Engineering Concepts in Strength Training

In a previous blog, I touched on some of how software engineering has provided a new lens to understand programming for strength development. That blog focused on algorithms.

This blog will focus a bit more on structure based parallels. They are in no particular order so I will just dive right into it.

The first parallel I’ll dive into is the DRY principle emphasized in Ruby on Rails development. For many of the same reasons, DRY (or do not repeat yourself ) code is much preferred when building web applications and building strength training programs. The most obvious reason is time limitations. The more lines of code your computer has to process, the slower your program will run, similarly, the more non-functionally redundant (important distinction from functionally redundant) training you add to your program, the longer it will take to reach the desired outcome.

The Second parallel I will look at is single responsibility principle, or separation of concerns.

In Rails development you see this principle manifest via the MVC or Model, View, Controller structure. The model corresponds to the data related logic that the user works, with. The view corresponds to the way things are presented in the browser, and the controller makes sense of requests and delivers the appropriate output.

In strength programming I have found it very useful to identify which movements offer discrete or exclusive benefits relative to other movements. This allows for a tight and clean programming structure that is less prone to bloat and non-functional redundancy.