Two questions come before everything else. Can this athlete keep showing up? And do they have the physical tools to do what their sport is asking of them? Almost every decision I make traces back to one of those two.
Intake questionnaire, injury history, movement screen, where we are in the calendar, what they're trying to do and by when. That part is mostly on paper before we ever train.
What I'm actually after in those first sessions is something a form can't tell me: how they respond to load.
So I start conservative on purpose. I would rather undershoot the load and learn something than overshoot it and spend the next two weeks paying it back. Once I can see how they recover, and what they carry into the following session, I have something real to build on.
That's when the actual programming starts. Not before.
Principles travel. Plans don't. These hold up in a D1 weight room, a G League season, and a clinic in Manhattan, but what they produce looks different in each one.
If the prescription keeps changing, I can't tell what caused what. Keeping it simple and consistent is how the training stays readable.
How the athlete responds is the data. That decides the next block, not what I wrote in August.
Enough exposure to the stresses of the sport that their system stays resilient to it. An available athlete gets more reps at everything else.
Space, time, staffing, technology, the calendar, the expectations. The plan has to work in the building it lives in.
Performance sits across four domains: physical, technical, tactical, and psychological. Mine is the physical one. That doesn't let me pretend the other three aren't in the room.
Sometimes an athlete already has the capacities they need. The strength is there, the speed is there, and the thing holding them back is somewhere else entirely.
When that's the case my job changes shape. It becomes about keeping them available: enough exposure to the stresses of the game that their body stays resilient to it, so they can keep showing up and get the reps they need on the technical, tactical, and psychological side.
Knowing when to stop adding physical work is part of the job. Piling on more of what somebody already has is one of the easier ways to make things worse.
Every week has a job, and that job comes from the goal of the block and where we are in the year. That part is written down. Then Monday happens.
The plan doesn't get thrown out. It gets steered.
The athlete, the sport coach, the sports medicine group, the front office, and whoever else has a claim on that person's week. A plan that ignores any of them is a plan that gets overruled by Wednesday.
When an athlete is coming back from an injury, I work with the sports medicine staff through the early stages and then take the lead on running volume and strength as they move back toward playing. That handoff works when everyone knows what the others are seeing.
The same is true of the athlete. If they don't understand why we're doing what we're doing, the plan is only as good as my ability to be standing there.
If you're a coach with a problem you're chewing on, that counts too. I like working through the hard ones out loud.
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