When you are choosing a fitness certification or continuing education course, you make a reasonable assumption: the people who wrote the material have years of hands-on experience doing the actual work. Unfortunately, in today’s digital and commercialized fitness landscape, that assumption is increasingly wrong.
The sharp rise in popularity of online education, combined with the explosive boom in artificial intelligence (AI), has fundamentally shifted how fitness and corrective exercise information is created and sold. Many of the industry’s certifications and courses are no longer crafted by educators, clinicians, or movement experts. Instead, they are assembled by tech-driven corporations eager to cash in on digital trends.
Before you invest in your next course or certification, it might be helpful to understand who or what is genuinely driving the curriculum so you can make confident decisions about the best options regarding your education.
Human Expertise or Generated Learning?
Developing effective education for health and fitness professionals has traditionally been a labor of love, born of passion and experience. However, in today’s technologically driven society, it is increasingly viewed simply as a highly lucrative commodity.
As in other industries, private equity or venture capital firms have taken note of the potential to profit greatly from online education. When an investment company acquires a fitness certifying organization or agency, there is naturally a shift in focus that reflects the objectives of the new owners. Typically the company directive changes from the previous mission of “How do we provide the highest quality education for our members?” to “How can things be scaled as quickly as possible to maximize return on investment?”
To accommodate new organizational priorities, cut overhead, and speed up production, content creation is subsequently outsourced to digital marketers, copywriters, or automated software rather than to seasoned industry veterans. This means that instead of genuine education, members and potential customers are often given generic information that looks professional on a screen but lacks real-world substance and practicality.
The AI Hype Machine: Manufactured Research
Learners also need to be aware of the source of the information increasingly used to create online education. Enter AI.
The world is currently witnessing an unprecedented influx of capital into artificial intelligence. Corporate investment in AI has skyrocketed, with hundreds of billions of dollars having been poured into AI startups and digital infrastructure over the last few years. Because of this massive financial backing, companies are under immense pressure to prove that AI is the future of everything—including health and fitness. This leads companies who promote AI to conduct their own “research studies”. The results of said studies are subsequently fed into AI platforms so that these corporate-sponsored research outcomes are repeatedly cited when topics are searched for on the internet.
Algorithms and Bias
Many modern education companies now rely heavily on internet aggregation and AI prompts to build their courses. The danger in this is that the internet is inherently biased. Search results and data points are not put together based on clinical information; they are placed in front of content creators by algorithms optimized for search engine rankings, ad spend, and sales conversions. If a company builds an education course by merely scraping the internet or asking an AI site to summarize information on a popular topic, they are creating “educational” programs using biased, commercialized information that may have not been proven in the real world.
A Legacy of Real-World Authenticity
The good news is that there are still a number of organizations that create and offer online education for health and fitness professionals that are not corporate-owned, AI-driven companies. The BioMechanics Method is proud to be one of them. We choose to operate differently because we believe that human movement education requires human experience.
When researching your online education options, here are three things you can be sure of when it comes to The BioMechanics Method courses:
- They are never generated by AI. TBMM courses are written, structured, and taught by experts in their field with real world experience. We do not ask software programs to create our education. Furthermore, while TBMM courses are often updated to include the latest scientific research, data and studies are not taken at face value. Information used in TBMM courses is carefully investigated to determine where it comes from, who funded it, and whether there is a digital agenda attached to it.
- The skills, assessments, and corrective exercise techniques included in all TBMM courses are the direct result of more than three decades of hands-on experience by top professionals working with real people. They have been trialed, tested, and refined in real-world settings with actual clients to ensure they work to alleviate pain and improve function.
- The BioMechanics Method has been an independent education company since 2000. It is not owned by investors or venture capitalists whose primary objective is to increase profit margins nor is it subject to external financial influence. We answer only to you—the professional—and the clients you serve.
Education Demands Verification
Even in today’s tech-driven era, there are still many ways to ensure you are getting quality education; you just need to be smart about evaluating the information being presented to you. The next time you consider a taking a fitness certification, investing in a corrective exercise course, read the latest industry-based article, or cite a piece of research data for a client, ask yourself ask these questions first:
- Who or what is behind the company providing the education or certification and what are their motives?
- Did an expert working in the field create the content, or was it generated by AI, a staff writer or a paid blogger?
- Does the entity funding a research study profit directly from its findings?
Your professional reputation and your clients’ physical well-being depend on the quality of your education. You have both the right and the responsibility to verify the source of the information used for your training to make certain it is transparent, real-world, and of true value.
The BioMechanics Method Corrective Exercise Specialist certification program (TBMM-CES) is the highest-rated specialty course in the industry. Click on the image below to learn more about the program.
Already TBMM-CES certified or a CES through another organization and want to elevate your skills further? Check out our new Advanced Corrective Exercise Specialist program (TBMM-AdCES) by clicking on the link below.
