New Class Announcement: "Practice 4"
On August 6th, we’re launching a new class called Practice 4 for all members and trials. Practice 4 combines elements of our Allegiate Hypertrophy and Allegiate Conditioning classes into one class. If your goal is to gain muscle, lose weight, improve body composition, improve performance, or add variability to your Team and Strength classes – Practice 4 is for you.
All our coaches and owners beta-tested the program. It rips. It’s awesome. You’re gonna dig it.
Introducing Practice 4 into the system also means we’re changing the class schedule and removing classes:
We’re dropping Allegiate Conditioning, Allegiate Hypertrophy, and Arm Farm.
Allegiate Stretch will be going digital as a video with coach Tim that you can watch wherever you are, whenever you want. Stretch will be in-depth with coach Tim talking you through the whole program.
We know this change might frustrate some members who love the Hypertrophy, Stretch, and Conditioning classes. Many of you have a great fitness routine with Allegiate and we thought a lot about you before this decision. So for some transparency, here’s the rationale behind dropping classes and adding Practice 4:
Stretch and Conditioning had low-class attendance: Of our top 10 worst attended class times, Stretch and Conditioning were 8 of the 10. If members are telling us what programs they value most by which ones they show up to, this is a good indicator. If you’re thinking, “but these classes were low attendance because they’re not at peak times,” we actually did try Conditioning at a peak time for a while a few years ago. And it didn’t have great attendance.
Hypertrophy is well attended on Saturdays but also does poorly the rest of the week. Hypertrophy caters to members that want to build upper body strength and muscle. As a result, members have asked for a dedicated lower-body workout. We haven’t intentionally ignored everyone, it just goes back to pattern redundancy leading to either injury or diminished performance. Pounding the same movement patterns for the lower body has a point of diminishing returns faster than the upper body. Plus a dedicated lower body workout and then doing Practice I or Practice III the following day would lead to drastically lowered ability. I (coach Tim) think this is the more important point, we do a ton of lower body already.
Fewer programs mean better execution of Team & Strength: as we scale, grow, and have new staff in our system, we want to be the best we can with our highest attendance classes. Combining classes into one and dropping the others means we can spend staff time training, working, and improving our core offerings. A couple of nonnegotiables for our coaches: always keep our members safe, always give our members great instruction, and always strive to help each member improve each training session. If we have too many things for our coaches to learn or do in a shift, it limits our ability to deliver our product effectively.
With Practice 4, you get everything in one class instead of spread across multiple: Practice 4 has important program principles like tri-planar movement (from the conditioning class) and hypertrophy all in one class – things we can’t fit within a 1-hour Team or Strength class because we’re focused on other aspects of athletic development. And though our hypertrophy and conditioning classes had those elements, you had to attend both classes to get the benefit. Now you have 1 class for everything.
More class distribution for Practice 4 is better for members’ busy schedules: Schedule is one of the main limiting factors for many people getting into the gym. So with Practice 4, you go to 1 class and you get all you need in a session, biomechanically and physiologically. A week has a finite amount of class times, so instead of 3 different choices (hypertrophy, stretch, conditioning), there’s 1 choice (Practice 4) to make it easy on you and your schedule.
Change is tough, even if it’s for the better. So if you’re frustrated, we ask that you go through a month of the program. Work with us as we iron out the program and get better at implementing it. If you’re new around here, we’ve added and dropped classes over our 6 years in business because we’re always trying to finetune schedule and strike the right balance of variability and consistency.
Why’s it called Practice 4? If you’re a member, you know both Allegiate Team and Allegiate Strength are made up of 3 total body workouts which are named Practice 1, Practice 2, and Practice 3. Since Practice 4 is designed to be cohesive with the Strength and Team programs, the name Practice 4 fits well within our system. Practice 4 is a new entity – we’re not adding a fourth day to Team and Strength programs. Those programs are still 3 day total body strength programs. We felt Practice 4 was an intuitive way to tie everything together.
In conclusion, we want to be great. We want to be efficient. We want to work with the feedback our members give us. We want our coaches to have confidence in what they are doing daily. We have to put our staff in the best position to do so. Not being overwhelmed with five different programs (Team, Strength, Hypertrophy, Stretch, Conditioning). We want our coaches to be able to give better options for the members that are struggling with a movement or are in pain. We want our coaches to give clear instructions that each member feels comfortable and confident about what we are doing each session. We want our members to improve each session, each week, each block, and each year. Doing all this without watering down our program is the goal.
If you want to drop us an email with your thoughts or feedback, please write a note and cc our three owners and we’ll get back to you: cody@allegiategym.com tim@allegiategym.com steve@allegiategym.com
Free Practice 4 T-shirt for everyone who attends Saturday August 12th.