Training the Human Body meets Product Design

How techies can learn from strength and conditioning coaches

This post is for young professionals ages 23–32, but others will enjoy it too! 

There are skills that work well in any professional setting. I think the best skill is listening. Not just listening to pass judgment, but listening to gain a deeper understanding and perspective from others. I am writing this post because my company lives in two worlds— fitness and product development. It’s funny how close these two worlds actually are, but listening is a dominant factor for success in both.

Below I introduce the basic concepts of Functional Movement and Human Centered Design, why they work well, and how these concepts are similar.

Functional Movement Training

Functional movement training sounds fancy, but quite simply it’s a type of training that prepares us for movements we use every day.

Functional movements are what prepare you for life. Squatting, running, jumping, throwing, pulling, picking things up, all pre-date gyms by thousands of years. They weren’t invented by anyone and they’re found everywhere. This is what our bodies were meant to do. It’s part of our DNA.?—?Crossfit, Inc

The adoption of functional movement training has exploded in recent years. One reason is that exercise science has accomplished more, thanks to technology. Another reason is that CrossFit has popularized functional movement exercises through nationally televised competitions. There’s also a good chance you live near or train at a CrossFit gym. It’s where athletes perform numerous repetitions of power cleans, pull-ups, squats, and sprinting.

CrossFit has done an amazing job getting more people to lift weights. It has raised awareness and encouraged hundreds of thousands to train their bodies. Yet, CrossFit methods are not for everyone. In fact, their competitive group approach can sometimes neglect individual’s goals or differences. People looking for individualized training can work with several types of professionals. Personal trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, athletic trainers, and physical therapists all use variations of functional movement.

To effectively prescribe functional movement training, coaches have to account for trainee’s current mobility, previous injuries, deficiencies, endurance, recovery ability, strength, and future goals. For these reasons, listening without bias is important. You may assume that someone with great mobility also has great endurance, but you can’t assume that. Every person is unique. So, trainers gather qualitative and quantitative data about their trainees.

Over time, the best trainers continuously gather insight and develop rapport. This level of service was once reserved for elite athletes, movie stars, wealthy executives, and post-injury patients. Now, thought leaders are inspiring more people to adopt functional movement methods for the masses. Moreover, affordable training equipment and biometric technologies are making sophisticated training available to more people. Altogether, coaches have more listening capability than ever.

This level of personalization is becoming the industry standard. It’s time to prepare for the exercise physiology and product design crossover.

Human Centered Design

The world is full of problems. Some problems are caused by cultural limitations. Some are caused by limited ability, tools, or resources. Others are problems that people simply don’t care enough to solve. With no clear place to start, people and organizations often let problems fester. That’s no way to live life, and Human Centered Design is a way to address and possibly eliminate roadblocks.

That’s why David Kelly and Tim Brown, executives at IDEO, started the Institute of Design at Stanford. There, Kelly and Brown codified their product development methods and challenged Stanford students to implement them against worldly problems. Now, IDEO.org has open-sourced their methods.

I highly recommend finding and using a method relevant to you, at least once, no matter what profession you’re in. https://www.designkit.org/methods

Here are three phases of their framework that can help you maintain confidence and clarity for your goals.

1. Inspiration — Identify problems for people. Understand people’s desires. Generate creative ideas.
2. Ideation — Collect thoughts and ideas. Refine the good. Toss out the bad. Build prototypes. Get input from end users. Keep iterating upon feedback.
3. Implementation — Build relationships. Polish business model. Get your solution out the door.

What is Human Centered Design — IDEO.org 

Human Centered design is a way of thinking and executing. When done properly, amazing value can be created. Without open-mindedness and organized insight, it’s tough to do. But to get started, all you need to do is listen. Then, it’s about generating ideas, keeping an open mind, getting tons of feedback, and executing toward a person’s ideal solution. By anchoring your efforts around the people you serve, your chance for success will increase.

Crossover

So what’s the biggest crossover between fitness and product development? We think listening is not only universal — it’s essential for success.

Effective functional movement trainers understand the variables that impact their trainees. The difference between success and mediocrity is simple. The best at any profession embrace reciprocal communication. They experiment and look for feedback. Then they rinse and repeat until they outperform their client’s expectations.

My strength coaches have regarded Mike Boyle as one of the best at this. He is known for methodical experimentation with athletes. Here’s an example of Coach Boyle demonstrating an exercise he’s implemented after years of experimentation.

VIDEO: Mike Boyle  

In a similar fashion to Mike Boyle, the most innovative product designers the world has every known experiment with solutions through an iterative process until they achieve the results they want.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Jony Ive, James Dyson are names known for changing the way we live our daily lives, because of their thoughtful product designs. Every choice they make for products is the result of rigorous testing. Through their processes, they listen for cues that indicate opportunities to delight people who engage with their products.

Visionary Product Designers

Strengthen

Long before launching Strengthen, we gathered insight into the exercise physiology world. Tyler played football in high school and has lifted weights off and on since. I’ve trained with my sports performance coaches since 2003. But in April 2015, when we contemplated forming a team to improve the way people train, we made it a point to dig deep. We spent several months interviewing coaches, experimenting with mock products, and scouring online fitness message boards.

What we found was that most coaches spend 2–3 hours a week manually keying workout data. In addition, coaches struggle to engage their trainees, yet they aren’t leveraging the power of smartphones. Now we’ve come up with a way for fitness professionals and trainees to create workouts, schedule routines, track their progress, and analyze results across all their devices in real-time.

Understanding our Users

We admire the best professionals in the fitness and product development world, because they exhibit dedication to their clients and users. They do what the average won’t. They care enough to listen for details that make each person unique. Then they exceed our expectations.

They change lives!

If you see the coming changes in the health and wellness industry, join us at Strengthen.io. We’d love to hear from you!

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Thank you, Clifford Chirwa for correcting my grammar!

Thank you, David Allan for asking me hard questions about this post! I was stubborn about some of it, but it helped me clarify some things!

Thank you, Max Farrell  for helping me tweak a few things!

And my biggest thank you goes to Kathryn Gadberry, for putting up with my antics.