On Standards
“What are good standards for fitness?” It might be the most common question I get.
On the surface, it seems straightforward. As a fitness professional and a former competitive athlete across multiple domains—from endurance to strength and everything in between—I should have an easy answer. But asking this question reveals not only a misunderstanding by the person asking, but a deep, unspoken problem within the fitness industry.
First and foremost, the question assumes you can prove your character through a series of exercises or tasks. Let’s explore that. We usually look to the old standbys to measure strength: a 2x bodyweight deadlift, a 1.5x bodyweight squat, and a 1x bodyweight bench press. I concede that anyone hitting these numbers probably understands how to brace themselves and lift weights. If there were discrepancies, the typical answer would be to design exercises for those patterns and loads, creating challenges derived from the ratios of world-class performers in those specific areas.
Next, we might want aerobic standards. We throw out a 1.5-mile run, a 2km row, or maybe a 60-minute bike time trial of 16km. Pushing to the top end, I might demand a 500m row or ski. If we want to measure how someone handles their own body weight, we ask for 100 burpees for time, looking for sub-five minutes. Or, to measure capability against gravity, I might require a test of 2,000 vertical feet per hour.
These are all great tests for specific objectives. However, they become a checklist for people who want to avoid questioning their own capabilities. This is the inherent problem. Fitness is an “in-the-moment” problem measured against real-time reality, not your past. Our culture teaches the exact opposite. We go to school and achieve degrees, or we study under experts and earn certificates, all to show someone a piece of paper that says, “Look, I’m qualified.” But we cannot do this with fitness. Having once deadlifted 500 pounds does not make me a 500-pound deadlifter; it simply describes a state I once achieved. It offers no information about who I am today or what I can do.
People use past accomplishments as a sort of certification—a way to avoid changing their thinking or their actions because they once did something of note. This is not fitness. This is egoism.
So even though some standards are pretty clever, the biggest problem is that they compel the player to focus on achieving a measurement for external validation. This is exactly why very few people possess an intrinsic understanding of their own physicality, let alone know how to explore or enhance it. They just want to know what they should blindly aim for and this make sit hard for them to know what to aim for.
This creates a perpetual cycle. We set up standards that grant aspirational credit to those who meet them. We ignore the fact that we are all highly individual, homogenizing our concepts into a series of easily understood patterns we can display to each other. We form a club where we collectively ignore our actual needs, focusing instead on impressing others and demanding immunity from criticism because we met “the standard.”
You might recognize this as the appeal to authority hidden deeply inside everyone who attempts to improve themselves based on someone else. By wanting so badly to become an authority, we give up our own, and that is the problem. Because when you inevitably get hurt or your strength that was certified by a heavy deadlift fails to help you in another way, the person who told you that was a good measure will not be around to explain why.
Here is a wild concept many fail to realize: performance training is the act of increasing specific qualities to the detriment of others. Training for performance is a strategy, which by definition is a directing of resources towards an objective. We only have so many resources. When you get “good*” at something, you get worse at something else. That is a fine exchange for sport, but what if we want to be the most complete version of ourselves, right now, and for as long as possible?
This requires a different aim. We must forego general definitions and the acquisition of fitness “credentials.” Instead, we must find what is deficient and fix it. The true standard is to seek out insufficient ability and make it better.
This is training. This is the fitness that enhances life.
The Soviets recognized this immediately. They weaponized the concept to create the most effective training program anyone had ever seen. Their performances established new standards of athleticism for almost five decades. They were only able to do it because they understood the principle of specificity—or rather, the cost of it.
They demonstrated this through what they termed General Physical Preparedness (GPP). This is how they maintained the highest average level of physiology in their athletes before those athletes became specialists. They weren’t aiming for 2x bodyweight deadlifts or 2km rows. Instead, they constantly varied the signal to NOT set a pattern. Adapting to a rigid pattern means increasing deficiency before the athlete is actually ready. Winning was their standard; everything else was preparation.
Many methods and companies call themselves GPP fitness, but they aren’t. Doing random shit is not GPP. Achieving standards across many domains at once is not GPP. GPP is the act of ensuring that training is geared toward addressing deficits, not just increasing performance in a measurable way.
And magically, when this happens, you don’t need a standard to aim for—or the only standard that matters is that your body can do what you demand of it. You start to look inward at what you can and cannot do, and this is how you change for the better. You address the aspects that are deficient, not the ones that meet someone else’s arbitrary measurement of fitness.
On a final note, abandoning the pursuit of performance sounds like a sin against the holy dogma of the fitness industry. But how high-performing is a person who harbors very few deficiencies in any single system? Imagine a body with no compromised movement patterns, control of tissue in most ranges and especially at the end range, no single dominant energy system, and, above all, the intimate knowledge of how to fix his/her own deficiencies. Well, that person would be pretty high-performing. And that is the standard I am striving for.
