You know what really sucks? Vacuum cleaners (and that joke). But seriously, what sucks is busting your butt in the gym only to see little to no progress. You come in consistently to lift and do conditioning, you work on bettering your nutrition, etc., yet the fruits of your labor aren’t ripe yet. At BSP NOVA, our systems are designed to make it relatively easy to see progress month after month. How so? A handful of ways, actually:
- The 1-on-1 Assessment & Goal-Setting Session
- Personal Orientation Session
- Personalized Programming
- End of Phase Chats
- End of Block Meetings
The 1-on-1 Assessment & Goal-Setting Session
Your journey at BSP NOVA starts with a 1-on-1 Assessment & Goal-Setting Session, which involves a genuine conversation to get to know you so that we can put you in the best position to be successful. Beyond that, the session gives us a chance to learn about your medical history, past training experience, and goals for coming to BSP NOVA, before making our way through the Functional Movement Screen (FMS)—a standardized movement screen that provides us with a snapshot of your mobility, stability, and basic movements patterns, ultimately helping us to write a program that fits YOU. We finish the 1-on-1 Assessment & Goal-Setting Session with scheduling your next visit—the Personal Orientation Session.
The Personal Orientation Session
A personal orientation session is exactly what it sounds like—a chance for you to get 1-on-1 attention and be familiarized with how BSP NOVA works. You’ll learn our warm-ups, the core 4 movements (hip hinge, squat, push-up, and row), and meet the coaches and members training at that time. Like the FMS, this session also helps us to put you in the best positions to be successful in your program by removing the guess work of which exercises fit YOU the best.
But it’s not just a chance for you to learn the warm-up and core for movements. It’s also a chance for us coaches to see how you move during these movement patterns. Our goal with this session is to teach you the essentials of training at our gym, so that when you come in for day one of your program you are ready to hit the ground running.
Personalized Programming
Speaking of programs—or I guess writing of programs since I’m typing this—our programs are where we use the data we’ve gathered thus far. The data I’m talking about is your initial FMS, medical history, goals, orientation session, etc. This allows us to meet you where you are at and to give you the best program for YOU to train safely and effectively—once again, putting you in the best position to be successful.
If you have trained at BSP NOVA for more than a phase or two (a phase is one program), then you may have noticed that not every exercise changes each phase. If we changed most of the exercises each phase it would be too much. By keeping things similar—say by using goblet squats for 3 phases—it allows you to learn the movement with more efficiency so that you can train safer and with more intensity due to the skill that you develop. If we changed exercises for nothing more than variety sake, you wouldn’t have a chance to become skilled at the exercise, and all of the time spent reacting to and learning new movements means less training to elicit the adaptations that we’re after (i.e., your goals).
One thing that remains constant from phase to phase, though? Our end of phase process.
End of Phase Chat
At the end of each phase we have a process called an End of Phase Chat. On the back of each phase is an end of phase questionnaire to be filled out at the completion of a phase, and a 5-10 minute chat with one of the coaches. This is a way for us to check in and have dialogue outside of our coaching on the floor, and collect feedback on how you feel the phase went. But it also gives you consistent practice with the skill of setting goals—which truly is a skill—and helps us to modify the plan as those goals evolve over time.
If we gave you a program and never checked back in on your goals, or asked how things were going, then we’d be doing you a big disservice. After all, our goal is NOT to put people in the okay-est position to be successful, rather the best position to be successful. This means checking in frequently to make sure you’re heading in the direction you want to go over the long run, and tweaking things along the way to ensure you’re making consistent progress in getting there.
End of Block Meeting
With regards to long term progress and goals, we use what is referred to as an End of Block Meeting (a block is 4 phases of training). These can be thought of as a more comprehensive version of the end of phase chats because you are writing out goals for a larger time-frame—typically a year. Remember how we’ve been practicing the skill of goal-setting with the three preceding End of Phase Chats? All of that practice comes in handy at this point.
You can choose to strive for whatever goal you want to achieve at BSP NOVA—your goals are your goals, and we won’t ever tell you what you should focus on, because that’s not for us to decide—it’s about what YOU want to get out of your training for your life. You’re driving the car on this journey which means you can go where you want. We’ll act as your GPS and guide you along the way the best we can, but ultimately the choice of where you want to go is yours.
Beyond the surface level goals that you likely started with, this practice can lead us to take a broad view of everything it takes to have a successful transformation, things like the consistency of our training, sleep, and nutrition—but also ones that are not as obvious in the beginning, like a commitment to something purposeful, connection and support, being active outside of the gym, creating mental space, and active self-care. It’s at this time that we take a bigger view and introduce the “Where Am I At Wheel” (pictured above).
With time and practice we develop not only the skill, but also the context to set bigger goals, and create bigger transformations for ourselves.
To wrap things up, making progress is pretty darn cool and you might say it’s the bee’s knees, or maybe the bomb.com. Either way, we all hope to make progress towards our goals over time and see that the effort we continually put in is paying off. At BSP NOVA, everything we do is set up to make sure that your goal stays the goal, while also helping you to develop the skills to evolve the depth of them and keep making progress towards month after month, year after year, … putting you in the best position to be successful and transform.