While eagerly awaiting the start of the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games in just under two weeks’ time, I'm always attentive to updates I catch on TV or elsewhere. If you’re close by and utter the words, “the Olympics,” then as long as I’m in earshot you can rest assured I’ll tune in to your frequency. Unfortunately, however, my Olympics radar has too often been triggered by snippets I would rather never have caught.

With talk of banning entire nations and drug scandals, it becomes easy to forget the original Olympic ideals on which the ultimate world sports festival was built. Principles like the preservation of peace and human dignity, friendship, solidarity and fair play, and not discriminating on the grounds of politics, all seem like a bit of a hazy dream in light of the cold hard news stories rolling out here in the real world. And it’s not just the Olympics either, match-fixing is yet another scourge to rattle the sports world at large.

You simply cannot help but think about some of the other gremlins that might be lurking in those areas we like to think are good, wholesome pastimes, and pursue with the best of intentions. The Olympics are a powerful movement and the challenges they face will continue to garner due attention from influential sports administrators. A far less powerful movement in terms of internal organisation, management and influence, however, is the much younger fitness industry. We continue to borrow our science from other fields and lack the capabilities to understand, much less face the big issues.

While the fitness industry is indeed strong economically, its wealth is spread extremely thin among the thousands of small to medium-sized operators that characterise the sector, thereby lacking the sort of cohesion sports organisations and associations have. Issues in sport hit the headlines while issues in fitness remain largely ignored, or brushed under the carpet, because things are ticking along nicely and exposing gremlins might just be ‘bad for business’.

The elephant in the room here is no doubt the issue of drug use. Steroids available to fitness enthusiasts are typically designer drugs sourced through the black market, and if that doesn’t raise sufficient concern, the doses taken for building muscle are typically so very much more than those studied in clinical trials and duly prescribed for medicinal purposes. But we’ve heard all of this before, because we know about athletes who have taken drugs. My question, however, is this: how many competitive athletes are there in Malta likely to take drugs, and how many people exercise in gyms?

Issues in sport hit the headlines while issues in fitness remain largely ignored or brushed under the carpet, because things are ticking along nicely and exposing gremlins might just be ‘bad for business’

For the former group, there are drug-testing and education programmes organised by national regulatory bodies and associations; for the latter, there is absolutely nothing. Gym users are thrust into an environment where they are expected to keep up with an impossible body image, alongside peers who may or may not be drug-users themselves and possibly even exposed to gym staff who actively pitch and sell drugs.

Part of the problem is that I can pretty much say whatever I like about this or any other issue in our local fitness scene, because in the absence of any sort of regulatory body in the sector or sufficient research interest from local higher education institutions, we simply don’t know what is going on, not officially anyway.

Another elephant in the gym brushed even further under a very large carpet is that of mental health. We harp on about the benefits of exercise, including its application in the treatment and management of mental health conditions, including depression. Yes, it’s true, exercise has been proven to have similar effects as popular anti-depressant medications, but does that mean it’s OK to send patients diagnosed with mental health conditions into completely unregulated environments, exposed to new environmental factors potentially affecting their psychological state in any number of unknown ways, and run by staff who may or may not be qualified or in any way prepared with the sensitivity and communication skills required to help clients with health challenges?

Qualified fitness professionals all know about the importance of effectively screening clients when they join up, but is this actually happening? There is plenty of anecdotal evidence proving otherwise, but then again, we simply cannot say for sure. Meanwhile, many gym members continue to exhibit clear signs of body dysmorphia, which is an obsessive preoccupation with appearance, particularly one’s physical flaws. Fitness in this regard is reduced to no more than a tool for the actual implementation of obsessive and essential, unhealthy behaviour.

Eating disorders are also common. Despite the proliferation of information on nutrition in the fitness world, much of it is biased, not evidence-based and usually little more than pure sales patter for the purpose of selling supplements and products. Nutrition education must not be commercially driven but rather intended to actually empower and motivate people to adopt and adhere to healthy eating habits, establishing a lasting nutritional intake based on evidence-based recommended guidelines and not hearsay.

The right questions can reveal just how serious the issue of eating disorders really is. When someone loses large quantities of weight in short amounts of time, our typical response is congratulatory. “Wow you’ve lost weight, well done! Keep it up!” We endorse the weight loss and thereby validate any means they used to achieve it. If they compromised their health to lose the weight, then we can be pretty sure they will continue doing so.

Consider that on the road to becoming underweight, someone will have to pass through the ‘healthy weight’ stage, and it is precisely here where it is so difficult to identify unhealthy behaviours based on appearance alone. Instead, try asking: “You’ve lost weight, how do you feel now?”

Let’s not brush the gremlins under the carpet, it’s time to tackle these challenges head on. By asking the right questions of fitness at large, we can similarly safeguard health and ensure effective fitness services remain available to us well into the future, while we hopefully enjoy watching some fair and corruption-free editions of the Olympic Games along the way.

matthew.muscat.inglott@mcast.edu.mt