The purpose of the survey was two-fold: 1) We wanted to get honest feedback from members on how they are feeling overall with all things gym related, and 2) we wanted to gauge potential reactions/interest in some things we have planned going forward.
Overall, the responses were much as we expected. There were some surprising tidbits (people hate air fresheners! who knew?) but mostly the responses we received were kind of expected. While the overwhelming majority of answers were positive, it was the negative ones/ suggestions that we were most interested in. We are constantly striving to be better and at the same time focus on things that are important to our members or bring value into their memberships and their life.
For instance, the constant struggle in the gym is facilities upgrades vs equipment. What should the priority be? At the end of the day, what brings more value to our members and makes them feel satisfied when they are here? These questions are important so that we know where to focus our efforts. Unfortunately almost half the respondents skipped this question, so we're still at square one lol. But what I'm trying to say is each question was intentional and gives us valuable insight even though it may not have seemed like it.
The most important question in our minds was #3; is this is a safe and judgement free zone? This has always been the most important to us at ShopGym. We have worked extremely hard to make this space a special environment and we fiercely protect it. We were SO happy to see that we scored 100% on this. That's not just our coaches who make it happen. Buy-in is required from every person who walks through that door, so we want to thank you for making people feel welcome and safe and committing to the principles in our mission statement.
Some of the classes / special interest clinics we've been looking to add are yoga, running clinics, and various informational nights (nutrition, supplements etc) as well as specialized periodized extra programming such as body sculpting. Again, we want to focus our energies on what people want and would attend, so those responses were helpful in shaping our direction. Our hope is to add some extras at no cost to members as well as others that would be offered outside of your regular membership.
Evening class times have been an issue. We know things have been moving around quite a bit lately and we apologize for that. We are hoping to get some consistency across the board for those classes going forward and will be contacting the regular and sometime evening attenders to get a bit more feedback on that. Because we juggle a few programs in the evening or have crossover classes, it can become a space issue. As well, the silvers class has moved to a monday/wednesday/friday schedule which has also disrupted things somewhat. We appreciate your patience as we work these things out. Again, feedback from you is invaluable.
We like a variety of social events, those will continue to happen!
There were a few comments about open gym and also a few regarding more time in class for special skills training. These two actually go hand in hand. I will use this to segue into an explanation of programming. This is a long read, so if it doesn't interest you to know what goes into it, feel free to leave here and many thanks for your time!
Programming: The method behind the (perceived) madness
Judging from some unrelated questions and comments, I got the impression that a lot of you don't a) understand our method of programming b) understand that there IS a method to our programming, and c) recognize bias training when it's happening. So I thought I would give everyone a very general overview of what goes into programming for the gym.
While what we do is constantly varied, that does not mean it is random. I don't have a hopper at home (much to David's dismay) that I spin every week and see what spits out. I follow a template for programming on a very basic level. This ensures that we hit up the three modalities and combinations (gymnastics, monostructural metabolic, and weights) evenly and our programming is well balanced (not specialized, be good at everything!) . Within this template, I need to make sure that the movements themselves are varied.
Taking all that into account, I next look at the year ahead (in fall) and ask myself a few questions:
1) What holes did I see in our programming last year? What needs the most attention?
2) What is our gym demographic? Has it changed?
3) What are the majority of goals written on the board related to?
These questions are important. #1 is the most important from a programming perspective; if we have holes in the programming and people are not seeing success, that falls on me. So I need to be very honest with what I see and try to figure out what combination of factors are inhibiting success for our members. Gymnastics is a very broad domain, there are so many different movements to choose from. It can be difficult to get as many reps at a certain movement as you may like sometimes because we program for the population as a whole. So we try to add skill movements that transfer to other movements. Why do we throw in so many single wall walks? or active/passive hangs? or hollow body holds? Because they all reinforce a movement pattern that we need to establish for your handstand push ups, push ups, pull ups, ring rows, inverted rows, plank holds, etc etc. There is a reason we include wall slides in the warm up, it sets your spine to neutral and reinforces that position when you are bench pressing or push pressing or jerking. The warm up is just as intentional as the workout, and we are trying to make you better at other movements without doing those movements. Highly skilled gymnastic work (think muscle ups or getting your first pull up) or olympic lifting does take reps to get results (that's why we have open gym), but if you put in the accessory work during class, it will come more quickly.
#2 is equally important. Our demographic has everything to do with how I program. Right now, our demographic is primarily concerned with general physical preparedness, or gpp. This means that they may show up every day or come once a week but most of the goals are the same: to be fitter, look better, feel better, and do life better. There may be variations on a theme, such as getting leaner or doing one or two competitions, but overall our members like to workout, have fun, and not take themselves too seriously. So if I program crazy intense workouts all of the time, people are going to get injured or stop coming. The other side of that however, is that there are obviously a wide variety of fitness levels in the gym. In every certification I have taken when the discussion turns to programming (no matter if it's weightlifting, gymnastics, or level 1 or 2) the question comes up about Rx+ and Rx and how to program for everyone from the firebreather to the newest newbie. The consistent response has always been this: You program for the top capabilities in your gym and scale from there. This way everyone is challenged. There are days where I put up the workout and I know that no one in the gym will Rx it. This is usually the case with HQ workouts/named workouts/hero workouts or other common benchmarks. That's not up there to make you feel bad about yourself, it's there as a goal and a guideline. If Rx weight is 185 lbs and the goal of the workout is to finish in 8 mins, a person can look at that weight and determine what scaled weight will help them achieve that time domain. The goal on the board is that you get the desired response to the workout on that day. So if you didn't sleep last night and #65 thrusters are going to do you in, then choose #45 instead. You don't need to explain yourself to anyone, it's YOUR workout. Then if you finish that workout in 8 minutes give or take, you know that you achieved what you were supposed to for that day. If you finished it in 3 minutes, well maybe you didn't push yourself like you could have, but you still worked intensely for those 3 minutes so good on you.
#3 tells me what people want to achieve. It's great to have a goal board up on the wall, but if people don't put stuff on there, how are we as coaches and myself as programmer going to know how to help you? If I see 15 out of 20 ppl want to get a pull up, I know how to program for the next cycle.
After my thought process outlined above, I make a yearly outline with what we want to happen. We bias program in our gym. This means that while we follow the template, we will bias or lean towards a certain way of training to achieve a specific goal. What this usually looks like is in fall, we strength bias, so programming involves a lot of lifting, a lot of the week. While the program we use varies, we always run at least two cycles of strength with deload in a year. After christmas, we gear up for the open so we start revving up the engine and start working on more muscular endurance and metcon-y type stuff so that when the open hits, you have retained the strength you built up over the fall but can still giver cardio-wise. After the open, we go to general programming. In spring we start the endurance (running) bias to prepare people for marathon and race season. This can be an 8 - 12 week bias depending on how people are feeling (if you didn't notice, we are in week 3 right now). Then June or July we bias again to gymnastics where you will see more isolated work to achieve a very specific movement (usually muscle ups/hspu/pull ups). We do accessory work to strengthen and also volume work for reps. Fall goes back to regular programming although sometimes we will do a month bias of endurance before the snow flies. And then it's back to square one!
Once that's done, I break out the monthly programming. In addition to everything above, I also have to look at whether I am hitting all of the time domains to keep intensity up (2 - 3 short, 1 - 2 medium, 1 long) and then mix up the number of movements within that (single modality like a 5k row, couplets, triplets, chipper) and make sure I hit all of those. I base our model on 5 days on, 2 days rest. Saturday is always chipper day and is treated as a bonus. More than one chipper per week can be detrimental to progress. Whatever you might think, more is not always better. You need to hit up ALL the time domains for the program as a whole to be effective.
And THEN I need to look at loads and make sure that over a month we are getting the prescribed amount of light weight days, medium weight days, and heavy days. Sometimes I will program a week of bias training (cleans anyone?) just to get people more reps at a highly skilled movement or to trash a body part. These all help keep the body guessing.
So if you look at all of that and then check out the blog every night before you hit the gym next day, hopefully you can see from the warm up and the way the class is designed what the goal is for that workout. We are very thorough on the blog to explain the movements and the warm up and what we want you to be thinking about while you are doing those movements. Your coach is there to help and guide you, but knowing what the group is trying to accomplish and being prepared will only make your experience better.
So that's it in a nutshell. Again, thank you for taking the time to do the survey and to read this. And I'm sorry to Mitch and Lynne, but we will not be moving the barbell clips. ;)
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