Unfuck your Instagram

Good old Instagram. The internet’s second greatest repository of cat photos, memes and…mediocrity?

Fancying myself a strength coach, I spend a fair chunk of time online seeing what my peers are sharing. Some of them are remarkably insightful and make voluminous contributions to the ever expanding body of online knowledge. Think Pamela Gagnon, Squat University or Juggernaut. But for every genius, there is an endless sea of grey, faceless nobodies. Fortunately for us, they’re rather easy to spot and you can personally take steps to remove this vacuous nonsense from your life. Since search engines love lists, here is my helpful guide in point form:

1. Competence speaks for itself and doesn’t need to be dressed up or promoted. If you find a profile that consists almost entirely of bikini shots, shirtless selfies or trite inspirational quotes taken directly from the random bullshit generator, just unfollow. Yes, I know we’re all perverts and enjoy looking at a bit of skin, but you’re actively making your life worse by indulging this urge.
2. Using all the hashtags. All of them. If your chosen page can’t accurately describe what they’re trying to convey using a short set of keywords, then either they’re desperately whoring themselves for fake internet points or they truly don’t know. The latter is far more concerning since it adds to the infinite pile of digital garbage passing itself off as knowledge. The former is just pathetic. Do you respect and trust pathetic people? Thought so. Hit that unfollow button.
3. Celebrating nothing. Or rather, having egos larger than their lifts. Here we have to draw a distinction. If you’ve been grinding away for ages and finally managed to hit one of your goals, such a new squat PR, first double under or finally getting into a healthy bodyfat range, by all means post it! Acknowledge your success and challenge your friends to do better. But “coaches” who post lifts that are less than 50% of the world record and strut about like they are the next Eddie Hall need to save us the trouble and just delete their pages. More distasteful still is asking you to sign up for their program/tshirt/supplements/premium snap so that you too can bask in their glory.
4. Ask yourself if you’re the post you just saw made your life better. Did you see something impressive that motivated you? Was it a new cue that might help you fix a movement error? Does it express something you vaguely understood in a much clearer way? Or was it just more meaningless nonsense you absentmindedly scrolled past while numbing your brain.

Hopefully this goes some way to spring cleaning your Insta life and making your time online more productive. On the other hand, why are you reading this instead of working on that disaster of a snatch of yours?