The Cave: Why There’s No One Best Program

Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Streichholz -- 2021 -- 6258” / CC BY-SA 4.0

Many of the fitness questions I get sound like this:

“How many sets should I do?”

"What’s the optimal training split?”

"Dumbbell bench or barbell bench?"

All of these questions have one thing in common:They assume there’s a clear, knowable answer.

But I want to show you why that assumption is wrong - and why questions like these don’t really make sense once you understand how the human body works.

To explain, I’m going to use a simple analogy.

[Tycho] talk , http://shansov.net, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Cave Analogy

Imagine you have to walk through a cave every week.

It’s pitch black, and all you have is a box of matches, a compass, and the goal of reaching the other side.

There are lots of tunnels going in different directions. Since you only have a small match to see, you can’t look very far ahead.

At first, someone gives you simple advice that helps most people when they’re just starting out:

“Try going through one of the tunnels to the north. When you hear water, head east and stay away from any tunnels that go downhill.”

This advice works pretty well at first, and each week you can reliably reach the exit.

But after several months, you notice that some of the paths that worked before no longer do. You have to think more carefully about which tunnel to take if you want to reach the end.

As time goes on, you try different paths and learn what works best for you. You still don’t know if you’re on the fastest or easiest path— you only know you made it through.

No Perfect Tunnel

This is what makes training, and the human body, so complex.

The cave is your training. The exit is your goal.The tunnels? They’re all the choices you could make to get there.

The hard part is this: there isn’t one 'best' tunnel for everyone.The route that works best for you depends on a mix of things - like your training history, recovery ability, beliefs, weekly schedule, injury history, how much volume or intensity you can handle, and more.

Even worse? All of those things affect each other.Your exercise selection affects your recovery. Your experience level changes how hard you can train.Your injury history changes what you’re willing to push.

And all of it changes over time.

That’s why the question “What’s the best programme?” is often the wrong question. It assumes there’s a clear, fixed answer. But in a system this complex, we can never know that for sure.

Stein Langørgen, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Finding Your Own Way

You might’ve noticed I didn’t mention those helpful directions from our first few trips through the cave - those represent beginner training programs. These are 'good enough' to get early results. Honestly, any half-decent programme will work for a beginner.

But as time goes on, those simple plans stop working as well.That’s when we start making changes based on how our body responds.

This requires some trial and error - some wrong turns, getting lost, and learning from it. We might start writing our own program. Or we might get coaching to help guide us through the cave with more precision.

But ultimately, all we can ever know is whether a programme was 'good enough' to reach our goal.

So, ask yourself: is your current program helping you reach the cave’s exit? If it is, that’s as close to perfect as you’ll ever need to get.