The Exercises Change. The Thinking Doesn't.

One of the athletes I've coached the longest is Cara, a track sprinter. This year marks our 19th year working together.

Over that time she's competed at National Championships, won State Championships and major professional sprint races and, most excitingly  consistently produces her best performances when it matters most.

If I dug out one of the old Microsoft Word programs I emailed her nearly two decades ago and compared them with the program she now downloads onto her phone, you'd probably expect them to look completely different.

They don't.

Cara is now balancing training with raising two children. Her body has changed, her schedule has changed and, naturally, the way I coach her has changed as well. What hasn't really changed is what we're trying to achieve.

Eighteen years ago we were trying to build an athlete who was stronger, more powerful and capable of handling the demands of sprint training. That's still exactly what we're trying to do today.

The longer I've coached, the more I've realised that this isn't unique to sprinting.

Earlier in my coaching career I probably spent too much time thinking about how different various sports were. These days I'm far more interested in what they have in common. Over the past 35 years I've coached Masters athletes from athletics, swimming, rowing, canoeing, boxing, obstacle course racing, triathlon, rugby and tennis. Their gym programs often look completely different, and that's exactly how they should look. Every sport has different technical demands, different injury profiles and different performance requirements.

Yet when I sit down to write a program, I keep coming back to the same questions.

Where does this athlete need to become stronger?

Do they need to become more powerful?

Can their body tolerate enough training to keep improving?

Are they moving well enough for those improvements to transfer back into their sport?

The answers are different for every athlete but the questions rarely are.

I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions about strength and conditioning. People often assume the value lies in finding the perfect exercise. In reality, the difficult part is working out what the athlete actually needs. Once you've answered that question, selecting the exercises becomes much easier.

That's why a swimmer doesn't train like a sprinter, and neither of them trains like a boxer or a rower. Their programs shouldn't look the same because the demands of their sports aren't the same. But what we are trying to achieve is remarkably similar.

One athlete may spend months rebuilding single-leg strength after a recurring injury. Another may spend more time developing power because strength is no longer the limiting factor. A swimmer may need greater shoulder robustness while a sprinter needs stronger glutes and hamstrings. Different athletes with different exercises but the same coaching process.

The other lesson eighteen years with Cara has reinforced is that improvement rarely comes from regularly changing programs. It's easy to assume progress comes from constantly doing something differently. 

In my experience performance improvement usually comes from doing the right things, increasingly better. That's where progressive overload becomes so important. The body doesn't adapt because an exercise is new. It adapts because it's repeatedly exposed to a training stimulus that's challenging enough to force improvement. Sometimes that means adding load. Sometimes it's increasing volume. Sometimes it's moving the same weight faster or improving the quality of movement itself. And, sometimes, it involves varying exercises. That's why changing programs every two weeks often works against the very adaptation you're trying to create. 

This is why Cara's programs still resemble those from eighteen years ago more than most people would expect. We haven't been repeating the same sessions for two decades. We've been progressively building the same broad attributes while continually refining how we go about it.

One thing coaching Masters athletes has reinforced more than anything else is that consistency and planning almost always beats novelty. Every few years our industry falls in love with another exercise, another piece of equipment or another training method that's supposed to change everything. Some prove useful and find their way into programs, others get disregarded.

Good coaching has never really been about collecting more tools. It's about knowing which tool to use, when to use it and, just as importantly, when not to change something that's already working.

Looking back over eighteen years with Cara, I could easily show you all the things that have changed. The exercises have changed. The training loads have changed. Technology has changed. Life has changed, and the program has changed with it.

What has remained remarkably consistent is the way I try to approachperformance enhancement. Every time I sit down to write a program—whether it's for Cara or any other Masters athlete—I'm still trying to answer the same question:

What does this athlete need now to get to where they want to be?

Once I can answer that, the exercises usually take care of themselves.

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