Let me tell you a story about my first tattoo. It was around 2004 when I stepped into Bear's Skin Art on walk-in Saturday to have two kanji characters tattooed - "Good" and "Evil" on my upper back. I have two resounding memories from that day. One of them is Bear's stance on gun ownership - "An armed society is a polite society", he said - and the other was his reaction when I told him I wanted kanji done. As soon as I showed him the picture of the characters, he asked if I'd had it read by anyone other than the person that wrote it, and immediately added that if not, I should go and not bother coming back until I had. I'm a bit more liberal when it comes to gun control, but thankfully we saw eye to eye on the tattoos in foreign languages thing. I think as a society in general we all kind of cringe at the idea of the guy walking around with a tattoo that he thinks means "Heavenly Gates of Extreme Fighting Spirit" but actually translates to "Furnace. Women find me unsettling. Mayonnaise."
Why then would someone pay $80 an hour to train with someone who lists their credentials on their website as "Fitness Expert with 10 Years of Experience"?
"Fitness Expert", "Fitness Guru", "_______ years of training/experience/exposure" are all widely spread terms used to convey a sense that a person knows what they're doing, yet none of these terms in and of themselves mean anything at all. 10 years of experience could mean the person started walking on a treadmill ten years ago and decided they were good enough at it to tell their friends they were all doing it wrong, or it could mean they were heading up the strength and conditioning for the Miami Heat, or it could mean anything in between. If you're training with them then you're essentially gambling $80/h that it's at least closer to the latter than the former. Fortunately for me, I'm involved in martial arts as well so I get a double dose of this. I'm not sure there are enough legs on insects in the world to count the number of times someone has bravely strode onto a message board to say some variation of "belts don't matter bro, I'm not a black belt and I've tapped out lots of black belts". First of all, no he probably hasn't. Second of all, you know who you've never heard say belts don't matter in BJJ? Yeah, a black belt. The whole notion of belts (or certifications) not mattering at all is an entirely self-serving concept and it's often used by people who don't have accreditation simply to justify continuing to charge for their services without having to put time, energy or money into getting any.
Now, I know what some of you may be thinking and yes, you are absolutely correct. It is 100% possible for someone without a kettlebell certification to know what they're doing, just like it's possible that Tekken 5's unverified tattoo actually means what he thinks it does. It's also 100% possible that someone WITH a kettlebell certification could be a hack. Certifications aren't absolute like that. However, and here is what you should really take away from this whole article so I'm going to make it bigger and bold to ensure just that:
"Accreditation means that at one point in time, someone reputable other than the person themselves acknowledged that they had achieved a certain baseline of skill and understanding in a given field."
That's what it really boils down to. Accreditation is meant to establish a baseline. If you ask someone if they know what they're doing and they say yes but only they can verify it, then you can choose to believe them or choose not to but ultimately you just don't know. If at least, at some point, someone with a proven track record signed off on the fact that they know what they're doing, then you know that it's a safe bet they still do. Does that really seem like the craziest idea anyone ever had? Why would you fight against that?
Now what if I told you that as an added bonus to having your (possible) awesomeness verified officially, you could learn new things, open up new possibilities for your own training and form lifelong friendships? Wouldn't that be worth at least checking out the link below? I know I thought so when the website looked very different about ten years ago, and I have never, ever stopped being happy and thankful that I did.
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