PaulRivers

I'm in my 30's and I've known many coworkers (and myself) to try taking up lifting to get into shape. They either go online and start doing something they found online or they try doing what they were doing while on a sports team in college. Every single one of them (including myself) that does stuff involving squats/deadlifts/bench press seriously injures themselves doing these heavy lifts. I messed up my right leg and hip. My coworker who played rugby in college did something awful to his back and went from sitting in office chairs fine to it being painful in his back to sit in them.

After that I noticed there's basically 2 groups of people who make claims about lifting.

1. People who face no negative consequences if their advice hurts people. If they tell someone lifting is perfectly safe, then that person gets horribly injured, they can just ignore it.
2. People who face professional or personal negative consequences if their advice hurts people. Like professionals who train athletes.

From the "whatever I say won't hurt me" group you get loudly pushing all kinds of over the top positive claims about lifting and health benefits. When you get injured and talk about it they get very angry and attack you.
From the "if I get someone else hurt it will be bad for me" group you get basically the opposite advice - a lot more isolation lifts for training athletes, a lot more "we tried squats and deadlifts but the injury rate was to high so we do something different now", and even from coaches that train people to powerlift and compete you hear a long list of boring things they do like not going above 85%-90% of your max in training, spending the first year at smaller weights to get the body used to doing it, and that there definitely are people who because of their genetics or physical condition should never be lifting heavy weights with compound lifts because their body just cannot handle it.

Meanwhile, back online people are some of the worst advice you've ever heard in how to exercise. There's a forum I sometimes check where they ban discussion of injuries, and recently had a thread exactly lifting with big compound lifts where they specifically mention how a guy who's had 2 surgeries was doing so great with it.

I think it's a combination of lifting being a little dangerous moreso if your body isn't suited for it, and just abysmally terrible advice given out as to how to lift. The "popular" lifting programs I see are like equivalent to suggesting people bike by dressing up in all black and riding on the street at 01:30am in front of the worst bar in town. When you see actual professionals who both train people and also face consequences if they injure people talking about how they train, it's almost always the exact opposite of the "popular" advice you read about lifting online.