What if You Don't Have a Fitness Problem? the FIT Facility

…Maybe You Have an Athleticism Problem

One of my favorite things to do when my wife, Sam, and I travel is drop into another gym. Some coaches do it because they don’t have anything of their own, other than a passion for fitness and heavily rely on the work other people have done, to in turn improve their product. Others do it hoping to validate their own biases, that their system is superior and everyone else is “wrong”. Of course there’s some that never leave their hometowns and more or less stay the exact same the duration of their careers. Nothing like being a coach for 20 years but still being on “year 1”. I find that the best way to be would be like Bruce Lee: absorb what is useful, discard what is not. If someone else has solved a problem better than I have, I want to know about it. Of course, without the prerequisite knowledge of the: who, what, why, etc. it would be very hard to discern what is actually useful and what is just a shiny new object.

So with that being said, here’s my candid thoughts on our trip and experience.

The facility was minimal but nice, what you’d expect from a retail storefront on the beltline. The amenities were excellent. Each bathroom had its own private shower, a detail that immediately made me think about the tradeoff between customer experience and operational complexity. 5 showers are wonderful for members. They're also 5 showers someone has to clean, maintain, stock, and eventually repair. Every business decision carries an invisible price tag. Good operators notice both sides. Additionally, for a 25 person class, does a facility really need 5 (1/5th the class size) showers? I doubt it.

The workout itself was enjoyable. Their coach gave clear instruction at the being of the session and was professional.

What continues to stand out to me—and this isn't directed at gym we went to at all because we've experienced it almost everywhere we've traveled—is that Sam and I have yet to walk into a facility where the coaching itself left us thinking, "Wow...that coach was exceptional." We've met plenty of excellent instructors. They explain the workout, demonstrate the movements, start the music, keep everyone on schedule, generate energy, and motivate people to work hard. Those are valuable skills, and running a quality class absolutely requires them.

But instruction and coaching are not the same profession.

An instructor manages the workout. A coach manages the athlete.

A coach notices that your left hip isn't producing force the same way your right one is. They recognize when today's limitation isn't strength but confidence.

They know when to progress an exercise, when to regress it, and—more importantly—why. They understand movement well enough to solve problems instead of simply identifying them. They aren't just delivering a program; they're constantly adapting that program to the person standing in front of them.

That's a much rarer skill than the industry likes to admit.

It's also one of the reasons I believe coaching expertise has become one of the most undervalued commodities in modern fitness. Boutique gyms compete over lighting, branding, playlists, recovery rooms, cold plunges, and social media aesthetics because those things are easy to market. Coaching is much harder to market because most people don't know what elite coaching looks like until they've actually experienced it. It's a bit like great officiating in sports—you rarely notice it when it's excellent, but you certainly notice when it's missing.

Ironically, I left the class appreciating the programming/business more than I appreciated the coaching. That's not a criticism of any one coach. It's an observation about the industry as a whole. Truly great coaches are extraordinarily rare, and I think most people have simply accepted instruction as though it were coaching because they've never been exposed to the difference.

One thing I particularly liked was how they organized portions of the workout. Rather than rotating stations every interval, participants stayed at one movement for six consecutive work bouts before moving on. It simplified the experience, reduced confusion, and allowed people to settle into the movement instead of spending half the workout figuring out where to stand next. That's an idea worth stealing. From a practical standpoint 6 stations of the same movement will induce local fatigue, switching stations after 1 set does solve this issue, however shorter rest don’t allow athletes enough time to go from station to station in larger facilities.

But what interested me most had nothing to do with their programming …total side note… programming is largely dictated by logistics, facility size, athlete experience and equipment, etc. Lots of facilities are limited by those constraints. So something to be mindful is this…since facilities only program certain ways because of those constraints, you can see pretty clearly my earlier criticism of coaches that don’t have a true north and how’d they’d be subject to the next new thing.

Back to what I thought was interesting… About halfway through the workout, I realized that neither Sam nor I had ever performed this session before. We didn't know the flow, obvious social anxiety when going to new places/gyms/etc, the coaching cues, or the rhythm of the class. Yet neither of us struggled to keep pace. More interestingly, this wasn't unusual. We've had the same experience in nearly every gym we've visited over the years, regardless of the training style.

As I thought about it later, another realization surfaced.

I've watched our members do exactly the same thing.

Not former collegiate athletes. Not people blessed with extraordinary genetics (sorry y’all, haha). I'm talking about accountants, nurses, teachers, engineers, parents, ,lawyers, retirees—people who often begin training by apologizing for how "unathletic, or out of shape” they are. If they’ve spent even just a few months in our Total Fitness Program, I’d be shocked if they couldn’t adapt, learn quickly, move confidently in new situations or while dropping in to gyms on vacation. I’d be shocked if they didn’t look like people who belong there.

These observations over the years solidifies what I’ve suspected about the fitness industry for over a decade.

What if we don't actually have a fitness problem?

Think about how often people say they "want to get fit." It sounds obvious until you ask what fitness actually means. Exercise scientists have to define the term every time they publish research because "fitness" changes depending on the task. Soccer fitness isn't football fitness. Marathon fitness isn't powerlifting fitness.

Yet most people use the word as though it has one universal meaning.

When someone says they want to "get FIT," what they usually mean is: lose fat, put on muscle (get toned), increase strength and aerobic capacity and look/move/feel athletic again. They won’t specific say all of those things, but if one wanted to increase fitness, 9/10x that’s what they mean in some capacity. All worthy while goals.

I believe we've mistaken fitness for athleticism.

Modern fitness has become remarkably good at producing specialists.

Athleticism is something else entirely.

Somewhere along the way, we quietly accepted the idea that athleticism is a gift. You either have it or you don't. It's discussed almost like eye color or height, an immutable characteristic distributed by genetics at birth. Children who move well are called natural athletes. Adults who don't are told they're simply "not athletic," and they have to live the rest of their life as a NARP (non athletic regular person).

I’ve been coaching my entire professional life, I don’t believe that.

Genetics establish a ceiling. They influence how high someone may ultimately climb. They do not determine whether someone climbs at all.

I've watched too many ordinary people become extraordinary movers to accept the myth that athleticism is fixed. Frankly I’ve watched/coached kids that normally wouldn’t get offers to go play college ball, become highly recruited athletes.

The word itself has been hijacked. Most people equate athleticism with elite performance—running a 4.4 forty-yard dash, dunking a basketball, or throwing a ninety-five mile-per-hour fastball. Those are extraordinary expressions of athleticism, but they are not its definition.

Athleticism, at its root, is adaptability. It’s the manifestation of one’s physical IQ.

It is the ability of the nervous system to organize movement efficiently when confronted with a problem it has never seen before. It is balance without conscious thought. Coordination without hesitation. Force produced in the right direction at the right moment. It is learning new movement patterns quickly because your body has accumulated a rich vocabulary of previous experiences from which it can borrow.

In biology, life itself is defined by adaptation. Species survive not because they are the strongest, but because they can adjust to changing environments. Human movement obeys the same principle. The person with the greatest number of movement solutions is often the person who appears most athletic, even if they possess no extraordinary physical gifts.

Viewed through that lens, much of modern fitness begins to look strangely incomplete.

If every workout occurs in the same plane of motion, under the same constraints, with the same demands, should we really be surprised when people become highly competent inside that narrow environment yet uncomfortable outside of it? The body always adapts, but it adapts specifically to the problems we repeatedly ask it to solve.

At The FIT Facility, I spent years asking different questions.

Can adults become more powerful instead of simply more fatigued?

Can they learn to decelerate as well as accelerate?

Can they move confidently sideways and rotationally rather than only forward and backward?

Can they become stronger while simultaneously becoming more coordinated?

Can a sixty year-old improve their athleticism, not merely preserve what remains of it?

Those questions have quietly shaped everything we do.

The irony is that our members rarely describe their progress using technical language. They don't walk into the gym talking about motor learning or multi-planar force production. Instead, they say something far simpler.

"Everything else feels easier."

They carry groceries differently. They climb stairs differently. They recover from missteps before they become falls. They pick up new recreational activities without feeling intimidated. They chase grandchildren, play weekend sports, or walk into another fitness class with a confidence that wasn't there before.

All of which are evidence of a nervous system that has become more adaptable.

Perhaps that's the real purpose of training.

Not to become exceptionally good at exercising.

Not to collect another workout.

But to become the sort of person whose body can meet unfamiliar physical challenges with competence.

The fitness industry has spent decades selling people workouts. You don’t have to look hard to find a boutique gym in a retail store with a part time instructor giving minimal coaching but excellent vibes.

I really hope what most people have been searching for all along is something much more valuable.

I do realize they don't want to become experts at the gym (I know this because most can’t remember the names of exercises :)

They want to become capable in life.

The fitness industry been asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking...

"How do I get fitter?" Because that’s very specific to the task at which you want to perform.

We should be asking...

"How do I become more athletic?" …And the desired outcome of being “FITTER” follows.

Because one question changes how you perform inside the gym.

The other changes how you move through the rest of your life.

I think that's the problem worth solving.