Navigating Acting Inside the System

In the first two articles, we did two things most educational systems avoid like the plague:

• We clarified what S&C is actually for: increasing the quality and quantity of sport practice. That’s the only thing that matters.
• We clarified why simplicity is a systemic necessity, because the athlete is not a machine you optimize, but a complex system you try not to ruin.

If you haven’t caught up on those articles yet, you can do it here and here.

So the next logical questions is obvious: What do you do with this knowledge. How do you put it to work? What kind of mental models frameworks principles are useful and whats not?

This is very hard for most coaches. you don’t learn it in regular college education. You learn to explain and categorize things. You learn to sound smart.

Some coaches even “get” complexity intellectually. They can say the right words. They’ll talk about nonlinearity and chaos and emergent behavior like its second nature. And then they still try to run the athlete like a Swiss watch: perfect plan, perfect periodization, perfect control.

I don’t even blame them. I was that guy too. Because it’s genuinely hard to break out of the thinking structures you were handed by classical education, periodization textbooks, and the whole „if it’s not carefully planned and maped out, it’s not professional“ religion.

The good thing is, reality will humble you the hard way or like tyson put it. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

By the end of this article you’ll have a navigation framework, battle tested thinking tools and you can build your own idiot-proof implementation loop

Welcome to the Disorder Family

Time. Error. Chaos. Turmoil. Chance. Volatility. Variability. Uncertainty. Randomness. The unknown. Incomplete knowledge.

That’s the lovely family you married the second you decided to become a Coach. Not an engineer.

I still remember when an Athlete told me several years ago:

“Coach… three months ago you said X. Now you say Y. Maybe you should just take your college degree and throw it in the trash?”

Yeah should have done that! From the outside, updating your opinion may look like incompetence.

From the inside, it’s the only sane way to operate.

If you’re not willing to change your mind, you’re just emotionally attached to your own bullshit.

So in this article, we’re not chasing “certainty.” We’re building a way to move inside uncertainty.

Before we talk about the tools for that, we need to talk about the ways coaches sabotage themselves mentally.

The thinking errors that ruin coaching

I know a lot of smart coaches that act like idiots. Its time to stop that. It all starts with awareness. If you are aware of these thinking patterns you can start observing and escaping them.

Control Fantasy (Overplanning Bias)

You think you can plan everything and if you plan harder, reality will behave. Oh yes thats a classic coach fantasy! Whos not been guilty for that one? Build a 12-week masterpiece, schedule every day like you’re running NASA, account for every variable… and then pretend uncertainty signed the waiver.

The plan feels amazing. Not because ist true but because it calms your nervous system.

It reminds me of a Taleb & Kahneman panel where they got into complex systems. Sure, in theory, a complex system might be deterministic Talebs basic message was, “What we’re trying to do, nobody can. You’d need an IQ of like 300. Im sure you might be pretty close but ist not possible” That’s the trap of overplanning: you’re trying to do god-level prediction with human-level brains.

Signs youre doing it:

• You spend more time perfecting the plan than observing the athlete.
• Deviations trigger panic, not curiosity.
• You treat „off-plan” as failure instead of feedback.

Control Panic (Reactivity Bias “Every signal needs a response“)

Overplanning is control projected into the future. Reactivity is the same addiction but in the present.

It’s the coach who sees or measures one weird thing which is not expected and flips the program.

One low CMJ? Panic. One ugly Readiness Score? Panic.

Systems fluctuate. That’s literally what complex systems do all day, every day.

If you respond to every blip, you don’t train the athlete. You basically let randomness write your program while you pretend you’re being responsive.

Signs you’re doing it:

• Constant micro-changes with no clear rationale.
• Today we do something different every time the athlete looks a bit cooked.
• You treat normal variability like it’s an emergency.

Identity Trap (Dogma Drift “The method becomes the religion.”)

A coach learns a framework—Triphasic, French Contrast, Conjugate, Neuroeverything, Functional Patterns PRI, whatever—and suddenly everything looks like a nail. The athlete stops being a person in a context and becomes an excuse to run the method.

That’s the trap: when your identity gets attached to a system, and your brain starts protecting the system instead of the athlete.

Remember this advice from Henk Kraaijenhof: „Find the right program for your athlete not the right athlete for your program.“

There is no universal “truth” here only tools that work sometimes, for someone, under certain constraints. That’s it.

Signs you’re doing it:

• You defend the method harder than you defend outcomes.
• You force athletes into your system instead of adapting the system to the athlete.
• You copy programs from successful coaches without understanding their constraints.

Data trap (Measurement Myopia “If I can measure it, it must matter.”)

First, lets accept this: not everything that matters is measurable and just because something isn’t easily measurable doesn’t mean it’s not important. Mood. Motivation. Trust. Fear. Confidence. Sleep quality. Life stress. Team dynamics. How do you fit this nicely into a dashboard? Camerons classic: „ Not everything that counts can be counted“

This is the modern trap: you start treating measurable data as truth. You measure what’s convenient or because it is professional. Because it fits the organization’s constraints. Because someone upstairs expects a dashboard. The system often rewards documentation, not decision-making.

Before we can act, we’re told we must analyze. Before we can decide, we’re told we must measure. “We need data before we can do anything.” Maybe you’re one of those guys with “evidence-based” in the bio, “data-driven” on the keynote, and a dashboard fetish on the side.

Cool. Now go watch Rocky IV and tell me what he measures in his training. Is he tracking asymmetry indices while dragging logs? Is he filling out a wellness questionnaire before punching frozen meat?

He adjusts based on reality and he’s using the most advanced tool in sports science: its called putting in the fucking work.

Here’s the ugly part: most coaches don’t even understand what they’re measuring. They grab metrics because ist industry standard, not because they’re meaningful. Then they commit the classic sin: they jump the is–ought gap—“This number is low, therefore endurance is bad or therefore we ought to change training“.

No. The fucking number is just low. That’s all you actually know. The interpretaion is the part where coaches start hallucinationg reality.

And even if the metric is theoretically useful, the measurement is often garbage in practice:

• Low reliability: the numbers bounce around not just because the athlete is a complex system, but because you keep changing the measurement. Different setup, timing. warm-up, Effort, protocol etc. Nice, you’re tracking your own inconsistency.
• Low validity: you think you’re measuring readiness, assymetries, strength when you’re actually measuring novelty, compliance, mood, timing, or the limitations of the tool.
• Too much novelty: new tests, new tools, new dashboards, so you never build baselines, and you never learn what “normal” looks like.

Interpretation meltdown or paralysis by analysis you collect more data faster than you can interpret it. Not good.

I’ve worked in enough organizations where people lovingly handed me “performance data” to guide my training. I’d take it with a smile, thank them for their effort, and then quietly let it disappear into the trash… because it didn’t help me make better decisions on the training floor.

I recently read Buchheit’s Sport Science 3.0 and ist the same story, it describes how technology and sport science get out of hand, and how we might fix it by grounding them back in fundamental training principles.

Signs you’re in the data trap:

• More metrics, less clarity.
• You chase numbers even when performance and health disagree.
• You “monitor” endlessly, but you have no decision rule tied to the metric.
• The data creates more anxiety than insight.

Story trap (Narrative Bias “story > evidence”)

The brain hates uncertainty. So it tells a story.

“Her knee pain is because her glute med is asleep.”

“This athlete is slow because his ankle mobility is trash.”

“It’s his breathing pattern. He’s stuck in extension, ribs flared, pelvis dumped so the hamstring pays the bill.”

“It’s his asymmetry beacause force plate shows a 7% imbalance, so obviously that’s the cause.”

Some of these stories might be true. The problem is: most coaches don’t treat them like hypotheses. They treat them like facts. They fall in love with the explanation.

A clean story is comforting. It makes you feel like you understand the system. It lets your elevated heratrate drop but understanding feels dangerously close to certainty.

A good coach uses narratives as temporary hypotheses. Useful for action, disposable when feedback disagrees. No attachment.

Because the moment your story becomes your personality, you stop seeing reality. You start defending your explanation instead of improving the athlete.

Signs you’re doing it:

• You can explain everything, but outcomes don’t change.
• You keep the same explanation even when feedback contradicts it.
• You’re always “right in theory“, and your athletes are still hurt, still slow, still stuck.

Action Trap (Intervention Bias)

This is the coach who can’t leave anything alone. Every session needs a new drill, a new cue, a new tweak.

But in complex systems, more intervention often increases noise. Often times the highest-level coaching move is to not touch the system and let it do ist thing.

Signs you’re doing it:

• Constant novelty for the sake of novelty.
• We need more variation when what you really need is better execution and consistency.
• Athlete never gets stable enough to adapt because you keep pulling the rug.

Outcome Blindness

This is when you get so deep into “strength,” “power,” “mobility,” “conditioning” that you forget the actual purpose – better sport practice.

If your training improves numbers but reduces sport exposure or worse creates injuries you’re not developing the athlete. Coach: “We might have lost the game but our squat numbers improved!“ I see my friend Dennis Wellm silently smiling. Keep the most important thing the most important thing. Its playing your sport.

Signs you’re doing it:

• Great lifts, bad availability aka winning in the gym loosing on the playing field.
• “Strong but slow.”
• Conditioning that kills skill practice.

Don’t try to escape your lovely Disorder Family the uncertainty. You can’t change your family. Change always starts with you. And in this case, it starts with doing what almost no coach is willing to do: actually embrace the Disorder Family. Stop treating them like a problem to eliminate and start treating them like the reality you operate inside.

Because certainty isn’t a reachable state. It’s a projection of our need for safety onto a world that is not built to provide it.

Ist simple physics. Knowledge requires information and information is always limited. In a complex system certainty assumes you can know the full state of a system completely, accurately, across every relevant scale. You would need infinite precision which requires infinite Information which requires infinite time & energy. No system (athlete or universe) can posess infinite information.

Even if the world were deterministic certainty still doesn’t follow because determinism is an ontological claim and certainty an epistemic demand.

Ok enough. Lets go straight to the good stuff.

How to navigate in the system

Most Coaches want the moves. They dont try to answer the meta questions. They want drills, set & reps, exercise selection. “Should we squat or deadlift?” „Whats better sets of 5s or wave loading?“

Navigation is not about what you do un a Tuesday afternoon. It’s about the principles that govern every Tuesday you will ever coach.

Here are some principles: