Prescribing Strength Training for Team Sports – Part 1

If you’ve ever walked into a gym with a perfectly planned workout, only to find half the equipment occupied and your athletes standing around, you already know the gap between theory and practice.

Most “optimal” programs assume perfect conditions. Team environments rarely offer them.

This video isn’t about those programs. It’s about designing systems that survive contact with reality.

A Shift in Thinking

I’ve spent years deep in velocity-based training, periodization models, and analytics. I’m often labeled “the VBT guy.”
But here’s what I’ve learned after going all the way down that rabbit hole: consistent, high-quality movement beats occasional optimal training every time.

That conclusion isn’t born from ignorance. It’s what sits on the other side of complexity.
Simplicity earned through understanding behaves very differently than simplicity chosen out of convenience.

The deeper issue is where most training ideas come from. Strength training concepts are largely built by specialists—powerlifters, bodybuilders, Olympic lifters. Team sport athletes aren’t specialists. They’re generalists. They’re not trying to win in the gym; they’re using the gym to support performance somewhere else.

Once you fully accept that distinction, everything changes—how you select exercises, how you organize sessions, and how you design the facility itself.

What This Video Covers

In this video, I break down how I actually approach group-based strength training in real settings:

The slot concept: functional units that force you to align facility layout and program design before writing a single set or rep

Exercise classification for generalists, using movement patterns instead of specificity models built for specialists

Managing multiple groups at once when needs differ, equipment is limited, and you’re the only coach in the room

Contingency planning for the four types of problems that don’t maybe happen—they will happen

A production-line approach to group flow that prevents bottlenecks instead of discovering them mid-session

The goal isn’t to be optimal under ideal conditions. The goal is to be robust under bad ones.

Why This Comes First

It’s tempting to jump straight into loading schemes, wave models, or the latest hypertrophy research. Those things matter—but only after the logistical problem is solved.

• You can’t apply sophisticated programming if athletes spend half the session waiting for equipment.
• You can’t coach movement quality if you’re constantly improvising when something flares up mid-workout.
• And you can’t run any program consistently if your facility design works against your training philosophy.

This video shows how these ideas play out in real gyms with real constraints. There’s an idealized version—but also the “this is all you have to work with” version. Because that’s usually the one you’re dealing with.

The framework is simple: design the facility around the program, then adapt the program to the facility.
It’s complementary, not sequential. And it works whether you’re in a professional club environment or running semi-private sessions in a shared space.

The Bottom Line

A good-enough program executed consistently will always beat a perfect program that collapses when constraints appear.

Watch the full video below to see the slot-based system in action, including facility layouts, station-based exercise organization, and practical strategies for when things inevitably go sideways.

The next videos cover load prescription and microcycle planning—but none of that matters if the basics of facility organization aren’t handled first.