Whenever you adopt a training routine, you make a huge amount of decisions without realising it. This is true even if you hire a personal trainer or subscribe to group exercise classes. Your decision-making process is at the mercy of common logical fallacies that all human beings exhibit from time to time.
What Are Logical Fallacies?
A logical fallacy is a gap in our reasoning process that leads us to arrive at incorrect conclusions. This can include faulty assumptions, biases, and inconsistencies in your thought process. If that seems a little vague, don’t worry – we’re going to dive into examples.
How Do Logical Fallacies Affect Our Training?
It’s pretty ambitious to expect even a full-time trainer to be an expert in every aspect of fitness. This probably means you’ll find yourself researching different sources for answers, some of which can be unreliable, such as:
- Social media influencers looking for fame;
- Companies trying to market their products and services;
- Gym urban myths (“my cousin told me that you should always train biceps on Tuesdays…”);
- Fitness professionals with their own logical fallacies;
- Traditional coaches who won’t move with the times.
Being able to sort through the barrage of potentially misleading information and come to sensible conclusions is a challenge that many gym-goers struggle with. If you know what the logical pitfalls are, you can avoid being tricked, over-sold, or led astray by others, regardless of their intensions.
1. The Appeal to Authority Fallacy
The fitness industry takes on an almost mythological status sometimes. A popular fitness individual or brand can have a huge following of people willing to follow their lead. Some become such fitness icons that you can find yourself accepting what they say with no analysis of your own. Sometimes this status is earned, and it’s certainly reasonable to assume someone at the top of their game knows what they’re talking about.
Unfortunately, even very high-performing people are subject to mistakes and their own logical fallacies. Some role models succeed despite their methods, not because of them. Alternatively, they may be paid to promote products or services that did not contribute to their success. This can make you invest time and money into something that won’t deliver results, or it can have you placing your trust in someone with ulterior motives.
Example: a popular bodybuilder has a very muscular physique and has been at the top of their game for years, and has a history of steroid use. Suddenly, they start claiming they got their results from a protein brand that they recently partnered with. Those people that admire this bodybuilder as a role model rush out to buy the product without questioning how that individual became so muscular.
It’s important to remember that no one is infallible. It’s why I spend so much time criticising aspects of the fitness of the industry: we need to normalise a more critical approach to fitness. It’s normal to have fitness role models who influence you, but you need to do some brainwork of your own before you jump in with both feet. That’s why I also wrote this blog about how we should view celebrity workouts.
2. The False Dilemma Fallacy
Fitness professionals love a false dilemma. These force you to perceive a certain choice as binary when the appropriate choice might exist somewhere on a spectrum.
Examples: Free weights vs machines, whole food vs supplements, weight training vs cardio, steady state vs HIIT, and so on.
In reality, you rarely have to choose between two extremes. For example, you can alternate between steady-state cardio and HIIT sessions. You can start a session with free weight exercises, then use machines to finish off once fatigue has set in. A flexible approach is advantageous in almost every area of fitness.
3. Correlation and Causation
We often interpret a link (correlation) between two events as proof that there is a meaningful connection between them (causation). This logic can seem persuasive, but it may just be coincidental; there may be no causative link between them at all.
A popular example: in previous years, there has been a correlation between the amount of ice cream consumed and the number of murders in New York (i.e. more people have been getting murdered during periods of high ice cream sales). The mistake would be to assume that murders cause people to buy ice cream, or that eating ice cream makes people homicidal. Clearly, neither of these possibilities is true; there is a correlation, but there is no causation.
Here’s a great list of other meaningless correlations.
Fitness example 1: Crediting your new testosterone booster for your increased strength performance even though their effectiveness is heavily debated. You could just be feeling the placebo effect, or you might have started training harder because you invested money on your training and want it to be worth it.
Fitness example 2: Believing that deadlifts caused your back pain, or that you fixed that back pain by doing a tonne of core work. The pain could have been caused by poor programming choices, poor recovery, or bad luck – deadlifts are not inherently bad.
Equally, the back pain could have been resolved because you were forced to take a break from deadlifting, or because all the time you spent on core work stopped you from doing as much heavy training in general.
Deciding whether your correlated events are evidence of causation or not usually boils down to understanding what other factors were involved in those events happening. I go into a little more detail on the relationship of core training and back pain in my Core Training Guide.
4. Survivor Bias
This is when someone only considers the success stories when evaluating if an approach is successful. This is usually achieved by downplaying or straight-up ignoring any occasions of this approach failing.
Example: A gym/trainer selling 12-week transformations posts their most dramatic before/after pictures on their social media. They use these images to “prove” the effectiveness of their weight-loss method without telling you how many clients found this method unhelpful or unsustainable. The gym/trainer then claims that any unsuccessful transformation was a result of the client “not wanting it enough”, which spares them from any further scrutiny.
This is one of the most easily abused logical fallacies in fitness. If you can obscure any examples of where your method or system failed, then all that’s left are the success stories.
This is just one reason why you should be wary of transformation photos.
5. The Halo Effect
Perceiving certain behaviours as inherently good because they’re associated with other “good” behaviours or qualities.
Example 1: Overtraining and exercise addiction. (“How can there be such a thing as too much exercise? You can’t have too much of a good thing!”)
Example 2: Douchey coach behaviour. (“It’s just tough-love. They take a no-BS approach. My coach treats me terribly, but if that’s what it takes to get results it’s fine.”)
We can also do the opposite, by perceiving an undesirable behaviour or characteristic as indicative or poor personal qualities or moral fibre.
Example 1: The belief that people who don’t look like fitness models are all greedy, lazy, and lacking in willpower.
Example 2: Imperfect exercise form (“I cheated on that exercise”).
Our judgements of moral or practical “rightness” should exist outside of lazy stereotypes and clichés.
Summary
This is already a long post, but there are so many other logical fallacies we could explore. Our biases and assumptions can lead us to:
- Blindly believe everything a fitness role model says;
- Create unnecessary binary choices;
- Incorrectly connect certain behaviours and outcomes;
- Judge a system based on it’s successes with no consideration for it’s failings;
- Make sweeping positive or negative statements about a person or activity based on one or two factors.
When making fitness-related decisions, it’s important to remember that none of us have an infallible thought process. It’s also important to ask yourself how much you actually know, how much has been proven in peer-reviewed research, and what you are just assuming. The keener your understanding of this is, the better equipped you will be to make fitness decisions.