Others are difficult to catch unless you know what to look for. In these cases, the telltale may be how effortlessly the athlete shifts the barbell right before he starts to bench. Or maybe he struggles at the wrong part of the lift. Or it could be that his plates don’t match the other ones in the gym, but they do look exactly like the fake plates you can buy online.
As anyone who’s ever used social media knows, you’re going to get criticism for posting even a moderately impressive feat. But if you’re an iconic actor, a popular influencer, or a self-proclaimed fitness expert, the scrutiny is going to be orders of magnitude more intense—from not just trolls in the comments, but also all the competing online creators who can capitalize on the potential scandal to churn out content. So why are people still using fake weights and running the risk of getting called out?
Some, like Stallone, are clearly hamming it up for attention—he’s an actor, after all. And as another creator pointed out in his response to the kerfuffle, Stallone’s gimmick got four million views and nearly 19,000 comments, a great warm-up for his next post: an announcement for the one-night-only theatrical debut of Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago — The Ultimate Director’s Cut, a re-release of the 1985 film. (Stallone’s agent didn’t respond to a request for comment).
For other influencers, juicing the numbers even a bit can elevate them from pretty strong to wildly impressive. “If you have 500 pounds, and you add an extra 100 pretend pounds, it’s a lot more impressive,” as Doucette points out in another video.
But perhaps the most convincing explanation is that there seems to be no downside. Take the case of Brad Castleberry, who showed himself quite easily repping out 675 pounds on the bench press in 2017. That was roughly 275 pounds more than he’d benched at a powerlifting meet a few years earlier, and Castleberry refused multiple offers to compete again and prove that the numbers were legit. He also denied the accusations, albeit in a meandering, narcissistic kind of way. Despite the strength of the evidence, though, Castleberry doesn’t seem to have suffered any consequences. Six years later, he has nearly a million Instagram followers.
As you’ve probably heard, just about everything on social media should be taken with a grain of salt. Including, perhaps, some of those followers: Considering that the average engagement rate for his past ten posts is surprisingly low, just .1%, at least one website cautions that many of those followers might be bots.
This content was originally published here.
