My Uncle Isaac is not dead.
I feel the need to start there because, often, when I tell a story about a family member, they have passed.
But even though my Uncle is in his mid-80s, as I write this he is alive and does paint-by-numbers in his home in Long Island and goes out dancing with my Aunt Miriam once per week.
I know, it’s all very sweet.
I was recently thinking about where my love and obsession with storytelling all began and I think it may have started with my Uncle.
He had rightfully gained the reputation as someone who really knew how to tell a story and I have early memories of him talking about his wild childhood adventures while he sat on a couch and my brother and cousins gathered at his feet.
It was an interesting paradox. I, in no way, wanted attention as a child. But I was captivated by the power being a good storyteller could possess.
This has slowly but very prominently worked its way into my daily work.
My staff can attest to how I will often start meetings with a story as they wait patiently for me to slowly get to my point.
These very blogs are filled with stories of my childhood or recent events or, yes, dead relatives. If I just stuck to reps and sets and protein intake and the Krebs Cycle you all would have, rightfully, unsubscribed years ago.
A less obvious place where story plays an important role is in our training programs.
When Kyle and I design the program you might think we instantly default into meathead mode. And while we do put a lot of emphasis into exercise selection and strength qualities and energy systems and bench angles and everything else that awaits our clients when they step through the door, we start every program by discussing its story.
We have limited equipment in our gym and we stick to what some would argue is a relatively narrow selection of exercises. This could be seen as a limitation but we’d argue it’s actually what allows us to drive the best results.
But in order to keep people engaged and, most importantly, keep people coming back, the training has to be psychologically engaging and be anchored in a story about what it is, where it is going and what it can deliver.
We typically start by looking at the previous program. What would physiologically make sense coming off of what we’ve just done.
Equally important is to assess the needs of the community. What did we see in the previous program that needs to be addressed.
This starts to shape the narrative. To paraphrase the title of one of my favorite short stories by the great writer (and fellow Syracuse alum!) Joyce Carol Oates, we take a look at where you are going and where you have been.
Now that we have a destination and what we need, we next take a look at what will get us there. What are the movements that will help us accomplish these outcomes? How do we structure them in a way that adheres to the basic principles of exercise science?
Next comes the system of scoring. How can we turn this into a game that has a scorecard, whether that’s reps or weights or paces or something else, that can be referred to and beaten week over week?
As Bruce Springsteen once said, it’s hard to write a bad song if you have a great title. So after all the details are laid out we name each program in a way that ideally expresses its intent in just a few short words.
And after all of that is done and the little training details and week-over-week progressions are laid out we actually create a written story about what the program is designed to deliver and how each section intends to deliver it. This goes beyond the numbers and delivers something much more important - why we are asking you to do what we are asking you to do.
When we are at our highest and best, we’ll create an accompanying video that explains the purpose and intention and expectations for the next four weeks.
While this may sound like one of those NBC crime dramas that my wife likes to binge watch on Peacock, we have actually had trainers from other gyms sign up for trials in order to get insight into how we do things. But even though they can steal the template, that doesn’t get to the core of why it works.
But whenever this does happen, our members and, more typically, our staff get upset. They worry that we put so much time and effort into creating the program and it's execution that someone shouldn't be able to just come in and shortcut the process.
What they fail to see is that what we goes beyond something that can be stolen. In fact, it cannot be replicated at all.
Just like my Uncle Isaac or Joyce Carol Oates or any of the great storytellers out there, it only works because those people have lived or written those stories.
And the story of our programs and our gyms and our coaches and our community, those are only ours to tell.