I was recently at a pharmacy where there was a small TV tucked into a corner displaying something I found rather odd:

If you have a hard time reading the text, it says:

Things To Remember When Lifting Weights
When doing squats, remember to keep your knees behind your toes at all times. You also want to make sure that your back is straight and strong and your head is faced forward.
—The Ginger Marie Blog

Those who are familiar with how to squat properly will know that the advice to always keep your knees behind your toes is a myth. Nothing bad happens if your knees go in front of your toes and many people need their knees to go in front of their toes to get full depth—especially olympic weightlifters who regularly bottom out their squat (so called “ass to grass” squatting). Like all lifting, it’s a bad idea to suddenly do it with near-maximal loads instead of working up to it, of course—but that’s true of all ways of doing all lifts. Walking up to a lift you’ve never done before and maxing out on it is a useful ingredient in maximizing your injury risk—though it should be born in mind that strength sports have pretty low injury risks compared to most other sports. But still, do work up to your maximal lift attempts. You’ll also lift more that way.

Also, does anyone really need to be told to keep their head facing forward when squatting? I’ve never seen anyone even attempt to look over their shoulder while squatting.

That’s not really why I bring this up, though. A pharmacy is a very strange place to get strength training advice in a corner overlayed on top of a picture of people on exercise bikes. To give a sense of how odd this is, imaging walking into a powerlifting gym and behind one of the machines is a TV which shows a picture of technicians putting someone into an MRI machine and the text on top says:

Things To Remember When Taking Medicine: When taking an antibiotic, always drink a large glass of whole milk with it, finish the antibiotics course unless otherwise directed by a doctor, and stand upright on the ground while taking it.

This, by the way, is the front page of The Ginger Marie Blog, as of the time I’m writing this post:

I do not say a word against Ms. Ginger Marie, but I must confess I’m curious as to why this particular site was chosen as the place from which to get advice on proper squat technique.

Though, to be fair to Ms. Marie, when I try searching the site for the word “squats” I don’t come up with anything. A google search for “The Ginger Marie Blog” and “squats” and “knees” also turns up no results, though that may not mean much since Google has been pretty bad for the last year or two. Still, it’s possible that the random TV in my local pharmacy is misattributing its dubious advice to Ms. Marie.

I wonder if we can blame AI for this? Perhaps a large language model mangled a quote from a publication like Marie Claire and then mangled the attribution, as well. This seems like the sort of thing that AI might do.

As dystopias go, this is a much nicer one than what most dystopian movies portray.