The Problem with the Nike Super Rep

Essay

I’ve posted about my disdain for this shoe a few instances and each time, a handful of people from inside the fitness industry and also outside ask some variation of the question, “How does a shoe like this happen if it’s so inherently wrong as you claim?”

So I’m going to do my best to tell you what I think I see going on and hopefully that will explain my feelings. Because to me, this shoe is not simply an article of footwear. It’s an ugly symptom of a much bigger problem at the intersection of fitness and media and business that infuriates me as a fitness professional—a situation to which all of us are victims.

But first, I need you to accept that these shoes are an abomination, simply by design. We can get into the biomechanics in another conversation and I’d probably want to employ people who are much smarter than me to tell you why. But regardless, before we move on, we must agree that this stupid trampoline apparatus they call a sneaker meant to help you move better, does not do what they say it does--it will not inspire better movement.

Ok, great.

What it might do for some people though, is lessen the excessive pain they may feel from over exercising, which we’ll define simply for the purpose of this essay as the participation in forms of exercise that your body isn’t prepared for and therefore cannot adapt to. Like when you are asked to vacillate back and forth between intense full-out treadmill sprints and complicated strength exercises you’re attempting for the first time...with transitions of course, so you’re never really resting--that sort of thing.

A shoe that may disguise some of your joint pain from overexercising is great news for the boutique fitness giants, like Barry’s Bootcamp and Orange Theory and all the rest of these trendy cult-like classes with whom Nike collaborated to market it. Because well, that’s precisely what they deal in. They call it HIIT training but any trainer with a simple national certification will tell you that what they do inside those walls has nothing to do with actual high intensity training principles or science. And that same trainer with the body and athleticism you covet will also tell you over a drink after class that “fuck no,” of course they don’t train that way themselves, the way they make it seem on Instagram--the way they program for thousands of uneducated, trusting, not to mention paying regulars. 

That’s because real high intensity training demands specific programming parameters in order to be effective, including but not limited to very short bouts of work completed at a high level of proficiency coupled with very long rest periods outlined with strict parameters that will always be highly individual as they are dictated by many different factors like readiness, preparedness, training age, proficiency etc. I know I don’t need to say it, but just in case you’ve never been, that’s not what you get at these places. And if you ignore these parameters and violate the way your metabolism works, you are simultaneously activating compensatory pathways that your brain uses to both protect your physical body from threat and also predict and balance energy expenditure. So you will pay for this dis-ease with not only aches, pains, and injuries, but the less talked about metabolic repercussions like a drop in metabolic rate, an increase in overall hunger, and a mysterious disappearance of motivation to move as your body tries to budget. Oh you thought that was just a lack of willpower you’re grappling with? Easy for some metabolically gifted trainer who doesn’t even participate in the workouts to imply. 

The truth is that your metabolism acts like a thermostat with a stress barometer in that it is constantly managing threat and seeking energetic balance. And like a boomerang, it will literally try to slow you down in efforts to compensate for the huge deficit you create as you beat your body day after day with excessive exercise. It doesn’t care that you want to lose five pounds. Your brain is worried about having enough energy for tomorrow’s insane calorie burner. And it also doesn’t care that you want to run faster than the person on the treadmill next to you. Mobility and strength have similar governance. Your brain will apply the brakes - tightening joints and enacting pain pathways - to sound the alarm and attempt to protect your physical body from what it cannot safely predict. That all seems sort of counter intuitive to what your original goal with exercise was doesn’t it? I won’t even get into the chronic inflammation or immune system dysregulation that can follow continuous overexercising--that my female NYC professionals routinely show up with. Although that’s somewhat concerning during a pandemic that is ravaging populations of people with compromised immune systems and metabolic disease. I digress. 

But it also seems like the type of hamster wheel that would keep body conscious individuals shelling out exorbitant amounts of money for single workouts that have almost no long term benefit and very high profit margins. It’s a self-reinforcing system. Work out too hard. Feel like garbage the next day. Eat Shake Shack and lay on the couch. Feel guilty. Sign up for another class. And the cycle repeats until you injure yourself or end up with an otherwise unexplained autoimmune disorder. And most will still continue to blame themselves and double down on attendance when they don’t see the results they believe they should. That’s a pretty great incentive for these bootcamps to keep programming shitty workouts and enslaving us to our dopamine systems. Sell some ridiculously expensive green juices that play to our elitist understanding of wellness and some high-priced athleisure that we never feel quite cute enough in because of the five pounds, and you have built yourself a money printing press made of lies and shame. 

“Why doesn’t the media call them out if these workouts are so obviously offensive as you say?” I hear this rebuttal often from people who think I must be a hater or don’t believe this could be true. How can they lie to us like this? Well, I’m not a hater. I can only begin to unravel that tangled mess but I will try. I will begin by admitting that we, the fitness professionals, have been complicit. 

We have and I am sorry for that. These journalists come to us for quotes and articles and then twist and repackage what we say to support their false narrative that implies these pseudo HIIT workouts are all you need for fat-loss, supposedly based on some janky study that proves nothing but the fact that they don’t know how to read studies or understand conext. 

And we don’t fight back. We rarely correct them. Maybe because we’ve convinced ourselves that the repackaging is subtle enough to hope that the reader still understands our message through the other muck. Maybe it’s because we’re hoping that if we silently agree to some of these concessions, we’ll be granted a bigger platform later that allows us to say what we really want to say. Or maybe we’re just tired as an industry-- we are shift workers. And when you get e-mailed a terrible draft that’s already been published to their website without your ok after a full day of 8 1-1 sessions and filming and social media posting and running around the city, it feels like a lot of work to craft the right sort of politely worded and cautiously critical review that would maybe prompt a correction, but more likely alienate you from future opportunity. So you just don’t. I’ve done that. And it’s egregious. And I’m sorry. 

Or maybe the fitness industry does live up to the stereotype at the very top and provides the perfect playground for a few undereducated, good-looking, narcissistic, ego-driven, status-obsessed individuals who want to be famous and are happy to simply play along. Oh I hate that explanation but there it is. New York City is a rat race for trainers and I don’t know how critical I can be of that behavior just because I feel like I’ve successfully escaped it now. In reality, it’s probably some combination of all of these theoretical factors.

And pseudo HIIT works for media really well. It’s what they refer to as “low barrier of entry.” Before you try to discern anything from that label, I will tell you what it really means. It has nothing to do with its appropriateness for the general population that signs up for group fitness; decidedly the opposite is true. 

What “low barrier of entry” means to boutique fitness is that instructors can pack a class in a relatively small space with dozens of bodies and minimal equipment and maximize the revenue per square foot. And similarly for the fitness influencers and “elite trainers” sponsored by brands like Nike and Samsung, and fitness editors from Women’s Health and Shape, they can provide a workout that followers can perform in their living rooms without having to secure access to a real gym or dedicated equipment. Bodyweight HIIT workouts are simply content that is easy to consume and therefore sell. 

And I don’t use the word “sell” without reverence. This is the part where I am doing some speculation but I’ll simply tell you what I’ve seen as someone who played a part as a cog in this machine and has had dozens of conversations on the subject with former editors and writers who’ve since moved on. It’s former because they’ve all been either been let go due to downsizing as print and mainstream media flounders or driven out by disgust for this advertising driven agenda that has them writing about what’s cool and playing to your false ideas about what a real workout is, instead of something that’s real like this giant elephant in the room. And these staff journalists have been replaced by free-lancers with no security who probably rightfully feel like they have no choice but to continue this stupid narrative or lose the gig to someone else. And you guys probably won’t ever figure out that these pseudo HIIT workouts are not that great anyway, right? “People don’t care about what makes a good workout, Ashleigh. Just give them what they want.” “Some fitness is better than no fitness.” 

The alternative really presents a lot of challenges for the numbers people. If they told you the truth about training, that it is highly individual, that you have to lift heavy stuff, that you have to do it well, that you need a set of eyeballs on you when you’re just getting started, that you need dedicated equipment, that you have to respect progressive overload and the way your body actually makes energy...well that’s a lot of barriers to entry. And it doesn’t have an immediately scalable solution in my mind that would entice investors and I’ve been doing this for over fifteen years now, finally at the unexpected critical moment of wanting to assume all of the risk and open my own fitness and wellness facility simply to build a fortress against this nonsense. I have stayed up many sleepless nights thinking about it in the last two years. And as I watch my sister struggle through a Peloton “strength workout” without the proper cueing to be successful, I will tell you my conclusion is there may not be a way to scale fitness that is both good, and also exponentially profitable in the way that all these start-up bros with their apps and their influencer envy seem to wish it to be.

But me? I think you guys are smarter than what all these companies are implying with their shitty workouts and bad journalism. I think you know you’re being sold bullshit that doesn’t work and you just need someone to tell you that what you think you know is true. 

Well, I’m here to confirm your intuition. Because I reject the idea that all of you will quit trying to take care of your bodies just because you’ve been duped so seriously. I don’t think you’re too lazy to push past those bigger barriers. I don’t think you view doing some homework as a waste of time. And “some fitness is better than no fitness” is frankly just not good enough.

I think you are smart. And I think you understand what I mean when I say again that that shoe is an abomination beyond it’s simple design flaws. The Nike Super Rep is a travesty. It is an ugly attempt to patch up cracks in a system that is knowingly undermining its promises and corrupting your health, in order to keep the bubble going--avoiding necessary evolution to scale an industry that it is not really capable of that sort of growth as a rule. And listen, I get it. Nike is a shoe company that just needs to sell shoes. At the end of the day, it’s just business for all these brands, right? I know we cannot hold an individual company entirely responsible for enabling this machine. But I guess Colin Kapernick’s face on billboards just makes we want to expect better from them. 

If you think they’re not complicit in the lie as they create these super fun collabs with these super fun fitness influencers at these super trendy studios after dissolving the actually elite Sparq strength and conditioning coaches program, remember this. They’ve been quietly producing a new version of their flat and flexible shoe year after year since 2004 called the Free that I’ve been enjoying buying on clearance and recommending to clients for the past two decades. Because they know the truth. Ain’t no cushion in the world gonna save your body from a poorly programmed workout. And that is a fact that even the most innovative of shoe companies cannot deny.