Do you like your spaghetti sauce chunky or smooth?

Indeed the question these days might be do you even eat spaghetti or perhaps stick with zuchinni-noodes…zoodles ? This article is not a rant about cauliflower rice but rather an interesting look at preference diversity and how we at Life Personal Trainers endevours to cater to these differences.

I recently listed to an entertaining TED talk by Malcolm Gladwell on choice. If you don’t have the 17 minutes or interest to listen, it discusses how Campbells revolutionised food industry by discovering the diversity in pasta sauce consistency and flavour warranted a number of varieties on the shelf to capitalise on market share. While it is normal to us to be given the choice of 35 kinds of milk to choose from, once upon a time; milk was milk and sauce was sauce. Researchers tried and tried to find optimal combination to suit everyone but invariably as you change something to please someone you will upset someone else in the process. Pasta sauce, like training, like most things – there is not one size/type/style that suits all. The interesting thing was, the chunky pasta sauce lovers never requested it, nor even knew they preferred it until given the option to try……

At Life PT we do our best to match clients and trainers on the basis of  personality fit/specialisation/time preferences and hopefully mostly we get a winning combination of the perfect program that ticks preferences and needs. However, at times a trainer has created an amazing ‘thin sauce program’ for a ‘chunky sauce’ kind of person – neither is wrong but we want to know.

In a similar way Kristin our MD is a king of routine, pre-set alarm clocks for each day of the week, same brand of baked beans for last 30 years and keeps a pretty consistent training week rain hail or shine. Other people crave spontaneity, variety and even randomness. As above – we want to know, if you want to keep a consistent program, monitor changes, collect data on your rowing PB then we can but if you are looking for a different session with different challenges and unpredictable turns – we can do that too.

Personal Trainers are educated about the importance of posture, movement quality but also benefits of aerobic training and strength work. There is a valid spectrum of how these can best work together but the important element is how you are improving and how much you enjoy coming. From decreased pain to improved fitness there are many areas of improvement possible with consistency.

So please, enjoy your health investment, keep moving and keep us in the loop of your preferences, goals and how we can mix things up……or not.

-Tanya Lewis