Strength. Just Take a Sip, Friend.

At Performance360, you might be surprised to learn that when surveyed, only a minority of members listed peak strength as their primary goal when entering into a membership. However, one hundred percent of our membership actively aims to improve their strength everyday when at the gym in some capacity, defined in their own terms not by what’s on our whiteboard.

So what gives? Why do only one out of five list strength as their goal, yet everyone in class is working towards developing it? Could it be that as an industry we’ve long perpetuated a view of strength that many actually find unappealing? Until they actual experience it for themselves and realize that they do in fact want and enjoy it?

Want our gym success hack? It’s this: I want you to come into our gym and genuinely feel as though your own goals and comforts are supported on your first day, and over time, I want you to discover what your version of strength training is relative to our environment. Then, I want you to love the hell out of your process to get there.

It is not at all unlike how a cult would approach things. We want you to make the decision to drink the Kool aid. We don’t wanna pinch your nose shut and poor it down your throat only to have you spit it out.

Let me kick you the alternative scenario. Someone comes into the gym and is lead by a coach who gets in front of them and talks all about ‘clangin’ and bangin’, hardo language here, hardo language there, hardo language everywhere. Grip it and rip it. If the bar ain’t bendin’ you’re just pretendin’. No pain no gain. Look at my ripped blisters. Sign this Pukie the Clown wall. Bloody shins mean a clean bar path. Here take this bump of pre in the bathroom. Fuck off see you later have a nice day.

That’s asking people to down the bottle and how you get people to spit, not sip. And in that scenario, we would be such a failure with the foundational purpose of a gym – to get people to stay and adapt positive habit shifts. Some folks gravitate towards strength training right off the bat, most don’t. They need to be guided, not forced there. If you want to effect real change in your community then you have to let people get to strength their on their own terms.

Weak bodies don’t change, and we teach that regularly. But continuing to refine your own version of that is where the transformative magic happens. Muscles can be overloaded in a number of ways. For some, it’s four wheels on the bar. For others, it’s grinding out ten heavy goblet squats. We don’t much care how you define it. There isn’t a right or wrong strength expression. What we do care about here is you’re doing everything you can to be mindful of your own strength and the pursuit of expressing it your way.

That is our goal and that is what makes us so damn different.

Unfortunately, some fail to continue seeing it that way. Everything along that path goes great until one day, the very environment that made them successful is now one they resent because we will not homogenize ourselves towards their version of strength. A shame, but an inevitably through the wrong lens.

This year, I encourage you to just take more sips.

-Dave