for me to admit that I’ve been thinking a lot more recently about how to utilize Instagram and Facebook appropriately for my fitness businesses.
For South Loop Strength & Conditioning – as a brick and mortar gym – our website and the customer experience of our members are far more important than our social media presence. And – in the past when we’ve experimented with attempting to drive more leads and business through our social presence and through advertising – we’ve found the long-term retention of those members to be severely lacking.
For Legion, however – as an online coaching company – Instagram seems to be a legitimately viable driver of consistent business. This is a difficult pill for me to swallow, since I find the way that most people in the CrossFit community relate to social media to be toxic and counter-productive.
This seems to be a pretty solid case of “If you can’t beat them, join them,” though.
The challenge is that the posts that generate the most engagement are often not the posts that are what I consider to be the most “valuable.” Our most engaged with post to date is of our strong young man Mark Stenberg squatting a personal record of 550.
Sure, this post is cool – but i don’t think it really teaches anyone anything. And, it honestly just probably makes a lot of people feel bad and stress about their squat numbers relative to Mark.
We do have plenty of other posts about movement, motor control and program design, though that I think are legitimately helpful. Problem is – those posts struggle to flip the algorithm switches that drive engagement.
So, figure I’d share one of those here since I think it will actually help a bunch of folks reading this who struggle with catching ring muscle-ups.
POOR SHOULDER EXTENSION LIMITING THE CATCH IN THE MUSCLE-UP
Now this is a post that I actually think makes the world a better place.
There’s a bunch of people wasting their time doing silly ring muscle-up drills and doing progressions to improve their upper body pulling strength to get better at ring muscle-ups – but they don’t have the control over shoulder extension (the ability to bring the arm behind the body) that they’d need to actually perform the movement effectively.
This pisses me off – since there’s a lot of people working really, really hard, but they’re wasting their time focusing on the wrong thing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES RECOGNIZED THE PERILS OF INFINITE SCROLLING IN 1976
Speaking of social media…
In Borges’s 1976 short story “The Book of Sand,” a series of unfortunate individuals are tormented by a demonic, infinite book – in which – no matter how you open it or flip through it – you never see the same page twice.
This is deeply and darkly relevant in 2018, when we all have our own infinite books riding along in our back pockets.
Here’s an audio version of the story from The New Yorker’s monthly fiction podcast.
Independent of the privacy and data-mining concerns that Facebook has run afoul of recently, I think the bigger issue is the way that these social networks prey on our attention and upregulate the most negative status anxiety pathways in our primate brains.
But, I also think it’s important to recognize the human beings that make these social networks are often good-intentioned humans responding to incentives and trying to figure things out in a messy world.
This recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg from Freakonomics shows the level of thought and concern that companies like Facebook have for how their product is impacting the world – and hopefully we can see some changes in the coming years (if not months) with how these social networks interface with our data and with our more base human instincts.
DERIVATIVE HARD ROCK SONG OF THE WEEK
Bruce Dickinson – Tattooed Millionaire
Sometimes it’s a good idea to dig into the questionable material from some of your favorite artists. Most bands that have been around for decades have all kinds of material outside of their classic or canonical work – and some of it can be surprisingly great. But that’s not always the case…
Bruce Dickinson’s first solo album was released while he was still in Iron Maiden. The reality is that most of this material is not very good – and many of the songs are obviously derivative of other hard rock styles. “Ok, let’s write a song that sounds like Aerosmith.” “Ok, let’s write a song that sounds like John Mellencamp.”
And – of course – “Hey, let’s write a song that sounds like Def Leppard.”
The title track off of Tattooed Millionaire is a pretty blatant copy of “Photograph” in both riffing and structure – and this is a good thing.
I know, I know. I probably haven’t done much to sell this song – but please check it out.