Author: Ross Oberlin
Imagine, if you will, that you’re walking into your first day of a college course. You sit down in your seat and to begin the first class, the professor hands out an exam. “Ok”, you think. “They just want to assess what we know on day one”. And that’s fine, right? They’re testing you to see what the class knows and determine the best course of action for educating you over the coming months.
But what if on day 2, you’re met with another exam. And the same goes for day 3, day 4, and so on.
How long would it take for you to walk down to the registrar’s office and ask for a refund? For me, I think I’d be done on day 3.
And why would we be upset? Why would we ask for a refund? Because we didn’t pay to be tested. We paid for an education and testing is only the means to confirm that we actually learned something during the course.
THAT is the difference between working out and training.
Now, language matters here. We have a clear definition of the difference between the two. If you happen to “train” as we define it, but you just call it working out, that’s fine. What matters here is intent.
Working out is a single, one off session. It exists in a vacuum. It doesn’t have context of larger goals that we might have. Goals that can’t be achieved in a single session (ie; any goal). Working out is just going to the gym and “doing some stuff” without a plan. It’s honestly how a lot of folks approach their training, and it’s why they struggle to get the results they want.
Training means that every single training session exists in a larger context. That they are all structured to reach a larger goal. Training means having a plan when you go to the gym.
We’re not just training to get tired or sweaty. We’re training to get better, and even though it feels good to get tired and sweaty, we’re able to think bigger than that.
It seems so obvious when explained this way, but if we do an honest audit of our training program, many of us will realize that we aren’t following this thought process. It’s hard to know what your training program should look like when you have big goals. It’s even more difficult to know if you’re doing the right things, especially because if you’re wrong, it might take months before you realize it.
That’s why our individualized training and programming is so valuable to our members. In addition to the coaching, community, and culture, folks like to know that we’ve not only looked far down the road in regards to their goals, but we’ve already walked that road ourselves.
And every once in a while, we test. We have a one-off session where we test and assess to see where we’re at. It might be testing our strength numbers, or our conditioning, or a combination of things. Once we’ve located “where we’re at” we continue to move towards “where we want to go”.
This is why rather than working out, we train.
This is why our gym slogan is: “Stop Working Out. Start Training.”
