2 Reasons Why Group Fitness is Inferior (and 1 Reason Why They Don’t Matter)

Let’s get down to brass tacks. There are two main ways to engage in physical fitness. There’s individualized training and there is group training (which includes digital expressions of a group). The reason for this discussion is to address the great debate that is brewing between two camps. 

Here are three reasons that group training is inferior:

1. The program isn’t custom to you. It’s specifically written for a population of people, which by definition can’t be exactly specific to your needs. After all, we’re all different right? How could a group program address your strengths and weaknesses when those are (mostly) unique to you?
2. You’re not the sole focus of the trainer. The best training experience would require a coach focusing on you and only you, right? Having one coach with eyes only on you would mean that you’ll make less mistakes and be taken care of more. 

This isn’t a satirical article. The aforementioned two reasons are facts. A program written for you would have a more specific impact. And, if a trainer had only one student, the focus of the trainer is not diluted. 

That said, here’s the one reason why these facts don’t matter:

1. The margin of inferiority of group training is absorbed completely by the goals of the student. Said differently, a custom individualized program will perform better than a group training program but only after a student has enjoyed the adaptations available from general programming to the tune of more than 90% of their human potential. Furthermore, achieving 90% of one’s human capacity would assume all of the goals I’ve ever heard students and clients proclaim to me as a coach. 

This is the reason your favorite team sport NBA, NFL, and MLB athletes follow a team program (and they are generally fitter than everyone reading this sentence.) Also, training doesn’t deserve to be placed on a pedestal as to be so precious that you need a trainer doing nothing but looking at you to benefit from classic effective movement patterns. A competent coach can put a group of twelve people in an environment to achieve an appropriate training stimulus in the same way that 16-Michilin-Starred Chef Gordon Ramsay’s food doesn’t taste better if you hire him to cook for you and only you in your home versus eating amongst other patrons in one of his restaurants.

That said, for twenty times the cost, you can choose individual training if you’d like.