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A SYSTEMS WAY OF THINKING

newsletter Jul 14, 2022

Eric Bugera is a Pre-Script ™ Lab Facilitator. He holds a masters and bachelors degree in Kinesiology in addition to a bachelor of science in human nutritional science. His professional experience is heavily centered on personal training and more recently personal trainer education. Although Eric has a broad scope of knowledge, his graduate studies focused primarily on hypertrophy training.


A Systems Way Of Thinking


Education is meant to expose you to new information – shaping your perspectives and helping you grow. This can be by way of cold facts, personal experiences, case studies, or anything in between.

Education should also be a humbling experience – drawing you ever closer to the conclusion that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.

This is especially true of fitness. The nuts and bolts of exercise physiology, anatomy, and applied biomechanics can set the stage for sweeping progress – but you are always beholden to the human in front of you.

Successfully navigating a roster full of clients from different lifestyles, goals, injuries, and personal preferences will rapidly crush any delusions of a single unified system of everything.

Instead, you should be developing a personalized “systems way of thinking”. Through your exposure to education, tied to an ever-accumulating case study of clientele – principles-based decision making should emerge as your primary method of coaching.

Rigidity causes more problems than solutions. While undefined answers may contribute to imposter syndrome early in your career, your ability to seamlessly flow between potential solutions will become effortless with enough experience. Real results with real people empowers the education you have accumulated thus far.

From the Pre-Script™ curriculum, Mobility–Stability–Strength™ highlights a systems way of thinking beautifully. From years of education and personal experience, reverting to the root premise of mobilizing where necessary, stabilizing in new ranges of motion, and strengthening the newly accessible movement patterns emerged as the foundation to successfully train an innumerable amount of clients.

The most important thing you can do is figure out how to make your own knowledge actionable. Regardless of education, experience, or source of information – how will you make decisions based upon your years in the field?

Specificity, progressive overload, and detraining are three major pillars of exercise science. Undeniable, universally applicable principles that guide the results of every client. Similar to Mobility–Stability–Strength™, viewing a client’s program through the lens of these evidence-based principles can streamline your problem solving.

The key is to overlay new educational vantage points such as Mobility–Stability–Strength™ onto your base systems of success – synergizing concepts and broadening your ability to problem solve. Robust critical thinking, not stubbornly trying to filter every human through the same spreadsheet.

On the other hand, nuance is earned through experience meeting education. However, an undue obsession with nuance can undercut early, rapid progress. While it can serve as a sniper shot to call the best possible option for a very specific person – no one escapes the fundamental principles of training.

Earn your ability to fluidly apply hyper-nuanced perspectives through years of applying the basics. This is a natural progression of a systems way of thinking but is only enabled by understanding the universality of all humans. Skipping this step is a slippery slope.

As you learn and grow throughout your training career there will undoubtedly be situations and clients that challenge your confidence. These are the most important moments in your development as they shape your training philosophy – your individualized “systems way of thinking”.

Leaning into your combined education and experience – drawing upon your principles-based systems way of thinking will help ensure that you can do no harm. You may need some time to recognize the most precise option for every scenario, but like training itself, no one escapes this painstaking developmental time under the bar.

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