The other day my scrolling was rudely interrupted by a video purporting to offer four moves to lift your breasts. I nearly lost my frickin’ mind when I saw it.
First, let’s acknowledge the TINY bit of truth in a video like that: building some muscle in your chest can change how your breast tissue sits. It’s not going to be dramatic. You won’t get your large, low breasts to sit high again, and you’re not going to turn small breasts into giant knockers. But building some muscle can change the appearance of your physique. So that part is true. BUT doing a few weird bodyweight arm raises isn’t going to redefine your breasts.
So I have multiple issues with this video. The first is that it’s bullshit. It cannot actually deliver on the thing that it is promising. As an experienced strength coach, I know this immediately, but the average viewer might not. The second is that it’s trying to create an insecurity to be exploited. Most of us don’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide we hate a random part of our bodies. Someone usually plants that seed.
The seed might be planted by a magazine article. Maybe it’s a TikTok video. Maybe it’s an ad promising to fix your “hip dips,” smooth your cellulite, get rid of your back fat, or, apparently now, lift your breasts with four simple exercises.
The fitness industry has gotten really, really good at inventing problems and then selling you the solution.
Sometimes the “solution” is a supplement. Sometimes it’s a gadget (I know some of y’all remember the Thigh Master). Sometimes it’s a workout program. Sometimes it’s just engagement bait so the creator can build an audience and eventually sell you something else.
No matter what the pitch is, the formula is almost always the same.
Step one: convince you that a perfectly normal human characteristic is actually a flaw.
Step two: promise that they have a product, program, or secret method to fix it.
One of the reasons this kind of content bothers me so much is that it preys on people who are already feeling vulnerable. Bodies change. They change with age, with pregnancy, with weight fluctuations, with hormones, with gravity, and with life in general. None of those things are failures. They’re just part of being a human in a body. We’re constantly being told that every natural change is something to fight against.
What’s especially frustrating is that these claims are often wrapped in just enough truth to sound believable. Yes, strengthening certain muscles can slightly change how your body looks. But you cannot spot reduce fat from a specific area and you cannot selectively “lift” breast tissue through a few exercises because breasts are not muscles. The tiny grain of truth is what makes the lie so effective.
As a coach, I spend most of my time helping people get stronger. Sometimes people’s bodies change as a result of strength training. Sometimes they don’t change in the ways they expected. That’s okay, because the real value of exercise was never supposed to be that it magically reshapes every part of your body.
Exercise can help you get stronger. It can help you move with less pain. It can improve your balance, endurance, confidence, and ability to do the things you enjoy. Those are incredible benefits all on their own. They don’t need to be dressed up with fake promises.
The part that makes me the saddest, though, is wondering how many people watched that video and walked away feeling worse about themselves than they did thirty seconds earlier. Maybe they had never thought much about where their breasts sat until someone suggested they should. Maybe they started wondering if they needed to fix something that never actually bothered them before.
That’s the real damage this kind of marketing does. It doesn’t just fail to solve the problem, it actually creates a problem that didn’t even exist before.
The next time you see a piece of fitness content that promises to “fix” some oddly specific body part, pause for a second. Ask yourself: Did I even think this was a problem before someone tried to sell me the solution? If the answer is no, congratulations. You just spotted one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book.
Your body is not a collection of flaws waiting to be corrected. And while strength training can absolutely make you stronger, more capable, and maybe even change how your body looks over time, it is not magic.
Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
