An Athlete Approach — The Six Elements of a Coachable Body

Why a Framework

Most personal training programmes are written as exercise lists. Three sets of squats, four sets of presses, conditioning at the end. The exercises change, the structure does not. That works for a while. It stops working when the trainee gets stronger than the supporting tissues, when one quality outpaces the others, or when the same template keeps producing the same plateau.

A framework is the alternative. Instead of thinking which exercises, the question becomes which qualities does the body in front of me need next. There are six categories I think in.

The Six Elements

1. Force Production

The big one. How much force can the muscles, the nervous system, and the kinetic chain together generate. Force production is what 1RM strength tests measure, what jump performance reveals, what isometric mid-thigh pull data confirms. Almost every other quality in this framework either depends on force production or limits how much of it expresses in sport.

2. External Load Tolerance

Different from force production. External load tolerance is the capacity of tendons, joints, connective tissue, and bone to absorb force without breaking down. A trainee can build force production faster than the supporting structures adapt, which is the most common reason ambitious clients pick up niggles in heavy training blocks. Tolerance is built with appropriate dose-response over years, not weeks. Rushing it is the most common cause of avoidable injury in adult trainees.

3. Fundamental Movement Patterns

Squat. Hinge. Push. Pull. Lunge. Carry. Rotate. Every athletic movement is a combination of these patterns; programmes that load all of them across a phase out-perform programmes built from exercise lists. Thinking in patterns rather than exercises is one of the markers of a coached programme rather than a generic one.

4. Motor Skills (Stability + Proprioception)

The control layer. Joint stability under load, sensing position in space, recovering when the surface or trajectory shifts. Motor skills are trainable but rarely trained in adult clients — it is one of the qualities you usually have to deliberately program rather than expect to develop as a side effect of strength work.

5. Limb-Trunk Disassociation

The capacity to move limbs independently while keeping the trunk position you want. Sprinting, throwing, hitting — every fast athletic movement requires this. Limb-trunk disassociation is a skill problem first and a strength problem second; the drilling that develops it looks more like motor learning than gym work.

6. Spinal Control

The neglected one. Spinal control is the ability to maintain neutral or task-appropriate spinal position under load and movement. Distinct from “core strength” — control is a motor-skill problem first, a strength problem second. Many lower-back issues respond to control work before they respond to strengthening.

What This Buys You

Three things.

First, diagnosis. Once you have six categories, you can see which one is the limiter. A client who tests well on force production but poorly on motor skills needs a different block to a client who tests well on motor skills but poorly on force production. Without categories, every programme looks the same.

Second, sequencing. Some qualities precede others. Motor skills before maximal strength. Patterns before load. Tolerance before volume. Building in the right order means each block reinforces the next; building out of order means you carry deficits forward.

Third, realism. Six elements is enough categories that no programme will hit them all every week. You pick two or three to load heavily, hold the rest, and rotate emphasis across blocks. That is what periodisation is — the deliberate sequencing of which elements are emphasised when.

How It Shows Up in Practice

Every assessment I run measures elements 1–4 directly. Element 5 (limb-trunk disassociation) is observed in dynamic movement screens. Element 6 (spinal control) is assessed via specific position-under-load tests. From the data, the next block’s emphasis is obvious: we load the limiter, hold the rest, retest at the end of the block.

This is what I mean when I say programming is structured decision-making rather than improvisation.