#BikeEatsFirst

I’ve thought about it a little and I think, for the most part, the majority of our bosses and managers are unremarkable.

(This particular email is, once again, stolen from this article on Medium.)

They’re driven by either the finances or the people (a player-coach, as I like to call myself these days) and probably won’t leave so much as a fingerprint on your mind.

But I had two that stand out.

My first boss was tough. She was committed to the product that we were delivering and wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than great.

She held me back in the bullpen for the better part of a full calendar year and wouldn’t allow me to train a single client, no matter how hard I tried to persuade her that I was up to the task.

Even when she finally gave me the go-ahead, I think it was a rare instance of compromise.

To be fair, I was brought up with and worked with some amazing trainers, some of whom I still call friends today, and it’s easy to see in hindsight how far behind I was.

But she also pushed me to be better and, combined with the staff that I mingled with, I don’t think I’d still be in fitness if it wasn’t for her.

A second boss stands out just as well, but not as a warm memory.

We had a strong personal relationship, but Second Boss was a business person in the fitness realm.

So when I walked into the office asking for guidance on career and financial growth at the company, I can’t say I was surprised to be pointed toward a senior trainer and told, “Train like that.”

I remember thinking to myself, “Sure, but I don’t understand why they train like that.”

I thought that was a reasonable question, but I was countered with, “Well that’s okay, it’s a good idea for beginners to ask ‘why.’”

I’m rarely as offended as I was at that reply.

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A few months ago, I walked up to Erin in the back room of the gym and said something like, “You know what? I think we should consider not doing finishers at the end of our workouts. I think we should move intervals into the front of peoples’ programs instead.”

We had experimented with throwing some intervals into the beginning and middle of members’ workouts for a while, recognizing that it’s challenging to get any meaningful amount of cardiovascular work into a session without it feeling like we’re phoning it in as coaches.

Members don’t sign up and pay personal training rates to be plopped on a treadmill or rower for half the hour.

So we tried to find other ways to incorporate something that resembled “cardio,” if only so we could tick the box.

For the most part? It was a finisher.

I had been adding finishers into workouts for my entire career, cover to cover, for over ten years up until recently. Everyone else I knew did, too.

Sometimes they involved dedicated arm work, but mostly they were some sort of interval designed to bring the heart rate up.

Often, the question, “Do you want to do a quick finisher?” was met with a wrinkled nose and negotiation for fewer intervals or a shorter sprint.

The finisher was careless.

Thoughtless.

Lazy.

It was a reflection on me as a coach. And I had just had enough of under-programming my clients in the name of a few minutes on the Assault Bike.

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I retreated to the office and immediately started searching through Google Scholar and PubMed to find what I could on “intervals,” “sprints,” “cardiovascular capacity,” and “VO2 max.”

(VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can use during intense exercise. And it correlates very strongly with overall health, fitness, and longevity.)

It wasn’t about intervals and VO2 max.

It wasn’t about metabolic disease or aerobic capacity or general health.

I wanted to be sure that we could actually move the needle on all of these things in a short time-frame.

We know that interval training can improve VO2 max.

The Norwegian 4×4, Tabata, all different methods of high-intensity intervals.

The question was, “Could we meaningfully improve VO2 max in just 5–10 minutes each session?”

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In Second Boss’s office, I remember thinking to myself, “Sure, but I don’t understand why they train like that.”

Ten years later: I don’t understand why I’m training like this.

Because we’ve always done it this way.

Because exercise physiology textbooks very clearly state that strength training should come before cardiovascular work in the same training session.

Because it allows us to perfectly round out the coaching session by adapting the length of the finisher to the time remaining.

It was a reflection on me as a coach. I was being careless. Thoughtless. Lazy.

Members probably weren’t moving the needle on VO2 max because they were too tired at the end of a workout to really give a solid effort in any sort of interval.

And that’s if they didn’t elect to forego the finale and run out the door.

Designing a finisher often meant prioritizing what would fatigue a person versus what would benefit them.

And all because we wanted them to be 5% sweatier when they walk out?

It’s well-known that working as a personal trainer is a constant tug-of-war between delivering what you think your client needs and what your client thinks they need.

I just felt that the finisher, objectively, wasn’t really filling either bucket.

This isn’t meant to be a 500-word self-righteous confession.

No, I didn’t just finish Think Again by Adam Grant.

It was simply a genuine moment of reflection.

“I don’t understand why I train like this.”

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So, now, a majority of our membership receives programmed intervals after their warm-up and before their strength work.

Fewer, shorter intervals for those with more specific goals to tackle.

Extra, longer intervals for those that just want to feel better, get fitter, and keep from being winded too often.

We change them up on a daily and weekly basis to keep folks from getting bored.

And no, a few intervals before our strength work doesn’t leave us too tired to reap the rewards.

Beyond helping to build VO2 max, we’ve also created a transition period between our warm-up and workout that (I think) actually functions as an extension of the warm-up itself.

And in lieu of plyometrics and medicine ball tosses, our gen. pop clients are now building something that resembles power exactly where explosive work belongs: near the beginning of the workout.

#BikeEatsFirst

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I think, for the most part, the majority of our bosses and managers are unremarkable.

What I’ve learned this year is that there’s not much, then, that can rejuvenate you and rekindle your passion like hiring a first employee.