The Fitness Industry Just Doesn't "Get It"
Written By Kyle Ligon - MovementLink Head Coach
The parallels between a health and fitness journey and real life are everywhere. The more you see them, the more your efforts can compound into huge results, but when the advice you get is out of context for your life, progress can be frustrating.
I originally started as an engineering student at the University of Texas before getting a degree in Mathematics. Soon, my number-obsessed brain became entirely obsessed with health and fitness. I started training clients in 2008, opened my first gym in 2012, started two workout websites, and launched my second gym in 2022.
Because I came into the fitness industry with a highly analytical, outsider’s perspective, the status quo immediately felt off. There are contradictions everywhere, and most advice the industry actually does agree on just isn’t practical for regular people’s lives. Honestly, it’s no surprise 84% of Americans are overweight when prevailing advice makes you think you must track the macros or calories of every single thing you eat to stay lean, or when workout programs leave massive, hidden gaps in your functional fitness and things that will actually have the biggest impacts on your life.
If you are burned out on fitness culture, I’m with you. It took me years to put my finger on the problem: The fitness industry simply does not “get it.” But once I realized this, it became easy to sift through the ocean of expert opinions to find gold standards that actually work for everyday, real people looking for astonishing results. This is the MovementLink Method.
Here’s the core problem:
The entire fitness industry is pushed along by competitive exercise sports like bodybuilding, powerlifting, CrossFit, marathons, triathlons, gymnastics, and even things like kettlebell sport. Top competitors and their coaches are the main curators of the exercise and nutrition information that makes it to you. But the context of their advice being for competing at the highest levels of their specific exercise sport gets lost along the way.
There is so much conflicting information because how someone should work out, the techniques they use, and how they manage their weight is drastically different for each one of these sports. Yet, this crucial context is ignored, and the information is presented as being ideal for you, your goals, and your life. It’s not.
For 99.9% of us, the end goal is to get incredible results, within a realistic amount of time each week, that improve our everyday lives as much as possible. Maybe we want to participate in fitness events, but those aren't our #1 priorities. We have careers, relationships, and hobbies; fitness is just one piece of the puzzle.
It is a trap to think your best path forward is just a scaled-down version of a competitor’s program. Your goals in life are not a scaled-down version of their competition—they are fundamentally and extremely different.
The MovementLink Method helps you sift through the noise to focus only on the most effective methods to achieve your true goal: being Fit for Life.
Ultimately, the goal of The MovementLink Method is to provide fitness for life, both in the kind of life we want to live and for the entire duration of it.
To be capable of participating in anything we are, or may become, interested in and resilient to losing that ability requires:
Functional Ability - We want to be able to walk long distances, maybe carrying a backpack, pick up and move heavy things, possibly carrying them up and down stairs or on challenging terrain, get on and off the floor easily, and participate in anything physical that we may become interested in. We want the option to say, “Yes!” to anything when we want to.
Healthy Body Composition - We want to have a healthy level of body fat and beyond adequate and balanced muscle mass and bone density.
Tissue & Joint Health - We want to be pain free and capable of moving our body through full ranges of motion.
Overall Health & Wellness - We want to feel good about our physical, mental, and social wellbeing as well as have objectively good measurements of health.
These results require a broad type of functional fitness and healthy lifestyle habits.
THE EBOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE
I have been running clients through my MOMENTUM transformation program for 8 years with tremendous success. But, with the amount of 1-on-1 attention I provide in the program, it creates a cost that is prohibitive for some. I have finally consolidated the MOMENTUM program into one, easy to navigate EBOOK, so that more people can finally access the information that has changed my life and so many others.
When you finally “Get It”, the results you’ve been after are inevitable.
