P360 DNA: 10 Guiding Principles Over 10 Years (Part 2)

In case you missed part one of this series for our first five principles, go give those a read first. Today we pick up on the second five in effort to provide ongoing insight into why we do what we do, so that you can better understand how we’re best able to serve you in fitness.

#6. Avoid Complexity
Complex things rarely get adopted. At P360 we believe in and regularly train simple (not easy), effective lifts so that you can learn, become confident, get more weight on the bar, and get results. All in not that much time. So, we prescribe highly complex movements minimally. For us, pursuing the far reaching ends of specialization is a distraction to our main purpose of well rounded strength. Take something like the Olympic lifts for example. We’re big fans. But, not in the sense you might think as those of you with a savvy enough eye know that we don’t spend a ton of time on the full versions of them.

Essentially, our lane is the following:

  • Simple (not easy) – Can it be learned in a reasonable time and used regularly?
  • Effective – Can it be applied across a broad range of training and beneficial in every setting?
  • Sustainable – Is the movement something you can realistically perform for decades? No desire to be just your current flavor of the month.

We prefer not to let technical skill delay your results. It takes years of dedicated mobility, technique work, and preparation to become good at the Olympic lifts, and to put it bluntly we’re just not interested in being that place. Ain’t nobody got time to do ten workouts with a PVC pipe. We think we can better serve you elsewhere, and more quickly. If a unique specialization is your training goal, by all means we suggest you pursue it but we’re honest enough to tell you that you’re best served by soliciting the help of a specialized facility.

We know our lane, the value it holds, and most importantly the value of staying in it.

#7. Minimum Effective Dose
Our workouts are not built like most places which makes training here everyday indisputably not necessary to get results. In fact, our staff actively discourages daily attendance in plenty of one on one talks because each workout here is designed to hit heavy. We’re free of sandwich filler, like how Subway gives you very little meat and all toppings, the fitness provider equivalent of that is to make you hop around the room simply to fulfill a promise of 600 calories, 45 minutes, or turning your heart rate orange.

We’re the reverse. Double up on the turkey, hold the lettuce, and pile on the bacon. The average total time spent actually training at Performance360 in a class: 33 minutes. Instead of filling your sandwich with a bunch of green peppers and the mirage of a long, effective workout, we’d rather stuff those 1,980 seconds chock full of loaded, compound, total body movements that drive big endocrine and metabolic response.

Building muscle and strength > insane heart rate readings.

In the world of medicine, researches always try to determine the least amount of medicine needed to cause the greatest amount of change. This concept is called the Minimum Effective Dose principle, and it’s one we believe in wholeheartedly. Our result is a program that you simply shouldn’t don’t need to attend daily.

#8. Move Like a Human
The sagittal plane is where the magic happens, but the frontal and transverse plane are where the magic is honed. After all, the spine rotates. Did you know that? If you’re always moving with two legs at the same time, up and down, forward and back, then your body is going to plateau pretty quickly. Not only does moving in a variety of planes help you get stronger, but they are actually in support of your desire to hit big lifts, not at odds with them. By training the smaller stabilizers that the sagittal plane fails to, you’re able to stay healthier and be stronger for longer.

Here’s a great example: The back squat is excellent for developing the glute maximus, but pretty shitty at developing the glute medius. An undertrained glute medius will cause your knees to chronically invert on a squat which will create unnecessary stress on your low back. Why not instead just not let that happen? Lateral movement like side lunges, lateral step ups are excellent at hitting the glute medius. This is why we include a metric shit ton of unilateral and multi-plane movements in our database, performed with a wide array of tools.

#9. Conditioning Balance
Want to get great initial results and then completely stop altogether? Do an intense workout of the same duration all the time. Your body is not dumb and it quickly will realize that it doesn’t need to work any harder in order to keep up with the demands. That is adaptation halting, and that’s precisely what a plateau is. We make sure to vary our conditioning efforts between highly intense, short and fast efforts. And slower, lower intensity jams. Just like your Tinder dates. The result is a well balanced aerobic and anaerobic system that can do what you need it to, whenever you need it.

#10. Eat Like a Grown Up
Forget “abs are made in the kitchen.” Abs are overrated. Try, “fat loss and muscle growth are made in the kitchen.” Actually. Try, “health is made in the kitchen.” That’s true and it’s a winning concept for all to understand. You can hammer yourself with intensity all week but if your idea of nutrition is to “avoid bread” or call a 6 ounce Yoplait “breakfast” then you’re never going to get results. Ever.

Think about your training like this. It’s the coach who sets the ball on the tee for the little leaguer. You are the little leaguer and your bat is your nutrition habits. Only when you take the swing and connect the two does anything really happen. There is only so much little Timmy’s little league coach can do if little Timmy keeps crushing tots and mules four times a week swinging and missing. This is why we go so hard in the paint on opportunities to provide endless nutrition resources.

As your nutrition goes, so go your results. Invest in and use your kitchen. Be a grown up. It’s not about strict adherence to a fad. Grown ups drink wine, after all. It’s about mature, sensible nutrition that supports a healthy lifestyle.

To recap our 10 guiding principles.

  1. We’re a Gym
  2. 4-Way Strength
  3. Reps for Goal
  4. Calories Burned
  5. Principles Over Variety
  6. Avoid Complexity
  7. Minimum Effective Dose
  8. Move Like a Human
  9. Conditioning Balance
  10. Eat Like a Grown Up

Well, that’s a wrap, folks. Thanks for stopping by the blog today and learning a little more about what is we do at Performance360, and why. If this seemed like a sales pitch, well. It absolutely was. We believe in what we provide here very much and we don’t care who knows it.