Our goal in this section is to develop a conceptual framework around understanding why you write workouts.

The core concept we’re expanding upon in this section is the idea of creativity through elimination. Specifically, elimination of options. When you sit down to write a workout from scratch, there are nearly limitless combinations of movements and times and sets and reps you can utilize and the optionality is overwhelming.

By eliminating large swathes of those options, you can focus your creativity around the most effective and useful tools you have at hand to get the best workout possible. In order to achieve the most effective elimination possible, you have to ask questions.

Sometimes it’s one question, sometimes it’s a few questions, but you have to ask questions to narrow the scope of your work and allow your creativity to flourish effectively. The questions we’ll be covering here can be used individually, but are more useful when used in unison with one or more of the others. In a sense, you can use these questions to help you prioritize what goes into your workouts and what’s left out.

Here are our four questions:

• Top Down Prioritization: “What do I want to feel?”
• Bottom Up Prioritization: “What do I want to do?”
• Inside Out Prioritization: “How does this transfer to other things I might be doing?”
• Outside In Prioritization: “How does this get me closer to a specific goal?”

Now that we have the four questions laid out, let’s dive in!

-Armen, [email protected]