History of Build Program:

Thank you guys for checking out our Build Program, a brief history of how/why we created it to get you an idea of how it can fit in as an accessory program. In 2015-2016 Friendship was 13th in the World in the Open, and missed the Games in the stacked Central Regional by 20pts (all 5 qualifying teams finished top 10 at the Games). Our team was all home grown, and all in our mid-to-late 30’s, working full time and we qualified two teams to regionals and had ~40 athletes training hard year round. As a result of our training that year, a lot of us were beat up and burned out. I wanted to get us back on a protocol that would rehab us, and allow us to recover while having some fun. We like functional movements, the lifts, etc. but needed to get back to basics a bit and calm it down on the intensity.

Enter Functional Bodybuilding — Marcus Filly and OPEX came out with FBB right around this time, and we started following this on Saturday/Sunday’s together with our competitive team to start our offseason. It was so effective and enjoyed, we decided to offer it as a class in 3 time-slots (TuTh nights and Sunday mornings). We had to restructure the programming a good amount to fit for classes, so I began writing it along his principles. In just a few short months the classes were AVERAGING 30 people per session. We didn’t have enough weights, benches, etc. to handle this volume so demand drove us having to offer more sessions.

We decided to make it a core offering in 2019, and now we see over 400 Build sessions attended every week at our gym across 28 time offerings. We learned a lot in terms of timing sessions, movement selection and what is coachable in classes vs. what is not and how to structure your year around cycles that have introductory write ups to them, allowing your clients to ‘jump in’ as a change of pace or to attack specific goals through the year. This helps a lot with retention, injury prevention and working around injuries (build is far easier to scale than CF), and keeping those 12+ year members fresh and excited.

We have dual workout spaces, 2500 sq/ft (Build space), that run programs at the same time during peak hours. This allows us to have 18 people working at a time comfortably. Usually the structure is like this:

  • Warm-Up: 6-9 minutes, Coach led and directed.

  • Core Lifts: Usually more complex movements, typically a superset of two items unless the core item is very strenuous. 15-25mins

  • Accessory Lifts & Physical Therapy: This is our isometric time, where we target often weak muscles or fix movement patterns we see breaking down during core lifts. 15mins

  • Finishers & Stretching: Some of our cycles are famous for hypertrophy finishers, some cycles we prioritize mobility & PT work. - 5-8mins.

Below is an example of our current cycle. This is our most popular cycle I’ve created, called Squats with Friends. We’ve run it 4 years in a row now, with massive results. Make sure you read our explanatory write up prior to the programming to ensure you get the intention. Thanks, reach out to me: jeff@friendshipfitness.com if you have any further questions on it! All of the links in the programming are for our staff & clients and are click-able to YouTube examples. I also do write-ups for our staff to start the week.