How we train

The Pump Club Difference

You never lose a workout. You follow a real, progressive program. We’re not like other apps — and the results speak for themselves.

By Daniel Ketchell, Co-CEO

As we grow, more and more members are coming from other fitness apps.

The team has done extensive testing of some of the most popular fitness apps so that we can tell you exactly what’s different about Pump Club — and answer many of the questions we’ve been seeing from new folks in the app.

But there’s one difference that underlies all the others.

The Pump Club is all about actual programs.

That’s because Arnold and Adam have always followed programs and believed they are the key to progress. I was always like most of our members — mixing up exercises and programs and making it up as I went — until we founded the app and I had to lead by example and suddenly made more progress in a couple of years than I had in the previous couple decades.

It’s also because many, many studies show people following programs have much more success in the gym than people doing randomized workouts, even when they do the same amount of volume. Some studies even show that people doing randomized workouts have more success for a few weeks, and then hit a plateau while the program-followers pass them up.

That will feel familiar to all of you who tell us that you saw more progress completing three months of the foundation than in a year of fitness classes.

I know many of the fitness apps claim that they’re “not just a menu of workouts” and that they’re running programs, so you might be confused.

Let me explain some of the most common differences between a real program and something that calls itself a program for marketing purposes.

You do not lose workouts in a program.

What we’ve found in several of the most popular “program-based” fitness apps is an answer to a question we’ve had.

“Why do so many people think if they can’t train on their workout day, they lose their workout?”

In one app that is very clear in its marketing that they’re only using programs, when I got assigned my program, Monday was upper day, and Tuesday was lower day. Each day had a cute name. When I logged in Tuesday after not completing my workout, I was surprised to find that my default workout when I clicked workout was now Tuesday’s lower day.

It was as if Monday’s upper day didn’t matter.

But that’s not how programming works.

In real programming, there is no such thing as Monday’s workout, Tuesday’s workout, Thursday’s workout, and Saturday’s workout.

There is Workout 1, Workout 2, Workout 3, and Workout 4.

That’s because an actual program means that each workout is built on all of the workouts before; each week is built on the week before; each phase is built on the phases before.

In the Pump Club, if you missed Monday’s Workout 1, Tuesday’s workout will be… Workout 1.

Think about it like an elementary school classroom. My mom was a teacher, then a curriculum specialist, then a principal, so let me try not to embarrass her with this analogy.

Imagine you’re in fifth grade again. In my public elementary school, that meant your history focus was US History (third grade is county, fourth grade is state, sixth grade is world).

Now imagine you have to miss two weeks right after you finish learning about the Revolutionary War.

Your parents are going to make sure you have your lessons, because otherwise, you’re missing the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution and coming back to learn about the White House burning down in the War of 1812 with no context — you didn’t even learn what a President was yet.

You can’t simply skip two weeks of lessons without falling behind.

Your workouts are the same. Each workout is a piece of context for your body. If you miss two weeks, that same workout will wait for you, because your body isn’t ready for what’s coming in week 3 before it does the homework of weeks 1 and 2.

Our programs progress.

That might feel boring if you’re used to workouts with more novelty than progression — until you learn that progress is not boring.

A lot of apps use more of a class structure than a program structure.

Monday might be upper day, and your main chest movement one week might be dumbbell bench press, the next week pushups, the next week dips, the next week dumbbell flys.

Novelty is fun!

It also doesn’t allow progression. If you change movements every week, you have no baseline.

Progression requires asking a little more of your body every week. Not asking a different question every week.

Here, you might see that the main movement for your chest is dumbbell press for week 1, 2, 3, and 4. That allows you to ask more each week. When you’re asked to do 8 reps in week 1 and you use 25-pound dumbbells, you know in week 2 that you’ve made progress when you hit a 10 rep set with those same dumbbells. Or when you do one more rep. By the end of the phase in week 4, you’re lifting more than you ever have.

That’s progress, and it’s addictive. You can’t do that switching exercises every week.

A program has variety between phases, but it’s a lot of the same movements within a phase, because that’s how you build on what you are doing every week.

Because of different progression styles, sometimes you will see a linear progression where each week is 3x10 and you know the goal is simple: doing a little more weight each week.

But you might also see that your rep target changes every week, unlike some apps where it is always the same. If you’re used to 3x10 for four weeks straight, it might be strange to see one week is 3x12, the next week is 3x10, the next 3x8, and the last 3x6. Or even stranger to see 3x15,12,10, the next is 3x12,10,8, the next is 3x10,8,6, and the last week is 3x8,6,4.

Here’s what’s happening: as the reps come down, the weight goes up. Week one builds a base with higher reps and lighter loads. Each week after, you do a little less volume per set but handle more weight — so you’re progressively challenging your muscles in a heavier range while your body is ready for it. By week four you’re lifting the heaviest you have all month, for fewer, harder reps.

The descending reps within a session are an Arnold-favorite, reverse-pyramids (15, then 12, then 10) and work the same way on a smaller scale — you add weight as the reps drop, so every set stays challenging instead of the last one feeling easy. It’s all one system pointing in the same direction: progress you can actually measure, not just movement for its own sake.

Our programs contain all of the strength-training you need.

There are science-based calculations behind the volume for every body part.

Many apps have add-ons. Do the “17-minute core buster” or the “23-minute arm blast.”

That’s… not how programs work. A well-designed program has a genius (NOT A COMPUTER) on the backend who is looking at a lot of different variables to find balance.

Volume per week. Volume per phase. Volume over the course of a three-phase program. Volume per body part (pecs vs. lats, hamstrings vs. quads, etc). Volume per movement pattern (squat vs. hinge, push vs. pull, etc.). Spinal load (Stiff-leg deadlift vs. hamstring walkouts, seated overhead press vs. standing overhead press, barbell squat vs. goblet squat, etc). Central nervous system fatigue (compound vs. isolation movements, heavy vs. higher rep sets).

If you can add to a program, you are, in all likelihood, not doing a program at all, because adding blindly means there is no designed balance to all of those variables.

Instead of the curriculum analogy, we’ll use a home-building analogy. Which home do you feel safer in: the one where an architect considered every part of the structure, or the one where the homeowner added random additions to the structure without talking to the architect?

You can’t hop programs and pick up where you left off. You always start over.

You can’t do one program this week, and another next week. You always start on phase 1, workout 1.

In every app I’ve tried, it’s totally normal to just hop to another program.

That’s, once again, not a program at all.

Here, you can switch programs. But you still start at the beginning of the new program.

I’ve had a lot of people ask why they can’t pick up in phase 3 on the gym plan since they finished phase 1 and 2 in the bodyweight plan and now joined a gym.

Once again, an analogy. Would you ever get to chapter 12 in one book, decide to change books, and think it was logical to start the new book at chapter 12 because you made it that far in your first book?

As soon as I say that, they get it. Like we said before, a program is your body getting context for everything that comes next.

There are no workouts of the day or workouts of the week.

Workouts of the day are not programs.

A real program can’t be written every week, because of all the design I spoke about earlier. It requires a 30,000-foot, holistic view.

I see that in some of these apps they reveal the next week’s workout on Sunday. Adam would die if he had to consider all of those variables every weekend to write the next week’s plan. People who have been here a long time realize that sometimes it takes him so long with Arnold to design a program that programs will launch with one phase and be that way for a month before they finish the next phase.

And finally, there is a really big, deep philosophical difference in our programming:

We don’t believe an algorithm is a coach.

Almost every app you’ve tried sells the same promise: an AI that watches your performance and changes your plan automatically. It sounds smart. A computer, reacting to you in real time.

But think about what that actually means. The algorithm has no idea you slept three hours because your kid was sick, or that you’re one week from a deload you can feel coming, or that the reason your bench stalled isn’t fatigue — it’s that your setup is wrong and you need Nic to catch it. It just sees a number went down, so it serves you something different.

That’s the same trap as program-hopping, except a machine is doing the hopping for you.

A real program already accounts for the bad days. The progression is built to absorb them. That’s why we don’t need a computer rerouting you every time life gets in the way — the structure was designed by people who assumed life would get in the way.

When you truly plateau (getting stuck for multiple weeks) and you need a human, you get a human. You will see us in the comments, not occasionally. Every day. You will see us live on Zoom calls for you, not once a month. Once a week.

That sums up the majority of the differences that you will find here that are driven by our complete and total focus on programs.

There are a lot of other smaller differences.

We don’t pick your weights for you

Arnold doesn’t believe in this. After using a few apps, I don’t, either. If I actually used what they pre-filled, I’d be training at 50%.

It might give you confidence to have someone else pick the weight, but Arnold prefers giving you a guide.

Once you read First Set Mindset, The Pump Club Training Principles, and The Gym Is Your Lab in the recommended tab in the app, you know:

• Every set should end with a couple of hard, slow reps.

• You want to land within 3 reps of the rep target or adjust

• There’s going to be some trial and error, and that’s OK.

A note: we do have a compromise coming with some of the tech we are building right now. You’ll always pick your own starting weight — the gym will still be your lab. What we’re adding is the math after that: once you’ve found week 1, we’ll suggest the progression so you don’t make my old mistake of lifting the same 45s for a year until Arnold says “Why don’t you go up?”

Your support here is real, not AI. And our coaches aren’t picked for their Instagram following, they’re picked for their knowledge.

Jen and Nic are two of the best in the game.

Yes, Jen does have a following, but she also has a real résumé with decades of serious work in the fitness industry, and a trail of celebrity and regular clients with tons of success.

Nic is how you really know that we prioritize skill over everything else. Anybody sorting for Made-for-TV coaches is not choosing someone who looks like a pirate and talks in a way that you have to cringe while wondering if he’s about to be canceled. But he’s the best damn movement coach we’ve ever seen, and he can look at your squat and make a one-inch adjustment that changes everything.

You know you aren’t being answered by AI if you tag them here in the app because you can join live video calls with both of them, every single week (or watch the replay if you can’t make it that week).

I know I got automated messages from the coaches on most of the apps I tried. On one, I got a real follow-up message.

I have a lot of friends who tell me I need to automate our customer service. If you have ever submitted a ticket, you know it’s either me or Egzon, the leader of our development team, answering. We don’t automate it because we love the human factor but also because customer service tickets help Egzon and me prioritize our roadmap for the app. I don’t know why more CEOs don’t spend part of every day in Zendesk, to be honest.

Our village is a real community, not just typical social media

A few of the apps I tested had communities. All I saw was people bragging about finishing their workouts for likes.

We do encourage bragging about weekly wins here. But something is different. You don’t get people talking about their battles with depression or their struggle with eating disorders in these other communities because they are set up just like all of social media:

They’re a place for everyone to share the best version of themselves, even if it is fake.

We don’t know why this community became such a safe space for people to be real. It could be that we called it the positive corner of the internet. It could be our zero tolerance policy for trolls (we’ve only invoked it once in over three years). It could be that we lead by example — you don’t just hear from Arnold, Adam, me, Jen, or Nic about our PRs and great moments, we make sure to share when we miss workouts, when we get hurt, when we struggle.

Whatever it is, we love it.

We also love that everyone is here to help each other. Someone can ask a question and get an answer from another member right away, but at the same time, we don’t turn our work over to the community. If you tag any of us, we show up.

In fact, time in the communities of these other apps convinced me that we will never do a member-driven form check group when we enable uploads in the community. What I saw was the blind leading the blind, and that doesn’t help anyone. Nic handles form checks.

You’re not a number in a leaderboard.

A few of the apps I tried lean hard on streaks, badges, and leaderboards — fitness as a game you’re ranked in.

We use streaks too, and we love a weekly win. But there’s a difference between a game that rewards showing up and a game that rewards beating other people. Leaderboards quietly tell you that someone else’s progress is the measure of yours. That’s the comparison engine of social media wearing a fitness costume.

Here, the only person on your leaderboard is the version of you from last week. That’s the one you’re trying to beat. You see it every time you open your workout: Last reps or Last weight. That’s your leaderboard — we only want you trying to beat yourself.

And when you do, a thousand people will celebrate it with you — not rank you below them.

We also meet in person

Every year, 200 of us get together in Austria. Every year, up to a thousand of us meet at the Arnold Sports Festival in Ohio, and then across the pond at the Arnold Sports Festival in Birmingham, UK — both in March.

It’s not just huge events. The team also hosts meetups open to all members in LA and travels to set up smaller meetups from our big events. We will be in NY, Florida, Chicago, Toronto, and Denver later this year. (Schedule coming soon, right now we are in Austria planning mode.)

And our members use the meetups group to set up their own hangouts — in Munich, in Texas, in Kansas City, in the Bay Area — all over the world.

Lifelong friendships have been built, and it all started on this little screen.

We pay you back for training

Our primary goal here is getting people to train. Making money is important — because it ensures the app lasts as long as possible, but the lighthouse for all of us is your success.

We also have a policy everyone should know: when we do make pricing changes, we always offer existing members the ability to be grandfathered in to your current price, forever.

Our changes are driven by our primary goal.

We saw that heavy discounts decrease workout start rate, so we moved away from heavy discounts.

We saw that monthly subscribers are much less likely to train, so we made it more attractive to be an annual subscriber.

We also saw that our promotion to give $50 back for finishing the foundation skyrocketed workout start and program completion rates.

So we changed our pricing structure permanently.

The new annual price is $150.

But if you subscribe directly with us, through our Earn It Back program, one program gets you $50 back, and after your fourth program, you get another $50, so someone training all year gets $100 back.

That’s right. Someone who does four programs a year (which takes 48 weeks, not perfection) would only pay $50.

Here’s where we get really crazy.

All of you now have 30-day guest passes to share with your friends.

And if you are subscribed directly with us and your friend joins — and finishes their foundation program — we will give you another $50 back (people who signed up through Arnold’s birthday sale — you have to wait until next year, we don’t have another $50 to give you, since you only paid $100). The key is, they can’t just join. They have to complete a program.

I know somebody has smoke coming out of their ears right now trying to do the math, so let me do it for you:

If you refer someone who joins and completes the foundation program, and then you do four programs next year, the app will be free to you, as long as you are subscribed through our Earn It Back option and not through the Apple or Google stores where we cannot automate refunds to you.

Refer somebody who completes a program every year and complete your four programs every year, and the app’s free for the rest of your life.

No other app offers that.

There’s a simple reason:

Their data obsession is your conversion rate and your retention rate.

Our data obsession is your workout start rate and your program completion rate.

Winning for the Pump Club looks a lot different than winning at other apps.

We don’t have investors or a board of directors to satisfy.

We just have you.

All of the differences you see here are driven by that lighthouse: we want your success story more than we want your money. Your money makes you committed, and it keeps the business running.

Your success story is what drives all of us to keep working.

Common questions