Why Answer Fitness®?

March 18, 2008 on 7:00 pm | By Matt | In Fitness Philosophy |

So I finally did it. I took the plunge and started a blog.

First, an admission. And then some explanation.

The admission: I started Answer Fitness® for some pretty self-serving reasons.

Now the explanation.

Answerfitness.com exists because I really needed a single place to collect all of the fitness tips, diet tricks, health and nutrition research, recipes, and workout regimens that I currently have scattered in various bookmarks, Microsoft Word documents and yellow sticky notes. So at the most basic level, this website is a way for me to organize my own training and health.

But there are some other reasons ….

I’ve been a active contributor to the Yahoo Answers Diet and Fitness category for over a year. I try to spend the time to provide well-researched, well-documented Answers that I like to think help people become more healthy or take their fitness to the next level.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Yahoo Answers, it’s Yahoo’s attempt to build a Q&A application to allow people to ask questions of the Yahoo community, and hopefully, get sound advice in return. In otherwords, it’s an application of James Surowiecki’s principle of the “wisdom of the crowds“, which is kind of a hot topic in Silicon Valley and Internet Marketing (I know about this stuff, because when I’m not ducking into a phone booth to become “Fitness Guy”, I’m doing Interactive Marketing for a major online mortgage company.)

Yahoo Answers is a funny thing. I get paid nothing to provide advice to people, yet I enjoy it enough to have provided 696 Answers so far to people’s fitness and diet questions. I’m not really sure why I spend 60-90 minutes in it each day, but I do.

I suppose at my core, I like teaching people. I sort of view it as me giving back for all of the great advice I’ve gotten over the years for free. And the people I’ve helped have rewarded me with an 85% Best Answers rate … which is kind of satisfying at the end of the day.

One thing that my Answers experience has shown me is that people are really craving honest and well-researched advice around fitness, diet and health in general. Practically speaking, I’ve also gotten frustrated with having to constantly dig through my past Answers or those infamous bookmarks, Word docs and sticky notes to find my sources for Answers.

I also sometimes want to provide much more detailed Answers, but just don’t feel comfortable putting it all in my Answer. Often, I link off to other sites for additional information or context. Yet, I feel like these sites aren’t providing the level of information that I really want. Sometimes they pop advertisements or or are hawking products, which always makes me uncomfortable, even when their content is good.

So a few months ago, I got the idea to launch my own site, where I can put some of this information and feel that it is solid and up to my own standards.

For example, I often have people ask me about specific exercises, but I’m not happy with the quality of the videos or instructional information on other sites. This is particularly the case with women who have questions, since a lot of the video out there is of juiced-up men and they simply can’t relate (or are scared that they’ll look like a bodybuilder if they perform this exercise.)

My goal with Answer Fitness is to provide a single location where people can get sensible workout plans, diet and nutrition tips and healthy recipes that don’t require you to eat only brown rice and tuna from a can. There are so many ways to eat healthy and enjoy your food at the same time. I know it, because I do it every day.

Finally, I’d like to thank the Yahoo Answers community for helping be name this website. I put several names out to the Diet and Fitness community and the majority of them clearly like the name “Answer Fitness.” I actually had a personal favorite that wasn’t “Answer Fitness” but set aside my own preferences because they seemed to like this name so much. Hey, that’s the Wisdom of the Crowds, right?

So “Answer Fitness” is will be. More about me in future posts.

Until then, live fit.

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Tags: Blog, Diet, Fitness, Fitness Advice, Fitness Philosophy, Healthy and Nutrition, Training Routines, Workout Advice, Yahoo Answers

One Response to “Why Answer Fitness®?”

1
Jala-neti (3 comments) Says:
July 15th, 2009 at 6:16 am
You know, that doesn’t sound too self-serving to me. Sounds like you’re providing quite a resource to people.

If you don’t mind me asking: Do your ads earn you much money or do they just fund the running of the website?

PS: I can certainly imagine women being put off by videos of huge blokes demonstrating an exersize. Must be very easy to imagine that the exersize in question is only for huge blokes.