Yesterday I was recording an episode of SOFLETE’s Die Living Podcast. The guys at SOFLETE have been friends of mine for many years and it’s been a ton of fun watching them expand and do more and more awesome stuff, and it was a pleasure to be on the podcast.

At one point we got to talking about coaching and the contrast of a coach who gives six or eight things to work on at once versus those who work on one specific thing until it’s fixed before moving on to the next issue. You can probably guess who gets better results.

The same principle applies outside of coaching however, directly to self-driven improvement.

It makes me think of the Roomba, you know the little plastic manhole cover that bumbles around a room vacuuming it completely automatically?

Basically the way that a Roomba cleans is by going as far as it can in one direction before it bumps into a wall, then turns away and heads off in another direction until it can’t go anymore. Given a bit a time, it covers the whole room with this sort of random walk.

And this happens to be a great strategy for improvement in one, or many domains. Focus on one thing and go as far as you can with it before encountering immovable resistance. You’ll get much better at the thing you focus on, and because of the magic of human learning and adaptation you’ll also get a little bit better at peripheral things as well. Your whole sphere of capability expands a little tiny bit, and a lot in one direction. Then change direction and focus on something else for a little while until the same thing happens again.

With physical training this looks like block periodization where you might have a hypertrophy block that you take as far as you possibly can, before switching to a strength block for another period of time, before switching to a power block until you take that as far as it’ll go.

In general it might look like working on your physical training for a while, then focusing most of your time and attention on learning a musical instrument while putting training on maintenance mode, and then when you run out of steam there learning how to weld.

Focusing your efforts on one at a time will yield you much more than trying to juggle all three or more at once.

One question I hear a lot, some might even call it a criticism depending on the context, is why I lean so heavily on old school movements instead of what is popular and mainstream. It’s a good question and to understand the answer you have to go back and question some of the assumptions along the way.

The first assumption to examine is one that is very logical – that the most safe and effective exercises would be the ones that would stand the test of time and would be the ones we’d focus now. Another way of looking at it would be that the unsafe, ineffective, inefficient, or superfluous movements would get dropped along the way. The reality is that exercises get dropped, but not for any reason that has to do with how good they are for you to do at all. A classic example of this that most people are blissfully unaware of is that the original Olympic lifts are not the snatch and clean and jerk as they are performed today. In fact, those two lifts have only been contested since 1972. The original Olympic lifts are the one-hand snatch, the one-hand clean and jerk, and the two-hands clean and jerk.

These one-hand power lifts are absolutely fantastic for building total body coordination, power, balance, and strength. To get into specifically why is beyond the scope of this article, but I’d also argue that they’re in many ways safer than their bilateral counterparts. And you don’t have to use as much absolute load to get the same training effect. You know why they were dropped from competition? Because contests took too long with competitors having to do both hands. Once they were dropped from contests, they naturally fell out popularity with everyone else. Plus, there’s an argument to be made that in the 60’s when bodybuilding really started to become popular these exercises that required tremendous strength but not necessarily muscular size fell out of favor.

In the same way a whole host of movements and exercises that are great for the individual have fallen out popular usage for reasons wholly unrelated to how good they are on an individual level.

The next assumption is that there is a best or perfect way to do exercises and this has been codified and disseminated and you can compare what you’re doing to the textbook and know if it’s correct or not. The result is that if you do a conventional deadlift it’s very likely that every asshole in the gym has an opinion on whether or not you’re doing it correctly and is likely to share it.

On the other hand, if you do a Jefferson deadlift they will assume you are doing a deadlift so far from correctly that they won’t bother to try to correct you.

But one of the things that I hope people take away from what I teach is that there really is no empirically correct way to do any movement. Every individual is different and your movement reflects that. Sure there can be generalities and common things that are usually true, but not always. With old school movements there is often more of a context for variability because no one really has an idea of what ideal should look like. Everyone I’ve ever seen bent press does it a little differently and none of them are wrong. This also ties into movements that have been bastardized over the years to make them easier to judge in competition, and those rules bleed into the form recommendations whether they’re good or not.

Listen, there are plenty of movements that have been forgotten for good reason. I’m not planning to bring back chest expanders any time soon. But if an “old school” movement is safe, effective, and it imposes stresses in the right places to achieve the training effect I’m looking for you can bet I’m going to use it and teach it.