Some urine with the sugar

Jon:
Consumed MASSIVE amounts of sugar and coffee yesterday so sleeping when it was time for that seemed as a hunch of a distant memory of a dream of a fairytale told in a long lost language. Distant that is. Nothing gets you thinking like caffeine and refined sugar though so here's a recap of my 3/4 conscious stream.
As a personal trainer you are to some extent responsible for the well being of your clients. You will not allow your clients to do something that you think might hurt them. This responsibilty is of course limited. It is not possible for you to know everything about your client. This might be tackled through asking the client to see a doctor before engaging in any training. No matter how many precautions you take there are however always an element of insecurity. Also, the client has a responsibilty of his/hers own. If you tell the client not to train while in pain and he/she does it anyway it is really not your fault.
All this notwithstanding if your client gets hurt while training with you, you have some responsibility for this. On the flipside: if your client has great results you can take some cred for that.
That about training individuals.
What about writing training programs or doing programming for a faceless crowd? What happens when you start doing programs not for individuals that you regularily meet and see train but for people that you have never met and will not see executing your program?
All training programs boasts about their results. They have given people superhuman strength, racehorse work capacity, elite fitness, fixed broken shoulders, burnt kilos of fat and built even more kilos of muscle in no time. No training programs boasts about the risks involved in following them (except maybe Crossfit and when it comes to tearing a blister or two RKC). The risks and potential injuries are however as much a part of the program as the potential benefits. So if I write a program that I want everyone and their mother to do for at least 12 weeks how much responsibility for my followers do I have?

For example:
I have come up with this new awesome program for muscle gains. It looks like this:
Do three days of training for each rest day. Day one is deadlifts. After warm up do five sets of five reps working your self up to a max on the last set. Aim for an assisted rep or a failed rep as the last one of the last set. Day two and three are the same except with squats and bench press.
Do this for 12 weeks. During these 12 weeks eat as much as you can focusing on meat and avoiding sugar.

There is no doubt in my mind that a lot of people will gain a substantial amount of both strength and muscle doing this program. There is also not a shadow of a doubt that a lot of people will hurt themselves doing this program. The reasons are simple. If you lift a lot of weight with these basic movements and eat loads of calories you will gain muscle. If you do it with bad form, you will get hurt.
This program took me less than 30 s. to figure out. How much should I bang my chest for the people sending me e-mails in 12 weeks saying: "Maaaan! You're program was awesome!!! I gained 8 kgs of muscle, lost 10 kgs of fat and are now getting laid every day. Thanks duuuuude!!!!"
I will probably put this e-mail on my web page as an example of how brilliant and ground breaking my program is.
This e-mail however I will not put on my web page: "I tried your program for 12 weeks and it left me with a shoulder impingement, lower back pain and knees that hurt like hell on cold days". Rather I will tell this person that he/she has done too much too soon, that he/she probably has a lousy squat/bench press/deadlift and should have done more mobility work. I might even rant a little about this idiot on my web page and get some Huh Huh Huh's from my devoted followers.
But the question then is this: How can I take cred for the people that have succeeded with my program if I doesen't take responsibility for those that have failed?
General programs are a double edged sword. On the one hand it enables people to try new things and to learn by themselves without paying an arm and a leg for private sessions. On the other hand it leaves the programmer with absolutely zero control over his/hers creation.
So how do we solve this dilemma? Well I don't know. A good start however might be to start thinking about what the potential consequences of a program is when it hits the general populace. Things that work for an elite athlete while being superviced by professional coaches (read olympic lifting) might not be the best choise for any geek off the street starting to do the last fitness craze in his/hers backyard. The creator of a program have a responsibilty for the consequences of following that program. No matter if they are positive or negative.