Prescribing Strength Training for Team Sports – Part 2

In case you missed the previous part of this video series, click here to watch Part 1 on Prescribing Strength Training for Team Sports.

How to Prescribe Load Without Losing the Room?

In the first part, I covered facility design, organizing training around what you actually have. Program and facility work in circular logic. You design based on what you want to run, but also based on what’s available.

Now we move to how to prescribe the actual load. Weight, reps, and sets. The numbers athletes need to follow.

When I started coaching in football, I tried the training log approach. Give athletes a notebook. Have them write down their lifts. Track progress session to session. Teach them to fish, right?

It failed miserably.

They forgot the log. Lost it. The dog ate the fucking log. So I changed tactics. I printed training cards on thick paper and started filling them out myself during sessions, walking around the gym like a turkey, asking every athlete how much they lifted and for how many reps.

That failed too.

I couldn’t coach. I was too busy being a secretary.

Methods that work for motivated individuals often fall apart when you put twenty athletes in a room, all with different priorities, attention spans, and levels of buy in.

Open sets and logs can work, just not with team sport athletes who want clear instructions, minimal thinking, and to get back to playing rondo.

Subjective methods like RPE or reps in reserve sound elegant. But try explaining to an average soccer player – “Do three sets of five at two reps in reserve.”

The first question is always the same – “Coach, how much weight is that?”

Velocity based training adds precision, but it also adds equipment demands, time costs, and extra decision layers. In many real settings, that complexity becomes friction.

The issue isn’t that these methods are wrong.
They assume clean feedback loops, time to explore, and athletes who enjoy making decisions about loading. Team sport training rarely looks like that.

This article walks through common prescription approaches including open sets, logs, subjective ratings, velocity, and percentages. It shows where each breaks under real constraints.

From there comes a simpler idea. Percentage based prescription refined through iteration, not constant testing or guessing.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s a system that gives athletes clear targets, gives you control, and adapts over time, without turning every session into a negotiation.

Stable systems last longer than clever ones.