The Specificity Conundrum and the Intervention Pyramid Part 2 – From Pyramid to Practice
This article continues Part I: Why “Functional” Training Never Really Solved It.
Part I reframed specificity from resemblance to relevance. The Intervention Pyramid located the reason for intervening: begin with human-specific and sport-specific priors, then earn athlete-specific and event-specific updates. The Intervention Barbell protected the broad base while bounding narrower bets. Substance~Form explained why we sometimes reduce complexity to load a resource and reintegrate it where expression matters.
That untangled the exercise-classification problem. It did not answer the more dangerous question:
When is physical preparation supporting sport—and when is it pretending to be sport?
This is where specificity debates usually slide from confusion into cosplay. A coach observes a sporting problem, translates it immediately into a capacity, and then builds a gym exercise that resembles the action. The movement looks specific, but the original problem may have involved perception, timing, positioning, tactics, or an opponent who refuses to cooperate with our periodization plan.
In Part I builds the decision architecture.
In Part II: applies it across sports, separates capacity problems from skill problems, clarifies local tissue work, and turns the framework into a seven-step intervention audit.
One model should produce different answers
The human layer does not erase sporting differences. It gives us a common starting platform from which those differences can make sense.
Table 1 offers examples rather than programs. The same four questions produce different answers without requiring a separate physiology for every sport.
| Sport | Human base | Sport support or protection | Athlete-level question | Event overlay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soccer | Broad strength, running options, jumping, aerobic support | Prepare for acceleration, high-speed running, braking, contact, and capacities that practice underprovides | Does this player repeatedly miss speed exposure, need a local loading target, or accumulate excessive match load? | Surface, climate, travel, congestion, opponent, temporary role |
| Basketball | Strength, jumping and landing options, locomotor variety, aerobic support | Tolerate repeated jumping, braking, contact, and dense schedules without adding more court chaos | Is the athlete constrained by force, exposure history, recurring symptoms, role, or minutes? | Tournament density, travel, venue, opponent, expected rotation |
| Handball | Broad strength and power, throwing capacity, movement variability | Support repeated throws, jumps, contacts, and direction changes; load neglected tissues directly | Does the athlete need more local shoulder capacity, lower-body work, or a different dose around throwing volume? | Opponent system, match sequence, surface, travel, role |
| Sailing | General strength, aerobic base, locomotor variety, carrying and pulling | Prepare for prolonged postures, repeated force against the boat, environmental exposure, and movement the sport neglects | Which positions, tasks, or tolerance limits are specific to this sailor and boat class? | Wind, temperature, race duration, location, equipment, travel |
| MMA | Strength, power, aerobic support, basic locomotor options | Build what sparring and technical practice cannot safely or reliably dose; avoid counterfeit fight circuits | Which capacity repeatedly constrains training or the athlete’s preferred game? | Opponent style, round format, travel, altitude, climate |
| American football | Broad strength, speed options, jumping, throwing or catching support, aerobic recovery | Prepare for collisions, accelerations, high-force actions, positional demands, and large practice costs | What differs by position, play count, exposure, training age, and individual response? | Opponent, surface, weather, travel, game plan, temporary role |
Table 1 — One decision model, different answers. The Intervention Pyramid organizes context; it does not flatten it.
Figure 1 — Sports change the demands, threats, roles, and event conditions. The underlying human does not disappear.
The point of Figure 1 is not that a soccer player and a sailor should train identically. Their differences should emerge from a chain of reasoning, not from our urge to make every exercise wear the sport’s jersey.
This is one of the main ways the Intervention Pyramid resolves the old conundrum. It preserves a common human platform without prescribing one universal program. It respects sporting differences without inventing a new universe for every sport.
Closed and open sports change the balance
The balance between Substance and Form changes across sports.
In a relatively closed sport such as powerlifting, the gym task may be the sporting Form itself. Technique, strength expression, competition rules, and physical preparation converge around a small set of lifts.
In an open sport such as soccer, handball, basketball, or MMA, the athlete must continually perceive, decide, coordinate, and adapt to other people. The sporting Form cannot be reduced to a list of physical outputs.
This produces a practical rule:
The more open and interactive the sport, the less physical preparation should pretend to reproduce the whole thing.
Let sport practice own the representative problems. Let physical preparation support the capacities, exposures, and protection jobs that make those problems more solvable.
The gym is allowed to isolate. Sport practice must eventually organize the available resources inside the information, timing, opposition, and consequences of the sport.
Skill needs a related—but different—pyramid
Physical preparation begins with the human layer because the body is the shared platform.
For the present model, sport-skill preparation begins one level higher. Its broadest useful layer is the sport itself:
- Sport
- Position or role
- Athlete
- Event
This does not deny broad human capacities for learning and coordination. It keeps the classification tied to its job. Once we ask about sport skill, the sport’s rules, information, intentions, and recurring problems provide the first useful boundary.
Figure 2 — Physical preparation and skill preparation narrow differently. They should coordinate without pretending to be the same practice.
Figure 2 and Table 2 show where the two hierarchies align and where they differ.
| Level | Physical-preparation question | Skill-preparation question |
|---|---|---|
| Broad base | What should remain available to the human? | What are the sport’s central problems, rules, information, and action possibilities? |
| Sport or role | What does the sport demand, underprovide, and repeatedly threaten physically? | Which problems recur for this position or role? |
| Athlete | Which capacity, tolerance, history, or response is specific to this athlete? | How does this athlete perceive, learn, and solve the problem? |
| Event | What physical preparation changes because of the coming competition? | What changes because of this opponent, venue, tactical plan, score state, or format? |
Table 2 — Physical and skill preparation coordinate around the athlete, but they do different jobs.
Sport and role define the recurring skill problems
Sport-specific skill begins with the representative problems of the sport:
- What information is available?
- What is the athlete trying to achieve?
- What does the opponent permit or remove?
- Which rules shape the possible solutions?
- What timing, spacing, and coordination make an action successful?
This is why a generic agility drill is not automatically soccer skill, and a choreographed pad sequence is not automatically fighting skill. The movement may look right while the problem is absent.
Positions and roles narrow that problem set. A goalkeeper, central defender, winger, pivot, point guard, offensive lineman, and helmsman receive different information and solve different recurring problems. Role-specific practice should emphasize those problems without freezing the athlete into one ideal solution.
The athlete and event narrow the skill problem
Athletes bring different histories, bodies, attentional habits, preferences, fears, strengths, and solution tendencies.
The coach’s job is not to impose a museum-quality “correct movement” regardless of context. It is to help the athlete discover more effective and adaptable solutions within the sport’s constraints.
Instruction remains useful, but it should be dosed like medicine. Too little can leave the athlete lost. Too much can make the athlete dependent on the coach’s narration.
Athlete-level skill work therefore asks:
- What problem is this athlete failing to solve?
- What information are they missing or misusing?
- Which solution do they over-rely on?
- Which useful options are absent?
- What task change could invite exploration without prescribing the answer?
The event layer narrows preparation to the next opponent, venue, format, tactical plan, or likely competition state. A defender explores an attacker’s tendencies. A fighter prepares for an opponent who pressures from a particular stance. A sailor develops decision rules for an expected wind pattern. A basketball team rehearses late-game problems against a particular defensive coverage.
These are right-side bets. They can create an advantage, but they can also overfit. The opponent may behave differently. The weather may change. The planned game state may never appear.
Event-level skill practice should expand readiness, not hypnotize the athlete into waiting for one predicted script.
Do not make physical preparation cosplay as skill
The two pyramids should talk to each other, but they should not merge into beige soup.
Sport practice is usually the big rock. It contains the information, timing, opposition, consequence, and tactical problems that define the sport. Physical preparation supports that practice. It changes what the athlete can tolerate, repeat, express, and potentially learn, but it cannot substitute for solving the sport’s problems.
Physical preparation often leans toward Substance: strength, tissue capacity, range of motion, energy resources, and tolerance. Sport practice must eventually organize those resources into Form: perception, timing, coordination, decisions, and useful solutions.
The border is not perfectly clean. Sport practice also loads the body, while physical preparation changes the athlete’s available actions. Interaction does not mean identity.
This distinction matters most in open sports, where the problem is alive.
If an MMA athlete cannot maintain position against a skilled opponent, the limitation may involve strength. It may also involve leverage, timing, perception, technical understanding, tactical choice, or an unpleasant mixture of all of them. Adding battle ropes because the athlete looked tired is not analysis.
If a soccer player arrives late during defensive transitions, the problem may be speed. It may also be starting position, anticipation, attention, team spacing, or a tactical instruction that creates an impossible recovery run. Improving sprint time does not automatically repair a bad starting position.
Before selecting the method, classify the dominant problem. Table 3 provides a compact diagnostic.
| Dominant problem | What is breaking down? | Main intervention | Role of physical preparation | Useful update signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity or dose | The athlete lacks, cannot tolerate, or has not recently received a required exposure | Develop, maintain, or carefully reintroduce the relevant capacity | Primary | Response to the dose and change in the target capacity or tolerance |
| Information or skill | The athlete fails to perceive, decide, time, coordinate, or solve the sport problem | Representative practice, instruction, task design, or tactical change | Supporting | Change in behaviour while the real problem is present |
| Mixed | A physical resource and the athlete’s solution interact | Coordinate physical work with skill practice | Shared but distinct | Improvement in both the resource and the live sporting behaviour |
Table 3 — Classify the dominant problem before choosing the method.
Start with the problem; regulate it with dose
Problemming is my deliberately awkward term for beginning with the problem the athlete must solve rather than with the exercise, method, capacity, or dose we happen to enjoy prescribing.
Problem-led planning asks:
What is breaking down, under which constraints, and what kind of change would count as improvement?
Much traditional planning has been dose-led. We name a capacity—strength, speed, aerobic power, tissue tolerance—and organize the exercises, volume, intensity, frequency, and progression needed to develop it.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Capacities require exposure, and exposure must be regulated. The error occurs when the capacity becomes the planning unit while the performance problem becomes an afterthought.
Table 4 compares the two perspectives.
| Question | Dose-led perspective | Problem-led perspective |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Which capacity or adaptation should change? | Which performance problem must the athlete solve? |
| Planning unit | Exercise, workload, exposure, and progression | Problem, behaviour, task, and constraints |
| Physical-preparation role | Build or protect the required resources | Identify which physical resource limits solvability and give it a clear job |
| Skill-practice role | Regulate repetitions, duration, density, pressure, and recovery | Design a task in which the relevant problem can emerge |
| Main strength | Control, progression, and load management | Direction, relevance, and representative task design |
| Failure when isolated | A beautiful workload attached to the wrong problem | A clever task with an inadequate, unsafe, or inconsistent dose |
Table 4 — Dose-led and problem-led perspectives answer complementary questions.
The problem should come first because dose cannot tell us what deserves to be dosed. Once direction is clear, dose becomes essential. A representative task can still be dosed stupidly. A perfectly controlled workload can still solve nothing that matters.
From the skill side, defining the problem is only the first move. The coach must also choose the kind of practice that makes the problem available.
Sometimes a drill is useful because the athlete needs to stabilize a known solution, reduce complexity, receive clearer feedback, or regain confidence. At other times, the task should preserve enough opposition, information, timing, and consequence for the problem to emerge.
This is not another drills bad, games good argument. A drill may be the smallest adequate tool. It should earn its place by serving the problem rather than becoming a ritual we defend because it looks tidy.
Representative practice does not mean adding random “chaos,” shouting colours, or putting the athlete on unstable equipment. It means making the relevant problem difficult to avoid while leaving room for a useful solution to emerge.
Physical preparation follows the same problem-first logic without pretending to be skill practice. If the meaningful bottleneck is tissue tolerance, high-speed exposure, maximal strength, or aerobic capacity, isolate it and load it. The exercise does not need to look like the sport.
A knee extension with a clear job is more relevant than a circus exercise wearing a soccer costume.
Physical preparation is allowed to be physical preparation.
The problem sets direction.
The task makes the problem available.
Dose regulates the exposure.
Feedback updates the plan.
That prevents a lot of nonsense.
Local does not mean individualized
The leg-extension machine exposes a useful gap in the model—or, more accurately, a gap in how we may be tempted to use it.
Where does direct tissue work belong in the Intervention Pyramid?
Responses