“I saw this new exercise online…”

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve shared training concepts, recent reads, etc. that have peaked my interest. This week I had the pleasure of watching a webinar from an absolute legend in the world of speed, Dan Pfaff. While the lecture was filled with tons of brilliant training bits, one thing that struck me was a social media experiment he conducted in 2012. The world of internet coaching/social media was relatively new and they wanted to see how far disinformation could spread. So, they had an athlete perform a backwards box jump where an Olympic gold medalist in the long jump launched himself backwards onto a box. They tagged it as a “new exercise” and uploaded it to Twitter. 

It had over 10,000 views in a week and he said that travelling the world that year they saw people doing it all over the place! This was never thought to be a good exercise, and in fact he reported being terrified filming it because he thought it to be incredibly dangerous. The moral of the story… be careful of what you see on social media and be intelligent consumers of information. Working with young athletes is a privilege we don’t take lightly which is why we not only train our athletes, but like to educate them on proper exercise and explain the “why” behind our methods so they too can avoid disinformation and eye candy!