An overwhelming number of people openly concede to the fact that they aren’t quite meeting the grade in terms of seeing out their fitness goals. Whether their aim is to lose weight, gain a little to have a healthier Body Mass Index (BMI), build some muscle, carve out some well-defined abs or perhaps even get a bit more flexibility, more people fall short of their fitness goals than those who can honestly claim to have realised theirs. But what are the reasons behind so many people failing?

Too Much Tech?

Do we place too much emphasis on using technology in order to try and meet our health and fitness goals? Google certainly suggests so. The United Kingdom’s most popular fitness questions depict staggering numbers of people searching for answers to questions such as How to Lose Weight Fast (40,500 average searches per month), Best Way to Lose Weight (14,800 average searches per month), How to Get a Six Pack (12,100 average searches per month), Best Exercise to Lose Weight (5,400 average searches per month) and Even How to Gain Weight (6,600 average searches per month), amongst many others of significance.

Doing research in this way in order to get better informed is actually a good thing, is it not? I mean that’s what it means to have a world of information at your very fingertips, so ordinarily this would be a good example of technology being a catalyst for more of us realising our fitness goals. Tech seems to be doing the opposite though, particularly with regards to our apparent over-reliance on it. You only have to take a closer look at exactly what people are searching for to realise it. People are searching for what appears to be quick-fixes and blanket solutions and they appear not to be willing to go further than these generic solutions to generic search phrases. The over-reliance on technology in this instance is misdirected. Search terms which would have demonstrated better use of this type of technology would have taken more specific forms, such as searching for the best protein shake if you were specifically looking to build some muscle and you understood a bit about the nutritional requirements which go into achieving that specific fitness goal.

We tend to rely too much on tech in many other ways though, even though a lot of that technology was initially created to aid us in the fulfilling of our fitness goals. Instead of using apps such as those which actually help us plan and track our exercise regimes and progress, we use every chance we can get to take selfies to be shortly followed by some exercise-related hash-tag.

Health and fitness should be a lifetime commitment and our efforts should be turned into a lifestyle, as opposed to being the temporary fixation suggested by our most popular fitness-related search phrases.

Yes, perhaps your best bet of getting the most relevant information about how to realise your fitness goals is if you searched for that info online, but we need to know how to search for the information and we need to know what to look for.