There's something comforting about the good old days. Music was better. Footy was better. Nobody stared at their phone all day. Things were built properly. And apparently everything tasted better before somebody changed the recipe.

Round 1 has its own version of this.

Every now and then I'll hear some variation of: “The sessions used to be harder.” Or, “There was more variety back then.”

And to be fair, I've probably said it myself.

You know. The good old days.

But after writing recently about the 16 years of experience we've accumulated at Round 1, I started wondering whether the good old days really were the way we remember them.

Fortunately, I don't have to rely entirely on my memory.

I still have the workouts.

So I went back to October 2015 and pulled out four weeks of old BoxPlus programming to see what we were actually doing more than ten years ago.

And there was certainly some stuff in there.

Some of it was really bloody good. Some of it was completely nuts. Some of it made me wonder what the hell we were thinking.

But the biggest surprise?

The old sessions weren't more varied.

In quite a few ways, they were actually much MORE repetitive.

IF THE SLEDS WERE OUT, THE SLEDS WERE OUT

This is something that's easy to forget when you look back at training rather than looking at the actual programs.

If we set the mini-sleds up in 2015 (and remember, we only had the boxing side of the gym back then!), there was a pretty good chance you were going to see mini-sleds for the next five days.

Same with barbells. Same with kettlebells. Equipment would come out and stay out, and we'd build several sessions around what was already set up.

Part of that was simply practical.

The gym was different. We had less equipment and more open space. And we weren't nearly as willing to completely reconstruct the place every day just so Tuesday's session could look completely different from Monday's.

We are now.

These days we'll finish a session, pull half the gym apart and rebuild it because the next day's workout needs a completely different setup.

That gives us considerably more freedom with our programming.

So when I actually looked at the old workouts rather than relying on my memory of them, the idea that there was “more variety back then” became pretty hard to defend.

There was variety within the sessions.

Across the week?

Not nearly as much as I remembered.

AND THEN THERE WAS THE BOXING

This one really made me laugh.

We talk a lot about how BoxPlus has evolved, but you only need to look at the actual boxing combinations to see it.

Left. Right. Left Hook. Right Uppercut.

It's everywhere.

Board after board.

Apparently if you'd mastered Left-Right-Left Hook-Right Uppercut in 2015, you were pretty well prepared for the week ahead.

The boxing stations we program in 2026 are very different.

We still want you punching hard. We still want the heart rate up. But we're much more deliberate about making the boxing itself part of the challenge.

Combinations change. Footwork gets involved. Timing changes. Defensive movements appear. You have to think about what comes next while you're tired.

There's a cardio component, but there's also that mind-muscle connection and coordination component. Your brain and body have to keep talking to each other even as fatigue starts getting in the way.

That's become a much bigger part of what we want from a BoxPlus boxing station.

So again, when I compare what I remember with what's actually written on those old boards, it's difficult to argue that the old classes contained more variety.

They didn't.

SOME THINGS REALLY WERE DIFFERENT

There was one area where my memory held up pretty well.

We combined strength and cardio constantly.

Bike and barbell combinations were everywhere. We'd move between a cardio effort and a strength exercise inside the same station over and over again.

We still do that today. You'll see rowers paired with kettlebells or SkiErgs with slam balls, for example.

But nowhere near to the same extent.

Part of the reason is pretty simple.

We have more stuff now.

Back then we had fewer pieces of cardio equipment and a lot more open floor. Pairing a bike with a barbell made sense. We had the room, we had the equipment and it gave us another way to create a challenging station.

Today we've got bikes, rowers, SkiErgs, sleds and considerably more equipment spread throughout the gym. We don't need to squeeze quite as many different training elements into one station because there are more opportunities across the room.

That's not necessarily better or worse.

It's just different.

And actually, going through the old sessions has made me think there might be something there worth using a little more often again.

That's one of the benefits of keeping the old workouts.

WERE THEY HARDER?

This is probably the hardest bit to answer.

Because “hard” is a funny word when it comes to training.

Was a bike-to-barbell station where you were desperately trying to hold an RPM target before picking up a barbell hard?

Absolutely.

Were some of the old sessions relentless?

Definitely.

But I'm not convinced that means the sessions as a whole were harder.

Some of what we remember as harder may simply have been simpler.

There was less to think about. Less equipment to move between. Boxing combinations repeated more often. If the job was to get on the bike, hit a target, grab the barbell and go again, you could just put your head down and work.

Modern BoxPlus asks different things of you.

There are still sessions where the physical challenge is simply to keep moving. But particularly at the boxing stations, we're much more likely to make you coordinate, react, remember and execute while you're under fatigue.

That's hard too.

Just in a different way.

MORE THAN TEN YEARS

And that's what I found most interesting about going through all of this.

BoxPlus hasn't been replaced by some completely different training system.

You can look at a program from 2015 and immediately recognise it.

Whole-room interventions. Repeated stations. Challenges. Competition. Barbells. Kettlebells. Cardio. Boxing.

We've been working with these ideas for more than ten years. Actually more than 16-years!!

What's changed is how we use them.

We've learned what needs variety and where repetition actually helps. We've learned how much information people can absorb while they're tired. We've learned how to use the equipment and space better. We've learned when combining exercises makes a station better and when we're just adding stuff for the sake of adding stuff.

None of that happened because one day we sat down and invented a better version of BoxPlus.

It happened because we kept running classes.

Week after week. Month after month. Year after year.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

That's the funny thing about the good old days.

Memory tends to keep the feeling and lose some of the detail.

The sessions felt hard, so eventually they become harder.

We remember all the crazy things we did, so eventually the classes become more varied.

Then you open the actual programs and discover you spent half the week pushing the same mini-sled and apparently threw Left-Right-Left Hook-Right Uppercut at almost every boxing problem we encountered.

That doesn't mean those old sessions weren't good.

They were.

There are things in them that we still use today. There are things we've improved. There are things we've moved away from. And there are a few things I've found that make me think, we should probably do a bit more of that again.

Last week I wrote that the most valuable thing we've stored inside Round 1 for the past 16 years isn't the weights.

It's the experience.

This is what that looks like.

It's having more than ten years of BoxPlus sessions to look back on and being able to see what changed, what didn't, what got better and what might actually have been worth keeping.

So yes, they were the good old days.

But I don't want to go back to them.

I'd rather keep building on them.