Poor educators and educational frameworks tend to place a much higher priority on content than on processes and principles. Without a doubt, content is important. But when content becomes the sole focus and there is no training in how to learn, to think independently, to investigate, aggregate, and create, content is mostly worthless. Knowing and being able to regurgitate the steps in the Krebs Cycle, for example, is great; but knowing how to apply this information, how to extrapolate from it, how to further investigate its importance in larger biological processes, etc. is far more valuable.

There’s an unsurprisingly high degree of carry-over between school education and our strength and conditioning practice. Our content is essential: it is our educational material and our medium for teaching and pursuing excellence. But it’s also only a fraction of the picture, and in my mind, it’s mostly useless without the processes and principles that underlie the whole thing. Being able to move well during a heavy squat, run fast, and move for an extended period of time are our storefront goals and our metrics; but if you come away from this gym without an increased understanding of the process of self-improvement, the principles of being a growth-minded person, and the willingness to commit to the process of trying, failing, learning, and growing, then I say our effort was minimally successful at best.

Our content is our learning material for these bigger ideas, and it should be no surprise that its our development of these processes and principles that drives our continued improvement in the content, too. I call that a win-win.