There are no Magic Workouts

I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on fitness products and education over the years. Especially in the beginning of my career, at one time I followed over a hundred different fitness "gurus", and I bought ALL of their products. My entire hard drive was ebooks.

After 5 years, I realized that 90% of what I purchased, it was all recycled content. And as my philosophy of gravity, training, and first principles coalesced, I realized not only were most fitness products recycled, they were also garbage.

While I still invest in education, I am have become much more particular in who I follow, and I take a more interdisciplinary approach to study.

Having trained over 10,000 training sessions. I can tell when someone is full of shit with their product/program design. I've worked for multiple fitness companies, I know the ins and outs of marketing and the hyperbole language and what people respond to.

Regardless, everyone can make mistakes. Recently I made a "program" purchase, which I had not done in at least 3-4 years.

This was from a fitness influencer whose content I enjoy. I had seen his content, and he seemed knowledgeable. He combined resistance training and cardio, and I was curious to learn more. I'm not going to share any details beyond that. This is not throwing shade.

I elected to get his most recently released program, hopeful it would be informative and contain some actionable knowledge.

Thus I paid $100 for the program. Pricey perhaps, but assuming it had all the material, a worthy invest. A good program is the most guaranteed way to get results.

What was in the program?

I opened it up to discover…a German Volume Training Program. 10 sets of 10. Thats how it started.

For those that dont know, German Volume Training is possibly the most overrated program ever created. Its doing 10 sets of 10 reps for two main lifts, and then usually doing 5x10 for your other lifts. It sounds cool and challenging, but its also leads to overtraining and the results have never lived up to the hype around it. Its been around since the 1960s, and aside from anecdotes claiming super fast muscle gains, rarely does anyone see great results from it. And it can only be done in the short term.

GVT has a reputation now for basically be a novice coach recommendation that cant think of anything else to do and cut and pasted it from the internet. Just bury the client with 30 sets and they’ll assume the fatigue is doing something.

So already I was letdown, but what made it worse was the impracticality of the workouts.

You would need Olympic bar and plates, squat rack, bench, dumbbells, rings, Assault bike, jump rope, sleds, a waverunner treadmill.

Unless you have a fully equipped Crossfit gym entirely to yourself, there is no way you can realistically perform any of the workouts.

A Good Program is EASY to Execute

I purposefully avoid supersets and circuits in my programs because I KNOW they are not realistic to do in commercial gyms. There are also exercises I dont bother with, even though I like them, because they use uncommon equipment or require complicated setups.

This program was the opposite. Which made me question that this coach had likely never trained anyone. If he had, he must have done it in the worlds best private CF facility, because there was no way in hell these workouts were getting done otherwise.

In a way, it was an ego check for myself. I had bought the program hoping to see someone COOL workouts, and what I got was a mess.

It reminded me why I so often ignore the work of other fitness professionals. At this stage of the game, there are very few people left to learn from, and most of them DONT have large following. They are more focused on the study and research than the business of fitness.

The more years go by, the more I learn the lesson of Simplicity being a guiding principle of fitness, health, and everything else.

the only Magic that exists is in doing right action, done well, over time.