Programming is Everything

By Rob Shaul, Founder

In the strength and conditioning context, “programming” refers to the deliberate, structured, and progressive design of physical training—built to achieve a specific performance outcome.

Early in my coaching career I realized the thought and theory behind the sets, reps, loading and sequence if fitness training was where I should focus my attention. And today, at MTI, “programming” is the most critical job function we have, and effective programming is the single key to our continued success for nearly 20 years now. 

When I started MTI in 2007, there were no programming resources for mountain or tactical athletes. I read everything I could, attended clinics, and came away empty

Most coaching courses focused on exercises, not programming. Few books were written at a professional level. Most were aimed at athletes, and either glossed over programming entirely or simply didn’t include it. Coaching clinics emphasized movement and hype. Programming structure was either assumed or ignored.

Professional conversations weren’t much better. Whether it was personal trainers, local gym owners, college strength coaches, or even pro-level staff, I rarely encountered anyone able to talk programming theory. Most coaches were faking it. The more famous they were, the more likely this proved true. When pressed, they couldn’t articulate their programming fundamentals, method or approach. 

There were two exceptions: endurance and strength. Endurance programming—especially for competition—has followed the same basic formula for decades: high-volume, easy-paced base-building early on, tapering into lower-volume, faster-paced work as the event nears. Most of it is heart-rate based and time-tested.

In the strength world, there were books and theory. Olympic lifting, high school football, and powerlifting all had structured progressions. I consumed everything I could: Russian, Bulgarian, and other Eastern Bloc training systems. I dug into Bigger Faster Stronger, high school coaching guides, and followed Louie Simmons down the Westside rabbit hole. At least here, there was substance.

But for work capacity? Mountain sports? Hybrid programming that combines strength, work capacity, and endurance for tactical athletes? It didn’t exist.

So we built it. What eventually became the MTI Method started with this process: research what’s available, apply progressions and common sense, test it on lab rats, measure the results, iterate, and try again.

Today, MTI training plans are professionally engineered performance tools. They are designed to be deployed by athletes to achieve specific performance outcomes. They are not templates. They are not workouts thrown together with a stopwatch and a spreadsheet. They are tools—tested, refined, and proven in the field.

Here’s what I learned along the way.

Coaching is Overrated. Programming Isn’t. 

It’s easy to confuse presence with impact. A charismatic coach can inspire with energy and intensity, but inspiration without a plan is noise. A bad program executed perfectly is still a bad program.

I learned to gravitate toward the quiet, celebral coaches rather than the charismatic, youtube, podcast and social media self-promoters. The geekier, the better. I found a common passion with these quiet coaches and after just a few minutes, we would be deep into the details of one method or another, trading insight and asking questions. We spoke the same language.

I’ve seen mediocre coaches get great results because their programming was airtight. I’ve seen high-energy, high-profile coaches drive athletes into the ground with randomized garbage hidden behind a flashy name. Programming drives results. Coaching facilitates it.

Good programming takes both science and craft.

It starts with science—structured adaptation based on well-established principles: progressive overload, accommodation, specificity, periodization. Random training is lazy. The body adapts to what it is asked to do. If the stress doesn’t increase, adaptation stops. If the stress isn’t relevant to the mission or event, the adaptation is irrelevant.

You can add academic research, but in my experience most studies are either too narrow, based on untrained populations, or flawed in ways that make them inapplicable to professional athletes. Science provides the framework. But craft is where real programming happens.

Craft can’t be taught. It has to be earned. It comes from application—on yourself, and on others. I always found the fastest way to learn about my programming was to do it myself and in my early coaching days I’d do the training sessions ahead of my athletes, and there find flaws in exercise selection, session flow, or progression aggressiveness. 

This experience under the bar and in the field taught me to recognize patterns, learn when to break rules for the right reasons, and appreciate directness and simplicity. 

I found in my own programming, and others’ who worked for me, most programming began too complicated and too sophisticated: too many exercises, too many fancy progressions, too much going on. 

Fitness programming is an art, and like all good art, it improves when you cut stuff away. 

With time we learned to do this after the first draft and before deploying it on athletes, but early on, I’d deploy a plan as written, watch it unravel mid-cycle, and have to rewrite it while athletes were still training. It was ugly—but it taught us everything.

The MTI Method

Fitness programming, when we started, didn’t exist for mountain and tactical athletes. So we applied what we could from the team and individual competitive sport worlds, but had to develop our own method to program for these unique athletes. The MTI Method is simple in theory, but sophisticated in practice. 

We begin by identifying the specific fitness demands of the mission or event. Next, identify the exercises we’ll use to train those demands, and finish with end of cycle goals for those exercises. Then we program backward …. From the end of cycle goal back to the beginning of the program. This lays out the progressions. 

I learned that not all mission or event-specific activity demands can be effectively training in the gym or artficial environment.  Skiing balance is one. I’ll see social media videos of skiers hopping from bosu ball to bosu ball with an attentive coach claiming this trains balance on the slopes. We tried this kind of stuff and determined all it did was improve the athlete’s ability to boune between bosu balls and thus burn training time that could be used to build strength which was transferrable. 

On the tactical side we messed around with shooting airsoft guns at targets in the gym after back squats, burpees or some other fitness stressor. This looked cool on video, but didn’t transfer to the range. 

In the end, we learned this: training technique in the gym is inefficient, and training fitness in the field is equally inefficient. The job of the strength and conditioning coach is to get the athlete to the field, mountain, fireground, or battlefield with enough mission-direct fitness to allow them to focus on technique. Our job is to make sure fatigue isn’t the limiter.

The MTI Method is engineered. Identify the demands. Choose the tools. Set the targets. Program backward. Deploy. Test. Iterate. This method creates a “virtuous” circle of continuous improvement that continues to this day. 

Programming is the Job

In the end, it all comes back to this: programming is everything.

At MTI, programming is our craft, our profession, and our passion. It’s what we spend most of our time on. The drive to continuously improve our programming directs our research, guides our internal debate, and fuels our evolution. Every training plan we build reflects two decades of testing, failing, iterating, and improving. Every set, every rep, every session is deliberate.

Programming isn’t part of the job – it is the job. 

Strength and conditioning coaches don’t rise to the level of their charisma, they fall to the level of they programming.

And that’s why at MTI, programming is everything.