By the early 2000s it was already trendy to make fun of Hootie and The Blowfish.
Just half a decade earlier they had sold roughly 3 trillion copies of their debut album “Cracked Rear View”. But when their follow-up album only sold roughly 1 trillion copies and the rock music world slowly turned from their feel-good harmony driven pop to the garage-blues sounds of The Strokes and The White Stripes, we quickly found ourselves wondering how we could have ever loved Hootie in the first place.
What people who still walk around in faded Nirvana shirts still fail to remember is that the rise of Hootie came as a direct reaction to five years of Grunge that preceded them. Sure, we all loved growing our hair so it hung below our eyes, buying crappy pawnshop vintage guitars and playing them while we stood on stage staring at our shoes and singing about how fucked everything is.
Ultimately, we needed a break from all that. And Hootie, with their songs about only wanting to be with you and holding your hand played on acoustic guitars with smiley drummers named Sonny while wearing J. Crew’s finest was the anecdote we all asked for.
Recently, the American Academy of Sports Medicine (one of the five or so main educational bodies within the field of strength and conditioning) released a huge meta-analysis that concluded that most of the things fitness people argue about don’t matter nearly as much as we think. What matters is showing up consistently.
Barbells or machines? Doesn’t matter.
Organizing training so more complex tasks come earlier in the sessions? Doesn’t matter.
Working on specific strength qualities and energy systems for certain periods of time rather than training randomly and chaotically? Doesn’t matter.
At least, that was the interpretation.
Kyle has made several videos on this topic and the reactions have been, how do I put this gently, varied.
Some people, particularly those who are new to training and don’t have posters of Frank Zane hanging up in their bedroom, love the simplicity of the message.
There is such a wealth of often conflicting information as to what makes for good training that the idea that all you need to do is show up and spend some hours in the gym each week is very refreshing.
For those of us who have spent hours reading Mel Siff’s “Super Training”, have given up many weekends to attend seminars on optimizing fast-twitch muscle fibers and have made a living dissecting the minutia for athletes and clients, well, we are slightly less receptive to these findings.
So what I want to do here is give you a different view that lands at what I believe is the proper balance. What is this study really trying to tell us and what is truly important when it comes to training.
Let me answer the main question first. Is consistency the most important factor when it comes to training outcomes?
It’s hard to argue that it isn’t.
I can design a beautiful program that is the perfect combination of volume and intensity, targets all the major muscle groups and movement patterns and improves power, increases muscle mass and promotes injury resistance.
If you do that program twice per month you aren’t going to get much out of it.
Conversely, if your program isn’t great but you show up consistently and train with focus and effort will you see measurable (if perhaps not optimal) results? Almost certainly.
But don’t ignore the details here. Consistency only works if you show up and train with focus and intensity.
What do I mean here? Your time in the gym needs to be spent training, not socializing or hogging the peck deck with your nose buried in Instagram.
If you are weight training, the sets need to be taken close to failure (typically within 5 reps) and need to be challenging.
So, yes, nothing good will happen if you don’t walk through those gym doors. Those are the table stakes. But showing up isn’t enough. You have to engage with focus and intensity.
Does it matter whether you use machines or free weights? Dumbbells or kettlebells? Selectorized stacks or plate loaded equipment?
No. Not that much.
Muscles are relatively simple. They contract and expand. Flex and extend. As long as they are performing those actions under tension, where that tension comes from isn’t wildly important.
However for skill development or athletic carryover, the type of equipment you utilize becomes more critical. For example, if you want to compete in Olympic Weightlifting or are even just curious about performing exercises such as the snatch, you are going to need to train with a barbell. But if your goals are just bigger quadriceps does a barbell squat matter much more than a plate-loaded leg press or a selectorized leg extension? No.
Does following a structured, progressive, thoughtful program really matter or does chaotic training (as long as it’s done with focus and intensity) yield the same result?
This is where you need to bring a bit of nuance into the conversation.
Programs make sure that your training is balanced, deliver the outcomes you are looking for and make you more injury-resistant. They also bring a lot of engagement to your training. People actually respond really well to constraints and knowing that your training has a structure and destination will make it much more likely to engage with it. Which will lead to greater consistency.
Many people, left to their own devices, will just do what they like rather than what they need. Which will lead to less than ideal outcomes at best and injuries at worst. A good example is our client Pat who loves to bench press and during Covid, when he was training on his own, decided he was going to bench press every day.
This led to his legs getting weaker, his bench progress stalling and developing a nagging shoulder injury that still plagues him to this day.
So, sure, if you randomly walk around the gym and intuitively decide what you are going to do that day you can still make good progress? As long as those “random” decisions lead you to training all the major muscle groups, progressing weights and intensity over time, staying interested in training and not blowing yourself up the answer is yes.
Which really means the answer is no.
Last two things that I will say are still important even in the presence of everything we’ve mentioned above.
The first is specificity. If you want to get better at something, you should train that thing. You will not become a better runner or squatter or boxer without engaging in those activities. Other exercises can support those activities, but they are not a substitute for them.
Secondly, progressive overload (the act of making things more difficult over time) does still play a major role in training. Your body is a very adaptive organism. You need to give it new and more challenging things to adapt to if you want it to change over time.
Sick of the constant criticism, Darius Rucker, the lead singer of Hootie and The Blowfish, left the band for nearly two decades to pursue a more “serious” career as a country artist.
And it worked! He sold millions of albums, won numerous awards and still packed stadiums.
But, along the way, it seems like he didn’t have to throw out the baby with the bath water. Once the criticism calmed down and the nostalgia kicked in he decided to reunite with Hootie and The Blowfish. And nearly two decades after they were the punchline of the joke they’ve returned to performing at sold out Summer tours.
Right now, fitness is in its Hootie phase. Pushing back against years of overcomplication.
And that’s a good thing.
But eventually, like music, it finds its balance.
The people who get the best results won’t be the ones chasing perfect programs or ignoring them entirely.
They’ll be the ones who show up, train hard, and do just enough of the right things to keep moving forward.