Variety May Be the Spice of Life, but Monotony is the Bread and Butter of Success

We have spoken about the importance of focus and intention in our programming. Another big piece of our programming is balancing variety and consistency.

Variety

As kids, we explore movement and space, learning through play and creativity. We solve problems with unique strategies and approaches, get bored easily, and are fascinated by the endless possibilities of the physical world around us. Nurturing a sense of childlike curiosity is a central tenet of our philosophy. We want people to move in weird, wonderful, and unique ways. We want people to have variety, be excited to show up, try new things, and get lost in the endless possibilities of what they can achieve with their movement and strength.

We do this with our Movement Conditioning, Fluid Movement, and Advanced Kettlebell Skills classes. Coordination, exploration, and curiosity are the bedrocks of these classes. While the skills build upon each other progressively, the way in which the movements are introduced to members changes from class to class.

Consistency

During the USSR era, athletes consistently dominated the Summer Olympic medal count due to meticulous control over their lives, treating them essentially as athletic science experiments. Every aspect, including sleep, diet, training, and social life, was tightly regulated. This extreme control allowed coaches and sports scientists to gather reliable data and achieve remarkable results. This period of athletic advancement is arguably the most influential in history, particularly for their work around periodized structured training programs that follow progressive overload.

While we have no interest in controlling every aspect of our members' lives or forcing them to adhere to a strict program, the concepts above do work. They form the core programming of our strength and mobility class. In this class, we ask that members track their progress, connect with the movements, and find progressions and regressions that they can see progress in over the long run. It might be a little tedious and may not be as exciting as something new and shiny every week, but it works!

Moderation

We understand that you are neither a Soviet sport slave nor a 7-year-old child. At least, we hope you’re not; otherwise, our marketing is way off.

Our trainers and members are not athletes whose only purpose in life is to be better than the person beside them on the field. They are not Instagram models whose entire personality, self-worth, and income come from their appearance. They are normal people with normal lives who just want to move and feel better for as long as humanly possible.

We don’t need to care about the extreme training protocols needed to reach the top 0.01% of physicality, but we can benefit from the science and structure of these strict programs moderated for the normal person. Similarly, our members cannot spend 6 hours a day exploring their bodies and the environment to learn how to move better. Even if they had the time, the amount of grey matter needed to learn that way peaked about 30 to 40 years ago for most of us.

Therefore, we need a moderate approach. We want variety and playfulness, but too much will distract us from our goals and progress. Strict and structured programming works better than anything, but what fun is having a life devoid of freedom of choice and spontaneity?

Putting It Together

We use our core programming (strength and mobility classes) to develop the basics, build overall strength, create more range of motion, and build confidence. This is structured and programmed with specific goals and outcomes. We encourage our clients to focus on this most of the time. It is repetitive, consistent, challenging, and disciplined.

We use our subsidiary programming (Kettlebell Skills and Movement classes) to explore and express the strength, coordination, and mobility we have diligently developed. These classes provide variety and playfulness.

By providing options that create structure and consistency, we can follow scientifically proven ways of progressing. By working in options that allow for more creativity, spontaneity, and variety, we give ourselves the freedom to play and explore. We do not worry so much about performance, goals, and structure but instead experience the joy of movement. Too much of the former, we become boring, robotic sagittal movers; too much of the latter leaves lacking direction and struggling to develop anything more than what we currently have access to.