Program Fever: The Holiday Strain

2009 December 1

By Matt

It’s started already. Every year, The Holiday Season seems to creep back earlier and earlier. When I left the US, you could see Christmas ads starting in October. Halloween be damned! Thanksgiving gets some kind of individual respect, though you can tell that it too is being assimilated into this vague “holiday season” that seems to last about four months.

I don’t mind the holiday spirit. I do hate how it’s become so commercialized that the entirety of Q4 is given over to a continuous spree of BUY! messages. Halloween seems to kick it off, and it doesn’t really quit until New Year’s Day. Then everybody wakes up on January 1st with a hangover and a new stack of credit card bills.

And of course we have the infamous dietary speedbump that is the month of December. With a flurry of Christmas parties, oh-so-tasty foods, and a nigh-inconsiderable number of days off work (which begets heavy drinking, let’s face it), the number one complaint you’ll hear in January is how badly the diet went last month.

Combine this with the on-going tradition of the New Year’s resolution – which is always “I’m really gonna get in shape this year! Really!” – and you’ve got a perfect storm that makes the sales staff at gyms world-wide salivate with the thought of their late Christmas bonuses.

Like the predictable beasts that humans are, every year we collectively give the waiting gyms our money for memberships that will not be used past February. If you look at the numbers, something like 1% of new joins in January will still be there at the end of the year. I totally made that statistic up, but it’s still depressing.

This will be my second year living in the southern hemisphere for Christmas, and let me tell you it’s a little different when you’re used to the end-of-year festivities being a winter thing. My last Christmas was spent in 35 degree swamp heat (that’s 95 F for you ‘merkans), and while this year won’t be so bad due to change of venue, the point remains: it’s still summertime, so we can add the typical “gotta get abs for summer!” motivation on top of the extant Resolutioner behavior.

What does all this mean? Well, for starters, it’s also a good time for the Back-Scratchin’ Blog Crew to gear up for their holiday hustlin’. Thanks to the Internets, no longer are the membership consultants at local gyms the only ones that can make a few bucks off the institutionalized insecurity that Western culture relies on to exist.

People already have Program Fever. It’s in the blood, and the fitness industry won’t tell you differently because it’s not profitable. Canned programs are the kernel of “working out”, really, and everyone has The Best Program Ever – as long as they’re using it when you ask, it will be beyond reproach. Ask them a month later and the opinion may not be the same, though. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia, of course.

For those of you that don’t know, Program Fever is what I call the obsession with canned, pre-made programs that come out every so often, be it in magazine articles or when the latest Big Name Rising Star of Fitness releases a new book from Rodale Publishing.

These programs become the fad-of-the-month; people follow them religiously, recommend them to each and every person on forums, and otherwise fall over themselves to sing the praises of the new workout. Fast forward six months later and maybe 10% of the original disciples will still be talking about it, let alone still doing the thing.

I’m not even sure I can blame the fitness industry for this one, as much as I want to. This is just the Disposable Society at work, a product of collective ADD that we’ve acquired in our on-demand culture. We want everything now, with the end result being that we have so many options that we literally cannot process them all.

I shouldn’t have to remind you that this thought process is at odds with the actual results-getting quintessence of any strength-building or physique-improving process. When I bitch about Program Fever, there’s a few points I always have to hammer home:

• A canned program is just a collection of rules, which in turn force you into specific behaviors. It just happens that those behaviors (ideally, anyway) bring you closer to the goal. Think of it like a recipe. It’s not doing 3×5 with a 3/0/X tempo and 60 seconds of rest that matters – what’s important is that if you follow the recipe, you get a cake. That doesn’t mean other recipes won’t work just as well, nor does it mean that an expert chef can’t whip up the best cake you’ve ever seen without looking at anything more than the ingredients list.
• You know what’s more important than the precisely-defined workout you’re doing? Consistency. Getting your ass to the gym when you’re supposed to be there. Working hard when you get there, instead of half-assing your sets and chatting for most of the time you’re supposed to be lifting. Focusing on getting stronger, instead of doing 50 sets for your biceps and telling everyone you’re training for size – and completely failing at both. I won’t suggest that you ignore the role of a well-designed workout, but I do suggest that it matters a whole lot less than most people think. It’s the effort and consistency that matters a whole lot more, and you can’t write that down.

But that doesn’t sell, does it? I mean, I might get one good long book out of that. I say might, because even that doesn’t have the marketable hook that claims of 35 LBS OF LEAN MASS IN JUST 7 WEEKS!!!!! can bring you. Bullshit talks, man.

Instead, if you market things as innovative programs, intricate masterpieces of flowing design that only the experienced coach, holder of all things knowledge-y, can bring you – well, if you sell things as Programs rather than teaching the man to fish by explaining guidelines, hell you can sell as many books as you want. There’s an infinite number of ways to create a Program, based on the simple principles that define “What Works”.

Gurus like to exploit the variety concept to make this work; how often are you told you need a new program every 4-6 weeks? Really? That’s kinda true, but here’s the fun part: “variety” is sufficiently vague that it can be used to justify just about anything. Yeah, if you do the same program for months on end, you’re gonna stall out.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean you need to haphazardly change your whole workout routine every month, either. Here’s a dirty little secret: a well-designed program that incorporates some kind of daily or weekly periodization scheme already incorporates all the variety you need. You can make progress off that one “program” for months if not years without changing a damn thing.

But that only sells one program; why do that when you can sell twenty by just re-writing the same concepts in different ways?

If that’s your bag of chips, eat it and be merry. I just don’t see the point if you’re after results.