What Being In Bands Has Taught Me About Programming
posted on February 5, 2025
I only got into the coaching world maybe 15 years ago and training in general a little over 20 years ago; and no, this isn’t going to be me talking about the good old days. Before all that, I started drumming in bands at the age of 14 and I played my first show ever at 15. For me it has been a little over 25 years of writing music and today I realized how much that is like writing training programs. A lot of the music I wrote early on was awful, I didn’t really know what I was doing, some never even saw the light of day but over time and with lots of practice I wrote music with my bands that has taken me from LA to Helsinki to Auckland. So, check it out.
When I first got into punk and hardcore I had mentors, I was lucky enough to have people 5 and 6 years older than me take me under their wing and explain to me the culture of music and take me to shows. These were the people I later went on to play in bands with. In regard to my coaching career, I did the same, I found someone who had already been in the field coaching, and I learned from him. Just like my older friends taught me about the music culture, he taught me how to coach, what to read and a lot of the history of strength training.
I started interning at that coach’s gym, understanding his programs and coaching athletes through his workouts. This was the same as learning covers as a band. They aren’t your songs, but you can begin to understand what makes them good. During this time, I kept reading and expanding my knowledge much like as a drummer I kept listening to music and practicing my chops.
Eventually, it was time to go off and do my own thing and time to write my own programs. Just like some of the early music I wrote, my programs were just rip offs of ones I was already familiar with. It wasn’t quite plagiarism, but I had yet to really grasp programming and make something truly original. It is tough though, just like music and there only being so many riffs you can write, beats you can play in training there are only so many exercises and so many ways to organize them. You may not mean to copy something but when you go back and look at things you realize “damn it, I knew I recognized this from somewhere”.
As time went on with both my music and my training, I kept reading more, kept listening to more music, kept practicing and then finally it all started to come together. I started finding all the parts of music I liked; I found the drummers that inspired me and began to write original music I was proud of, and training has worked the same way. I began to find coach’s whose message resonated with me, I found training modalities that made sense to me and worked. I began to realize just like writing a song, writing programs is the same thing. It is a combination of all your inspiration and talents/knowledge that makes a program your own.
Ethan
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