Roughly five years ago, the fitness industry was abuzz with the prospective release of a new meal replacement product called Soylent.
The new Soylent - which got its name from the 1973 film “Soylent Green” in which a revolutionary food replacement, it turns out in a twist ending, is actually made from humans - was not meant to be your typical on-the-go option like a Cliff Bar or protein shake.
Nope. Soylent was meant to fully replace all the macro and micronutrients supplied by typical meals. It wasn’t designed to tide you over until your next meal. It was designed to be the meal itself.
No longer would you have to go grocery shopping or slave over a stove.
Its odd choice of name origin aside, Soylent had the massive aspiration to change the way we approached nutrition.
No more preparation. No more tracking. No more guessing.
Just eat 3 portions per day and your nutrition was covered and optimized.
And Soylent aimed to not only solve the problems of the individual, it aimed to solve the problems of the planet. Claiming to be a much more sustainable and energy efficient way of creating enough food to feed the population with a fraction of the waste and ecological downside.
So, what happened?
If you are reading this there is a good chance that you’ve never heard of Soylent and even less of a chance that you replaced every meal you’ve eaten with it.
Because while Soylent ticks off a lot of the logical boxes - cheap, efficient, convenient, planet-friendly - it ignores a number of factors that play a big role in why and how people eat.
The meal-in-a–cup solution doesn’t take into account that people use food and meals for social reasons. To spend time with family or friends or go on dates.
Some people enjoy cooking. Nearly everyone enjoys having access to a variety of different cuisines. Eating a perfectly lab-formulated nutrient bomb actually tends to freak most people out.
If you look at food trends in the past decade or so you’ll actually notice that many, many people have run away from the notion of efficiency and convenience when it comes to making meals.
Sure, pre-packaged foods and fast serve restaurants still have their place, but when I was a kid the notion of traveling to a farmer’s market to buy your groceries just wasn’t in the public consciousness. Organic anything was reserved for health food stores and hippies. Cooking blogs, restaurant influencers and 24-hour Food Networks simply didn’t exist. There was no place for a regular consumer to buy a high-end sous vide pot.
It isn’t logical or efficient to chase down $200 per ounce saffron or set an alarm in order to call for reservations at a high-end restaurant the moment they become available or invest 2 hours every Monday night attending a “how to make the perfect pasta” class. Yet those things are more popular than ever.
Conversely, people are also more logical about food. Tracking calories and macro-nutrients, employing tactics such as keto or intermittent fasting, becoming educated about and resisting food dyes and high fructose corn syrup are all actions that prove that consumers are systematically and rationally considering how their nutritional intake will best serve them.
Training is no different.
When I first stepped in the gym there was one universally accepted training parameter: three sets of ten reps. We bench pressed every session. Why back squat when you could do perfectly good quarter reps on a leg press?
Of course training knowledge has grown and proliferated a lot since then. And many people have taken a much more logical approach to training.
Yet, at exactly the same time, influencers and sensationalism and biohacking have also led to more nonsense than ever before. People do some crazy shit in order to avoid the pain and shortcut the process.
A great training program relies on splitting the difference between these two notions.
Performing five sets of five reps and increasing your weights systematically week over week will yield great results for most people over the course of months and sometimes years. However most people don’t have the mental fortitude to bear the boring repetition that comes with training that way.
On the other hand, creative exercise selection and unproven protocols may make every trip to the gym feel like a novel adventure, but it won’t make you any better at training or yield the results you are looking for.
We learned long ago - and, to toot our own horn, before many other facilities - that the answer actually lies in the middle. Our processes and programs have to follow the basic rules of exercise science in order to deliver good training outcomes and keep you safe.
They also have to be interesting and psychologically engaging because, quite honestly, a great training program is meaningless if people are bored and stop coming to the gym.
I always say our greatest accomplishment has been creating a wonderful training community of like-minded people who all value fitness. And I stick by that.
But perhaps coming in a close second has been our ability to develop training programs that are also strategic and tactical and stimulate your mind as well as your body.
It’s the right cross-section of logic and desire. It’s the secret sauce. It’s what will have you coming back and excited for more.
And, unlike Soylent, it’s what everyone in the training industry will be talking about five years from now.