Optimum Performance Training

I wanted to post this after having a chat with one of our clients earlier this week. She was telling me how much she enjoys coming to our gym. She was saying how appreciative she was to have a space like this, to work hard around other people, to know that her coach is a real person that cares about her.

AI cannot and will not replace human to human relationship. As a coach, you need to lean further in to this.

The machine will provide advice, but it will never be your friend. It will never care about you in any meaningful sense. It can’t care, because it doesn’t know what caring is. It’s a machine, it’s not a human being.

—Michael

This is probably the first tester I ever designed and began giving to clients. This was back in 2010 or 2011. Of course, I did it first.

At the time, the standard for the Burpee was chest and thighs to the floor at the bottom, arms over overhead + feed off the ground and a vertical body at the top at the top.

Back in those days, we rarely used anything besides metres and time for rowing. We didn’t really use calories very much.

What I was trying to do for this design was to sort of equal it out a little bit between tall people and shorter people. I assumed the tall people might be about 3-5 seconds faster every 500 m and I assume assumed the shorter people might be 3-5 seconds faster over 15 Burpee’s. Obviously these were estimates, but that was the initial intention.

After that, I decided to keep it around once I was able to witness several people performance in person. I really liked tracking their round paces, establishing their repeatability over all 10 rounds, noticing their rowing pace throughout, etc. It was a good test. It still is a good test.

I think my best time is somewhere in the 27 minute range. I basically rowed 2:00/500m then hammered the burpees each round. Well that’s how I did it.

Many times, I shortened it to 5 rounds for certain testing scenarios, especially with more beginner clients. I don’t use this test as much anymore, but I do see others use it. Which makes me happy.

—Michael