PRINCIPLES, RULES, LAWS, AND QUALITY CONTROL IN PROGRAM DESIGN: Q&A WITH ALLEGIATE CO-FOUNDERS
For the last 5 years, we’ve fought to deliver the ultimate strength training experience. To do the best we could, across the variables we control, at the highest quality. To innovate, to try harder, to be better.
Allegiate is a commitment to doing things right. And to the work – the process – that goes into it. The Allegiate Way.
We hope co-founder Tim Caron’s approach to programming inspires you. And that in your quest to make your mark, you take a bit of Allegiate and make it your own.
This Q&A with Allegiate Co-Founders covers:
What a program is and if there are standardizations in the industry
First-principles in design and working from what we know is true
How theory is not enough and success requires execution logistics
How Tim’s views his role today at Allegiate
Identifying as an artist, creator, and designer in a profession that traditionally doesn’t use those definitions
Quality control with advanced technology for recording progress, measuring bar speed, and member readiness pre-session
Pre, during, and post analytics in a training session and tying it all together
Scaling a complex operation
The preparation behind a seamlessly run strength training session
Leaving a legacy
Programming Strength Training to Improve Health and Fitness
This is a condensed and digestible transcription of a conversation between Allegiate’s head coach, Tim Caron, and one of the gym’s co-founders, Cody Romness.
The Strength Training Program
Cody: For those looking to learn more, what is a strength program, and what's it supposed to have and do?
Tim: A good strength training program is a means to an end. Sometimes we get overly fascinated with the pieces that make something happen and I would look at a program as a set of strength training exercises, sets, reps, tempo, a certain amount in a period of time to accomplish something bigger and better.
In a lot of ways, the program is a vehicle to get us from point A to point B, and we want that vehicle to operate really well. We want it to be efficient. We want it to be set up properly. We want it to really get us wherever we want to go in the most linear path. These values and philosophies aren’t necessarily present in all popular strength training programs.
A lot of times, people will come to us wanting to lose weight or build strength. We can show them how we're going to structure a specific set of variables to help them achieve that.vIf they want to gain weight, it’s the same basic concept in a different form.
C: Are there standards to strength training programs, like some things you need and some things you don't? How do you approach standardizations and strength training programs?
T: I just finished a book by Adam Grant, and it explained how human beings make bad decisions when we don't have clearly defined rules and standards. So the question is, do we have standards for a strength training program? Absolutely.
Our standards are rules and principles. Principles are true without context; things that we have to do no matter what. Our rules are the things that guide us and give us boundaries for how we should program.
So if I need someone to gain body weight in muscle mass or lose body weight in fat, what are the rules I need to put in place? Are there certain things that I can't break without understanding too, or with some sort of context as there's going to be a consequence if I break those rules? So if I know the rule and I still choose to break the rule, then there's going to be potentially an outcome I don't want.
So as I go through programming and look at standards, principles are absolute. They are non-negotiable. Rules are the things I really need to stick to, but every once in a while, there will be an exception.
Another concept to understand is that the norms create the rules and the outliers create the principles. So when we're looking at the norms of things that we should do on a daily basis, and then versus the principles, those are things we absolutely have to do - that governs us in what we're doing from sets, reps, how many days a week, what strength training exercises to use, all the variables associated. Those principles and rules make a structure towards some sort of goal without causing unnecessary harm or injury or anything else that we don't want, at a program level, beyond just the use of the proper technique.
Programming Principles & Standardization in Strength
C: Now might be the time to dive into principles. What are the principles and rules in strength training program design? Are there standardizations in the strength industry?
T: So as an industry, we really have to look at this as “do we actually have standardization?” Is it actually governed by fundamental truth or first principles? The short answer is “yes”. That doesn’t mean that everyone abides by said principles. I would say if you do make a decision that breaks a rule or a principle that is a pillar of strength training it must be justified and acknowledged.
So a principle would be something like a law. The principle is true without context. And some of the principles that we use, I see those broken quite a bit with a lot of trainers and coaches. You can look at it two ways if someone is breaking a principle of strength training, they either don't know better, or they don't know it well enough to apply it.
If they don't know, then it’s just a matter of educating coaches and trainers on sticking to these principles.
If they don't know how to apply it, then we have to go through how to integrate these principles into an actual strength training program.
When I evaluate strength training programs I’m looking for the Big Six. The first step in an evaluation is observing whether these principles are in place. So, what are the Big Six?
Progression
Does the strength training program make some sort of improvement from one week to the next? If it doesn't have some sort of progression, you're breaking a principle - progression.
Does it go from simple to complex, slow to fast? Does it start with something that we can be successful with today and then increase to a level of difficulty that we couldn't do today, but can build towards?
Overload
With progressive overload, we’re trying to find something that we need to improve and design a way to get there.
If you are not progressing in at least one of the areas below, you’re not moving closer to anything. You’re staying in one spot with a lot of fatigue and wasted time and energy.
There are four means of overloading in training. You can increase the intensity(add weight), number of reps(time under tension), number of sets, and density(more work in the same time or the same work in less time).
Reversibility
If you don't use it, you lose it. If you can train three days a week for 52 weeks a year, that's better than training really hard and breaking down and getting hurt for eight weeks and not doing anything other for the next 44.
You will see better returns by being more pragmatic and more patient, spreading strength training out over a longer period of time than I would be if I just go really hard for a short period of time, break down, get hurt, or just stop entirely. The net is going to be positive for the longer, more thought-out approach.
The goal is to get a consistent return on the time you spend training. We can do this by systematically adding stimuli to the system over as long of a period of time.
Individuality
Another one would be looking at individuality. Everybody is going to respond to the same stress differently. We're all different ages, have different hormones, different genetics, and different experiences. So when we do a very similar protocol, there's an understanding that we need to accept that everyone is going to be a little bit different in how they respond to it.
This variance is a huge reason why we do so much tracking and monitoring. We need objective Key Performance Indicator(KPI) metrics to measure our progress. We track jumps on the ForceDeck, nordic curls on the NordBoard, as well as wellness, RPE, and all the loads that we use with the Bridge app. We go to these lengths because we understand that everyone's going to respond differently. We need to quantify it and see it to understand it and analyze it.
Diminishing Returns
They say everything will work, just not forever. As you become more experienced the room for improvement becomes less and less.
The longer you use a program the less value the program will have. And there is a sweet spot for the amount of time someone can do something and what is most valuable for someone.
If you are experienced, you need more variation. If you are less experienced, you need less variation.
Specificity
Next, we ask ourselves is this program goal-specific? Does it actually have something relevant to the goal at hand? And that's a big one. We see a lot of prioritization of exercises or protocols because “I want to do that” as opposed to “I want to reach this goal”, like decreasing body weight or increasing muscle mass. What are the best means to get there?
We need to think like engineers, seeing the program as a system with structure and a goal. However, a lot of people don't really necessarily focus on what they want to accomplish. Instead, they think about what they want to do, which is a huge misconception.
Principles at Allegiate
C: How can the principles and rules you mentioned be seen at Allegiate?
T: The proper use of these principles is a big attraction for Allegiate.It's either you don't know and we're going to talk about them or you don't know how to apply them and we're going to show you.
The rules of the game are the things that, as we go through, day-to-day we have to accept that they're going to be your governing aspects of what we're doing on a day-to-day basis.
We look at things like structural balance. Do you have to push it and pull it? Upper body and lower body? You could probably get away with a period of time without having to push equally to pulling, but you won't get away with it forever. And that's kind of the difference between a principle and a rule.
We can bend the rules to a certain extent. We can kind of get away with it until we can't. We hear constant examples of "I've never done equal distribution of pulling and pushing. And look at me. I'm fine," until you can't. Or maybe you're just the exception, and that's okay. That's completely fine. Or "I train every day and I throw up. I haven't broken down or gotten hurt." However, the majority of people do face the consequences when they take that approach.
Fitness Fatigue
So, rules - I'm going to train every other day. I'm going to adjust my frequency based on this model called fitness fatigue. So fitness would be slow acting. And usually the adaptation we get from a workout would be three days. Fatigue should be fast-acting. It should be about 24 hours. If I start to go every single day, we start to see that ratio invert and we start to see people overtrain and break down.
How long can you get away with that is really the question. So the thought of “I need to go every single day and I need to go till I break”. That's a strategy that you can use until you can't. That's a rule now.
Structural Balance
Structural balance. If I push it, I need to pull it. If I only push, I only do pushing exercises like squat and bench and I have no structural balance between my pulling exercises, a hinge, and a pull, then I'm eventually going to break down. You might not break down immediately, but eventually, over time, you will. The effects of this imbalance will vary depending on how much weight you move as well as your experience doing a full body workout. Regardless, structural balance is a rule. Looking at simple things like, hey, we need to have an inverse relationship between sets and reps.
If I can only work out for an hour and I'm doing high reps, I need to do fewer sets or vice versa. So that's another rule. It comes back again to what I want to accomplish and then building in these rules to help us make decisions because we know human nature is going to apply and adjust our thought process of "I really like doing this exercise or I really like this protocol." That's natural. That's what humans do all the time.
As a coach, as someone that has to think bigger picture and apply a strength training program to now multiple people, we talk about fractals, the simple rules repeated. What might work for me or with that elite-level athlete I work with will not expand out and work with everybody. So I need to apply rules in that setting to ensure that we're, one, not doing any harm, but two, we're actually accomplishing something better than if we didn't train in the first place. And then the principles are the things that no matter what, if I'm working with an elite-level athlete who has a high tolerance for stress and gets away with a lot, or if I'm working with a person who just started strength training, those are going to be in there. And if they're not, it's wrong, unequivocally.
So principles being defined as accepted truth? Yes, absolutely. It is common to know that. And what I always talk about, too, with coaches is you telling me that a principle is not true, and I usually show something in my hand and drop it. It's true whether you choose to accept that or not. It's like saying gravity doesn't exist. Whether you know about it, it's absolutely true. And it goes into like an ascend to lab black Swan approach. You don't know it's true until you know it exists. Just because you don't know it exists doesn't mean it's not true. It's going to be true.
So if you just started coaching or programming and you're not applying these principles because you're not aware of that, going back to do you not even know doesn't mean it's not true. It's still true. You just need to become exposed to that and get really good coaching and pedagogy to make sure that you understand these principles and are not breaking them. Because if you do break them, there will be consequences. There will be some people getting hurt or getting diminished value from what they should be doing from the time spent doing it.
Injury Prevention
C: To shift gears a bit, you've always talked about injury prevention being first and foremost. Other things are an important part of an effective training session, like having a fun strength training environment, having an engaging workout, or say strength training with your buddies, and the charisma of a coach. There are all these things that go into it, but you've always stuck to your guns on injury prevention being first and foremost. So the question is what about preventing injury is so motivating for you as a coach and as a programmer?
T: For me, I always looked at it as if I had ten additional trainees, 50 additional trainees, would this cause harm? And I can often get away with stuff on a much smaller sample, but the bigger that sample gets, the more exposed flaws become. So if it's 5% of ten people, it's half a person. If it's 5% of 1000 people, all of a sudden that number starts to go up. And what's that acceptable tolerable upper limit in terms of the number of people getting hurt? I would hope that number is zero.
There’s another dynamic though when someone presents to me "I want to accomplish this, I want to do this. I want to use this place to help me accomplish this goal." The number one rate-limiting step, like anything you multiply by zero, will be zero. That is that zero multiplication. If you get hurt, no matter what the construct was or what I thought would be effective, it's still going to have an impact of zero. That will halt all progress. It will stop us immediately. If people get hurt, they stop. It has to be that way because we can't continuously do stuff that hurts.
So if we're looking at programming and we're saying, okay, I'm thinking about if I leverage sets and reps or if you use this exercise or if I go this duration of a program, that's great. That's the fun part. But all that is obsolete if I get hurt or someone's getting hurt, and if I don't have a really good understanding of why potential injuries might occur and what my role with that is, then I'm going to do a lot more harm than good.
The hope is that if they choose to come here and they want to partake in Allegiate's programming is that we have their goals in mind and a big part of accomplishing those goals is not getting hurt in the first place. It comes down to us determining what's a risk and avoiding future risks.
Strength Training at Allegiate
C: Allegiate has different classes, we have team and strength as our main strength training programs. They're both composed of a full body workout three times per week. So when you come in, you're gonna train everything. Not just your legs or your upper body, we’ll hit the major muscle groups each session. Each full body workout in both programs follows the principles, design rules, and principles discussed.
I've heard you talk about how it's not the movement, it's about the muscle. People might say, "I want to back squat" when at the root what they really want is bigger, stronger legs. But what mechanism to use depends on the context. So why is it important for people to focus on the muscle and not the mechanism?
T: The general idea or question would be is it movement, not muscle, or muscle not movement? And there's a phrase in the exercise science industry, it’s about training muscle. And then for whatever reason, it transitioned to movement, not muscle. And then it comes back around. Everything is cyclical. However, oftentimes we overly prioritize certain exercises as the thing that's going to help someone accomplish something over the actual real mechanism that moves the needle.
Physiology doesn't understand that the bar is placed on my back or in front of me with dumbbells in my hand. But if I want to create an adaptation, whether it's increasing the muscle size or decreasing my fat mass and increasing muscle mass or running faster or jumping higher, whatever that thing is, it's not exclusive to an exercise. It's exclusive to understanding the actual reasons why that changes and why we create that adaptation. So when we're looking to explain to someone, marrying ourselves to a specific solution is not the right answer. Understanding the actual, deeper, fundamental reason why that change is and going back to our rules.
Individuals may have unique variables too. Do you have any biomechanical limitations? That's going to adjust our exercise selection, but we still understand the underlying physiology of why that happens. It doesn't really matter what exercise you use, as long as you’re using proper technique and I can leverage these variables in a certain way to get you to the outcome.
Going back to doing this without getting hurt. If you have limited or fewer variables associated biomechanically, that decreases risk, and opens our exercise selection a lot more. And what that does is allow us to use those underlying physiological reasons to make those adaptations occur a little bit easier.
That's where the really beautiful part of being in this system is we've taken that guesswork out of it. Some people might say "I don't know really how to train ‘x’ without doing ‘y’ exercise." I do. I just understand the physiology, and I understand the rules of what we do, and we can get away with it till we can't. So I don't want to break those rules. And I need to understand the underlying physiology of why some muscle mass might grow or why some fat cells might shrink or why someone can express force a little bit better or just be more efficient.
Then I can leverage the strength training exercises with those physiological variables to get whatever outcome I want. And it becomes now, this other idea of going back into what we talked about of muscles, not movements. And then it just paradigm shifts into movements, not muscles into, well it's both. It's understanding the movements that could get me the fastest track to my goal that's not going to cause harm with the underlying physiological variables that get that accomplished, and that's going to be the muscles associated with it.
Creativity in Strength Training
C: In strength training programs, there's a ton of underlying form. We talked about principles, and there's a ton of design in what you do. Putting things together, having a cohesive theme, order, and structure. I've been strength training here for five years in this program. And just from a structural standpoint, it's beautiful, right. I have an appreciation for it.
But going into that, I have a different context, or an advanced lifter has a different context and appreciation for something like this. I think the longer you’re part of the program becomes more beautiful and more well designed because you're not hurt and you're still engaged with the structure. But I've never really heard you explain yourself or think of yourself as a creator or a designer. I'm curious, do you identify that way at all as a creator?
T: I would imagine when it gets to a certain point in music or art, it becomes like a sequence of things that you do, right? So if I'm, I don't know Pablo Picasso at 20 years into his painting career or a musician that's been doing it for a long time, it becomes routine. Right now I know what I need to do to put out. I developed through trial and error, a lot of mistakes, a lot of “that's really inefficient”, someone looking over my shoulder, like, “why do you do it like that? That's just egregiously wasting time.” Like, “yeah, but it's the process I'm working through.” To now, okay, we’ve got to work really hard to get really effective strength training programs that obey the principles and obey the rules.
Not only that, we have to, by extension, get our coaches to understand that and be confident in implementing it and having consistency now across many people and many gyms. That process now becomes integrating all these ideas and the creative thought process of what things I need to adjust or can adjust to make this thing flow better or make this thing function better. Then, getting really high-level results without getting hurt.
So, when someone walks in here and they go through it and they do this incredibly challenging workout and they walk out thinking, "I feel like that was so efficient and organized," that's all thanks to the details behind the scene. That's hours on end meticulously planning and going through it with staff, maybe comparable to Jiro Dreams of Sushi. One guy's doing the sticky rice and the other guy's cutting the fish and the other guy's preparing the seaweed and just doing it all over this. Those are moving parts behind the scenes that have happened. So when you get the dish, it has this aesthetic that looks so simple and so elegant. But the work behind it was immense. So that piece of sushi that is presented to you, that's art, it's beautiful. It's beautiful in its elegance and simplicity. But behind, how many parts and people are associated with that to make that one piece of sashimi go into your plate? That thought to me is like, that's the goal. So when you walk in here, it looks so simple and so well designed and so efficient, you don't even think there are a million things going on behind the scenes.
As we start to get better and now macro out to a larger audience and a larger reach, we become more and more refined in that system. So going back to the original piece of, the output should look like art, but the process in between should look like an assembly line of pieces that we're doing. That efficiency from point A to point B where point B is the delivered product to our customers. It has to have multiple steps that we need to check every single time.
C: With so many different variables, how do you think through the timeline process? Like this idea of being linear, going from, I do this, then I do this, and then I do this. Is that the reality for you, or is it much more complex, multivariate, and messy?
T: Yeah. The idea of strength training programs being a messy middle or the creation of that, I think something analogous would be this as an ecosystem. It's an open system that takes on its energy from the outside world. People are coming in here consistently. And as we expand out, one small detail that we didn't consider, if it's not well thought out or well designed, exposes a whole multitude of problems that we just didn't see, right? Murphy's principle, always, every day. Something as simple as, “Hey, we're going to superset two dumbbell movements”. We're going to have a lot of dumbbells hanging around. How do we manage that? So I always like to think about it from B to A, then A to B.
When designing good strength training programs, there's a thought in your head of how you want it to look. You're more focused on obeying rules and principles. You know why you're doing what you're doing based on science; hopefully, it's gonna achieve some sort of overarching goal. Then it goes into the logistics of, the best way to organize this based on a previous experience and the way we flow and organize things. Then, you get to that first week, and it's a huge collective effort from the staff communicating and working together, like, "I don't know if we can do it this way going forward." Okay, what do we need to do to make it flow better? "I tried this. This worked really well." And it becomes this living, breathing, entity that expands and gets better.
So we work really hard to present this really beautiful eloquent product to you. Week one, day one, new beginnings. Everyone's got the new training block. And then from that first day all the way through 28 days later or four weeks later, it evolves into this even better entity that we have a better grasp of. We know where we made some mistakes or didn't fully think out the shortcomings and logistically we know how to explain it better. We know how to organize it better. We know how to group people better. We know how to flow better. We know we’ve got to shorten up talking here. We know so much more from that first week. So what we think we know in week one, we evolve and transform into this completely different thing that's so much better.
As it evolves, it almost starts into a whole new thing and that feeling of like everything is growing and changing. Every month, every six months, every year, this entity is growing, and it's like AI, it's getting better with each iteration.
Now as we start to look at it, that messy middle of start to finish, it's still a messy process on the back end. It's not linear at all. It's not like we get the program done, launch it for that block, and then I'm moving on to the next one. It's like we have to come back and revisit, making sure that, you know, everything is dialed in, down to equipment placement. All these variables are associated with how we have to adjust and move. So it's always a continuous, evolving process.
Member Takeaway
C: We have members that have been with us for five years, and then we've got members that just joined us and we've got new trials coming in. Everyone from beginning to intermediate and advanced lifters - Is there something that you hope that they take away from the time that they've trained here consistently? What do you hope that they learned from being a part of this place for that long?
T: What I would think would be a cool message, and it happens, right? People move for whatever reason. It's always this sad departure of “I found my place. I want to train here”. But even though they may not be with us, they can go off and, essentially by extension of what they did here over the course of the time they were here, they know how to train. They know what's good and bad. They know what it should feel like. They know what it should look like, and they go off by extension and do that elsewhere. They may not want to do that somewhere else, but they understand that and they can go to another weight room or they can go to another gym somewhere else and they have this foundational piece and this experiential learning of, and we see that with our athletes. The best compliment I can get from another strength coach is” when your athlete came through, they were a really good lifter”.
What that also means is, now we not only learn how to train from an effort, execution, and consistency standpoint, but we also understand the power of the community within. With the programming, the high-level experience, and all the additional value we're working really hard to create, it's also the group of people you're doing it with. It's that irreplaceable environment that we've built through simply deciding, that we're going to do this the right way. We're going to treat people the right way.
By extension of that, now you have a collective group of members and athletes and coaches and staff that all really believe in the mission. That becomes the next level value and you're not going to be able to replace that.
If you learn or master Allegiate, come out with a black belt from Allegiate. You've been here for five years. You’re a strong, good lifter. You don't need to listen to myself or Corbin or Dre or Kirk talk about the workout because you know how to do it. You read the board and you can understand the card game plan. You're going to have a wealth of knowledge and experience, but, quite frankly, you’re not going to be able to replace that competitive camaraderie. It makes us really unique and special with a bunch of other people that appreciate that attention to detail, that focus on quality over, just going till you get tired. You see it all the time, members recognizing “man, I've been here for a long time. You've been here for a long time. We found the right place because we're not breaking down. We're not getting hurt. We keep getting better, and we're doing it with people that are getting the same results.”
I want those folks to understand that our biggest difference maker is the people. The power of community and the power of really well-thought-out programming and good execution. Consistently exposure to the two makes Allegiate really unique and special.
Strength and Conditioning Roots
C: A big reason we started this in the beginning was we had that athletic atmosphere that most people don’t have the privilege to experience in a collegiate strength training program. If you're fortunate to have it, it's an absolutely amazing thing. What makes it amazing is you show up, you don't have to think about things and you're instructed through an absolutely dialed-in program. But the environment that you get to train in and the people that you get to be around it becomes a brotherhood or a sisterhood. It's that magic X-factor that you're talking about.
So, I guess connecting back even further, your career as a collegiate strength coach. I think there's a decent amount out there in our content and our channels in terms of your background in that and the relation between “collegiate” and “Allegiate” and how the idea came about.
Even further past that, are there other things in your life that have influenced who you've become as a programmer or a way that you look at the things that you do that you can point back to or say this directly influenced my life or my work?
T: Yeah. I just thoroughly enjoy exercising and strength training. It might sound corny, but I see quite too often a lot of coaches who don't like to exercise and train, which is beyond me. But that's my center. That's how I come back to it.
It's also, what other profession can you participate in the same program with the people that you're programming for? I can learn experientially from that. What an amazing thing to have done this as long as I have, I still get incredible joy from as well as I still get to learn by doing it. It gives me this shared experience with the people that I'm doing it for. That moment when we're walking through week four of a training block, "I'm right there with you, man. This is brutal."
But on top of that, I don't think that just happened. I think that occurred over years and years and years from high school. This might sound crazy, but I was strength training before and after school every day, and there are plenty of people who can corroborate that. All through college, the same thing. I got jobs to afford to buy supplements so I could work out more. As soon as I could save enough money, I would quit the job and focus on strength training. I think that process and how I looked at strength training, became who I was, that became my identity, that became my true purpose.
Now, by extension, when you move into coaching, you have to become selfless with that It inverts, right? It becomes really selfish early. I'm 16 years old learning about strength training, I'm reading all the magazines, and taking all the supplements. It's all about me. And then over time, you start to get this, in order for me to be able to do this, it needs to be completely inverted and go, everyone else has to come first. But what has come down full circle is now I get to experience that and share it with everybody, and I can do the Team or Strength program with them, and I can have this deal where it becomes now this “we're all in this together” mentality, which is a crazy thing to think about. I'm actually thinking about this out loud as we're talking through it. But how did I come to that, and how do I evolve past getting into coaching? Because it'd be a great way to wear T-shirts and shorts and maybe make money and coach people on this and then it goes to, “well it's not about me at all, it's all about them. When they're here, 100% my focus - nothing else matters”, but when they're gone I want to go through what they're going through.
I'm in a place where I would pay to be a member, I just happen to work here and get the perks of going through the strength training program with it. I'm earning that membership through hard work and committing myself. I find that process is similar to what I would have done when I was 16. I would have worked here for free if I had the opportunity to, and now I'm doing that and I'm still thinking about who I was when I was 16, 22, all the way to when I became a college strength coach. That's the wheel that keeps turning and I don't think that's stopping anytime soon.
C: What a cool angle. Do you do things outside of this that influence your work and this meaning Allegiate?
T: I think it's pretty well known I'm a pretty voracious reader. I would say I'm pretty obtuse with my interests. I don't have hobbies and I'm not trying to endorse that, I'm not trying to get onto this pedestal of like, "look at me, I'm so singular in focus." I know there's a level of potential limitation of how well-rounded I could be and I think we should all try to develop ourselves and expand out in so many areas but the other part is I don't think anything else really interests me. I read. I work out. I coach. All related to the same thing, and I've been doing this now for 30 years and I don't see it changing. I don't see that enthusiasm to learn more about this slowing down or changing.
However, I'm shifting a little bit from learning about it to talking about it and delivering it. That's something I'm adjusting to and sometimes I get stressed out, feeling like I'm not doing enough for my continuing education or growth. It's an interesting thing, I've probably accrued as much possible reading and education as you could possibly do in a 20-year span in this industry and I still feel this sense of anxiousness like I'm not doing enough.
With that being said, it kind of limits everything else outside of the gym. I don't have a musical bone in my body. I don't have any hobbies or things that I can't wait to do that serve as my release. It's literally this self-containing issue so maybe it's setting me up for burnout, or maybe it's just I've been doing this so well for so long and I find myself now more entrenched and more into the mindset of “how good can I possibly be at this? How much can I really get out of this?” and it keeps coming back. The more I put in, the more I get, and the more I see that this is what I want to do. I don't know. Who knows?
C: Let's talk about quality control. We integrate a lot of technology into our training.
We've got the Bridge app to track our wellness. We've got logged workouts, we've got weights, we've got progress. So twelve months ago, a member could see what they hit on squat for five if they were here for that program. We've got Gym Aware to measure our bar speed. We've got Force Deck to measure force output asymmetries. And we joke about it's not what Force Deck measures, it's what doesn't it measure? You're asking the wrong question. There's an ecosystem of technology and analytics, and it's not just to have it. It's not just to show off. It seems very much aligned with what we're trying to do from a quality control standpoint, from a result standpoint. So how do you think about that complex ecosystem of tech and analytics and how does it play in your programming process?
T: How does technology influence the program? How does it work within a really comprehensive ecosystem of strength training and group dynamics and all those things? It's keeping us honest.
I think the scientist in me would say, “I really want to know if what we're doing is working”, and if I sit there and say I have nothing objectively to say, “I helped that person towards that goal”. Or, “this program should have this effect, did it or didn't?” I think would be almost a contradiction to the way we're approaching this on the other end.
So we have these variables that we're really trying to make decisions on. It goes back to principles and rules, and then what we do is use tracking and monitoring and leverage Vault, leverage Bridge, leverage Gym Aware to help us see if we're actually doing that. It gives us a lot cleaner platform, objectively, to make really good decisions for people we don't know enough about. We want to learn more about you in terms of what you want to accomplish. What are your limiting factors, and what are going to be higher-risk things?
Members give us that information immediately, and then from there it shifts over into, you said you want to decrease body weight. Are we helping you with that? Do we see this number going up or down or closer to where you want to be? It's going up and to the right or it's not. Objectively, that number is telling us the truth and we need to accept that. From there, we have to ask a really hard question. Is what I did not the right idea or the way I did it not the right way to do it? We have to constantly go back and forth on that and we have to ask, collectively being honest and transparent with each other as coaches “is this the best way to do this?” If the construct was right, this should have worked, did it, did not? If Bridge, Vault, Gym Aware are showing us results that we don't want to see because we wanted to help this person accomplish that goal, we need to get better logistics. On the other end, it's asking, “are we paying attention to rules and principles and principles?” Yes. Then we might need to really configure how we leverage these principles. What does the data say in terms of rates of progress and change from week to week, month over month, quarter over quarter? We should have seen this earlier.
The more information we get, the better that information can help us and the more transparent it becomes. That ecosystem becomes our checks and balances. It's holding us to the standard that we should be fighting for. We value every person that comes through here, and they can go anywhere else. But the difference is we not only have a really clear sense of appreciation for principles and rules of strength training, but on the other end we now have this, really this judge and jury walking around going, “you can do better. You can do better from an execution standpoint or from an actual framework standpoint. You need to think about this in a lot more of a way in this way or that way to help that person accomplish that goal 100 times out of 100 times.”
C: Are there certain metrics that you're tracking? Also, there are different ways to define success, and it depends on how you're measuring it and for whom you are measuring it. With a really complex amount of people, all sorts of different types how do you actually tell if the program is working?
T: How we determine success, I think is best answered by my experience as a college strength coach. When I talked to admin and coaches, they’re telling me they want the team faster and playing more games without getting hurt. If I built a program to squat, bench, and clean more, it was irrelevant to the two biggest goals they gave me upfront.
So when you're looking at it, you need to have a clearly defined objective, and we need to define key results to help us get there. That’s why we have all these rules and why we create these biomechanical rules and physiological rules to help stay within that framework.
Are we getting people hurt? Yes or no? If yes, we’re probably not helping the cause of getting people more resilient and playing more games. And then the other end is what other key results actually matter, relatively speaking, to improving that quality the coach wants in terms of speed? Is it cleaning more? Could be. It's not 100% linear one-to-one. Squatting more? No, not a one-to-one. Is it benching more? Definitely not a one-to-one. It's nice and it gives some sort of quantifiable metric of what we're doing actually is increasing, but it's not helping us, relatively speaking. It's just something we improved in.
So we're looking at what is success for an Allegiate member. They're telling you “I want to look better and feel better”. What does that mean? “I want to lose body fat, gain lean muscle mass, and then really not get hurt.” That's all I really want from you.
Ten times out of ten, it would be nice to get some sort of metric to validate that. Like I really wanted to bench 315. Okay, we'll get you there. I wanna be able to do a pull-up. But it's not going to be a one-to-one relationship on that. So as I start to break down, what is success, we start to look at what are the actual key results that get us to that. For everybody going through a general program after they're done playing sports, it's all about consistency over a longer-term.
Getting hurt will limit you. And the other big part is, what that's limiting you from doing is coming in on a consistent cadence for a certain period of time or extended period of time. That adaptation takes time, and if we're not continuously stopping and going, going back to that principle of reversibility, using it, or losing it, then we won't accomplish that goal. I won't look better or feel better.
So what we need to do is create key results to help us make that decision. And what we look at a lot is frequency and consistency or cadence of that frequency. Are you coming in three days a week consistently, week over week? To macro it out, 152 sessions a year, whatever makes more sense for you. I like the big number. Give me 150 sessions to get this year, I'll go out there and do it. Great. Some might think “Three times a week is just not sexy enough for me”. I don't care. Just come in three times a week. Over time, the consistency of that frequency over that period of time is what moves the needle to look better and feel better.
So as I start to look at our objectives and key results, how do we get people coming in three times a week? Do we need to look at the schedule? Do we need to look at what we are doing in that schedule? Sometimes it's the coach, sometimes it's the program. So, let's make both of those better. Let's take feedback. Let's take the information.
We’re all ears to feedback that’s leading to getting people coming in more consistently. “It'd be a lot more conducive to my schedule if we had this class time there”. So then we ask ourselves, “Is that collectively across the board with everybody?” If so, great. We should really consider that because that's going to help that key result, three times a week for 52 weeks a year. Now we're talking in terms of why we make decisions and change.
From there, it goes into the next level question of, if I did get all those sessions, “did I look better, lose body fat, increase lean muscle mass, feel better, and not break down or get hurt?” We reflect on our execution and look at how well we thought out the thought process of the variables and just continue to refine our product. It's always going to be a living, breathing document, but we have these variables, key results, that are really keeping us on track.
Strength Training and Everyday Life
C: I take you as a person who likes things in their place. A person that values doing things for a reason and having control over those reasons. Is this a metaphor for life and connecting design principles to living an intentional life?
T: Living an intentional life and living a life of purpose, really. If we kind of look at what we do on a consistent basis, we talk about that quite a bit. Hopefully, it's not direct and awkward or it comes off as like we're snake oil salesmen, but it's a huge piece of it, right?
If you're strength training three days a week, it probably means life is in pretty good order. That you’re good at managing your day, your week, your month, and the focus on your physical health. These are usually things you do when things are in a good spot.
We talk a lot about getting 8 hours of sleep. What does that do? It means that you are in a good motivational spot to prioritize your personal health. And there's a feedback loop that builds off it, right? If you're going to bed at night and waking up at six the next day, that probably means more good decisions tomorrow.
We talk about drinking water, half your body weight in ounces of water. We talk about eating eight servings of vegetables. We talk about being mindful of what you're eating. All these things are foundational to being able to handle better things or more challenging things or more complicated things later.
So as we start to look at all the guidance we’re dishing out, we see we're telling you to train three days a week. We're telling you to go through a full range of motion without pain, if there's pain, let us know. Telling you to stick to these parameters we’ve put in place from a set, rep tempo, and intensity standpoint. We're doing that here. And there's a comfort with that. There's solace taken in knowing that this is thought out, this is planned. I appreciate the effort. I can just let go and let that happen.
But in a lot of ways, we're doing that because it leads to what we talked about before - better key results. People come in more consistently if they're sleeping better. People come in more consistently if they're eating more vegetables and drinking more water. People will get better results if they're more conscious of what they're eating. By default, what that also does, it allows us to handle the noise or the variance in our life a little bit better. That I can handle a really challenging situation that wasn't expected a lot better because I slept 8 hours the night before, because I'm hydrated, and because I got good nourishment from my food. I can handle the unexpected a lot easier. I don't need to add a whole bunch of stuff on top of that. If I'm in a good spot where I'm like, “I really want to challenge myself by climbing a mountain or doing this thing that I think has been something I wanted to do for a long time”, you're probably going to have a lot more chance of following through and being successful with that if you have these foundational pieces.
Again, it goes right back to rules and principles. We can get away with not sleeping for a certain period of time, but not forever. We can get away with not hydrating, but not forever. Once we have this foundation in place, it gets into, “I really want to amp it up a little bit. I want to lose weight”. Okay. We might need to talk about calories. We might need to talk about macronutrients, but only after we do these basic fundamental things.
So having a life of purpose and meaning, that's for that person to define. Everyone has a different life. I just talked about how I have a very obtuse approach to life. I only do strength training and conditioning, hitting the major muscle groups and beyond, and I'm okay with that. I'm happy with that. I find purpose and meaning in that, but that's not for everybody. Some people like to branch out and try many things and be as competent and proficient as they can in a wide range of things. They appreciate progressing from not being good at things and doing stuff in a way that brings enjoyment and fulfillment to them. I would say you can find purpose and meaning in both, whether it's casting a very wide net or a very singular thing that they're focused on. Whatever the approach, they are all going to be better served by having these really simple things that they should be doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly occurrence to allow them to pursue those things. It just gives a better chance for them to pursue and do what they want to do and handle more than they would if they didn't have it in place.
C: Why do you think people respond so well or seek out structure? Why do we need that?
T: We need structure because we need a foundation. We need something to say that this is set. That's why people gravitate to religion. It's why people gravitate to communities. Because that structure gives some sort of vector in where we should be and what we're doing every single day. And who knows what's good after that, who knows what's bad after that? But we do know that we can take peace and understanding and appreciate the simplicity of the path to enlightenment. Chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After that, over time, it macros out into, you decide if you're doing enough or doing too little, that's the thought process is that foundational piece and giving structure gives you a better opportunity to figure out what is good and bad and meaning overall.
C: Anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to cover?
T: I would love to celebrate our coaches and just how hard they work and their process, you know, going above and beyond. We take might take their impact for granted, but whenever we get someone new, we get really reminded of how much we're doing.
I'm the one who's actually writing the strength training program, but it's our coaches out here every single day executing that plan. And we've been fortunate to grow our staff. Anyone who has been here with us since 2017 can recall just me and Cody running the show from 5 A.M. to 8 P.M.
Then, it expanded and grew. We added a couple of coaches, including Andres, and it continued to grow. Now we have a coaching staff of 15, 20 people that are running classes between our locations on a recurring basis. When we bring someone new into the system, we get a really healthy reminder of just how much is demanded of that coach.
So we talk about what’s important here. You need to do the big three: you need to coach classes, coach privates, and conduct screens. All of those in their own right are full-time jobs. And there are so many details that go into them. Understanding the program, understanding how to coach the program, and understanding how to explain the program. Getting in front of people who are wildly successful in their own right, who are confident in what they're doing, who are really capable of what they're doing, but choose to go to Allegiate is not an easy thing for someone who's in their first couple years of coaching. It's a daunting, intimidating task. On top of that, we're running a really complicated program with a lot of variables associated, and a lot of logistics involved.
The assumption that to coach a class you can hire someone off the street, and they should be ready is wildly inaccurate. There's a lot of preparation that goes into the onboarding. On the other end, coaching privates, it's a customized experience. We want to take that stuff that we have as rules and principles apply that in a private, but in a lot more of a direct, specific manner.
Instead of doing a general program, based on rules and principles, it's a very specific vector, still based on rules and principles, but in a much more linear and direct path to what they want to accomplish. "I want to lose weight, I want to gain weight. I want to feel better." We have to really align those variables to get there. It's a different program than what we're doing in Team and Strength. It's customized. Everybody in private training has a customized program and the coach that's coming in and coaching classes needs to know how to do that private strength training program They need to know that person's goal because that matters a great deal to us. Everyone's goal matters to us.
Then you take them to the other consideration of doing a screen. It's not a simple screen. We tried to take as much of the heavy lifting off the coach as possible by utilizing technology and objective data to help make the decision. But it's not a foregone conclusion that they should be able to walk in off the street, and implement screen. Not everyone goes, “thank you for your insight. I accept what you're saying”. There's an element needing to be able to explain the results of the screens in an articulate and digestible fashion. The art of conversation, the art of communicating. That's not something as simple as people like to say it is, but it’s something our coaches need to do every single day, multiple days a week, with multiple people, with all various backgrounds and expectations. So the thought process of, “yeah, I'm writing a program”, but things that make that program actually work from start to finish are the coaches out here doing what they have to do on a level of, “hey, I need to learn this program”. Even our staff, our front desk, like communicating, being almost a translator of these hieroglyphics up on the wall, like, “it's all good, I'm here, I can walk you through this in a very patient and pragmatic way”.
Everybody’s part of it. Everybody who has their hands involved from that first touchpoint when we got a trial in. Saying"I know it can be intimidating, you see these racks, you see these dumbbells. We're going to get you in a class. We're going to get you in a good spot and you're going to get everything you want out of this. We're going to answer all your questions too." I've been here for five years and I'm still having a great experience. It doesn't happen by accident.
I would like to think that Cody and I are really trying to create these systems to make that consistently the process, but the system is only as good as the people executing on it. People, process, product. We have the right product. We're developing the right process, but the people are what make that work. Our coaches, our staff, all the way from start to finish. Allegiate isn't what it is right now - and we think we're in a good spot, we're only starting - without those coaches and staff every single day doing the hard work and doing the labor and having empathy and compassion, but being assertive and confident when it needs to be done.
At the end of the day, we're a high-performance gym. We're a place that's going to get great results but we're also going to have an appreciation for the fact you might not understand this or you might not agree with it and we're doing. We’re going to walk you through why that's the case so you understand and appreciate what we’re delivering. We're not making these things up. Principles, rules, and biomechanical things are deciding factors. We're just trying to be that ambassador and holding that standard as we go through.
So coaches, staff, everybody who has a hand in explaining this, integrating this, and keeping that motivation to keep going from year one to year five, where we're at now. That's the final element that I would be remiss to fail to mention. It would be huge, huge missed aspect of what we're doing here at Allegiate.