Why is my program the same as someone else’s?
TLDR: There really aren’t that many effective exercises out there. Your program might look the same as someone else's because you have similar goals, strengths and weaknesses, but you can rest assured it's written that way because it’s the most effective program for you.
Foundational to our offering at Woven is that you are doing a program that is completely personalized to you. Implicit in that is that every moment you spend in our gym one of our coaches has thought about what you should do and has built you a program to get the most out of that time.
That being said, your program may actually look very similar to the person next to you. This isn’t because we are lying about our personalization, but because in reality many people tend to need to train very similarly. Most of our goals that are built around changing our bodies or improving our health don’t require incredibly specific or fancy exercises. The reality is there simply aren’t that many good exercises out there.
Let me illustrate by listing out all the squat variations that I think are actually worth your time doing once you have been in the gym for a couple months and are confident in a squat pattern. 1) Goblet squat 2) Front squat 3) Back squat 4) Zercher squat (even though I think a front squat is better most of the time). That’s it. These are the only versions of a squat that are stable and progressable enough, while still requiring high degrees of coordination, to generate meaningful adaptations in strength and muscle size to have the biggest impact on our health and longevity. Could I program a single leg bosu ball squat to look fancy? Sure! It would make your program fancier, but it wouldn’t actually make it more effective.
A trap I fell in earlier in my career is writing programs to be different for the sake of being different. I couldn’t write two programs that were the same because what if my client’s found out? They would think I’m not doing my job. But the outcome was me writing worse programs due to a desire of being different for the sake of being different. The important thing is not that your program is different from someone else’s, but that it’s efficient and effective. And I can guarantee with absolute confidence that our programs are efficient and effective.
