Athletic Training Centre

When a problem keeps coming back, the instinct is to assume the cause is hidden: a weakness no one has found, a method more advanced than the one in front of you.

It is almost certain thatthe reverse is true.

Recurring problems are not always caused by what you do not know. They are often caused by what you already know and do not do, or do not do to the standard required to change anything.

The work gets done. Three sets, once a week. Enough to say it was done.

But completion is not the standard. Effect is.

A token dose of the right exercise is not a test of the exercise. It is a test of the dose. When it fails, that failure is read as proof that the answer lies somewhere else, and the search moves on: another exercise, another method, another hidden cause still to find.

That search feels like diligence.

It often functions as avoidance.

Basic is not the same as sound. The fundamental still has to be the right one, performed properly, progressed and repeated for long enough to matter.

But once the right fundamental is known, it usually does not fail because something newer was needed.

It fails because it was never done to standard.

The question is often not what you have yet to discover.

It is what you already know, and still have not truly done.

For a week, I have shown you one athlete and one rep.
A single-leg deadlift that started turning into a squat and a spinal fold because, when the movement became difficult, the hip could not keep leading.

Here is what to take from it.
The lift still happened. He reached the floor and came back up. If you only counted whether the repetition was completed, you would have marked it done and moved on.
That is the trap.

A finished lift tells you the task was solved.
It does not tell you how it was solved.

Balance was never only about which exercises appear in the programme. It is about which parts of the body actually do the work when the demand arrives, and where the work goes when they cannot.

Count the directions, as we said. But counting is only the first look.
The harder question is not whether a direction appears in your programme.
It is whether it does its job when you ask.

I asked Adam for one thing: a bent-leg single-leg deadlift, with the hip travelling backwards.
He did something else.
The knee drifted forward. The spine rounded. The hip stayed close to the planted foot. He reached the floor, but he had changed the exercise.
Instead of creating the movement through pushing the hip back, he found the depth through the knee and the spine.
He wasn't doing it wrong on purpose. His body solved the task with the strategy it knew best: keeping the hip out of the movement and finding another way down.
That strategy had been rehearsed for years, in the gym and in the sport, with very little work asking the hip to lead.
The body does not choose movements from a textbook. It reaches for what it has practised.
So when a hip-dominant exercise repeatedly turns into a squat and a spinal fold, the visible problem looks like technique. But the reason it keeps appearing sits deeper.
It may be the athlete's training history showing itself in a single repetition.
A bias does not stay on the programme. Eventually, it becomes the athlete's preferred solution.

Take your last four weeks of training and sort every main strength exercise into six directions:

Vertical push.
Vertical pull.
Horizontal push.
Horizontal pull.
Quad-dominant.
Hip-dominant.
(Muscle groups like arms, calves and trunk work sit alongside these. They do not create another direction.)

Then look at three things.
FIRST, count the sets in each direction.
SECOND, look at where each direction appears in the week.
THIRD, look at where it appears inside
the workout.

A direction that receives 8 sets is not being the same as one that receives 2-3. A direction trained early in the week is going to produce different results than the one repeatedly left until the final session.
And an exercise done first in the workout, is not the same work as one done last, when you're already tired.

That is how a programme reveals its real priorities. Not through the list of exercises it contains, but through the amount of work each direction receives, and how fresh you are when you do it.
A programme may contain all six directions and still be heavily biased towards three of them.

So do not only ask whether a direction is included. Ask how much work it receives, and when you are expected to perform it.
The exercise list tells you what's included. Only the volume and the timing tell you what actually matters.

One of the cases that came back to mind this month was Stefan, who came to ATC a few years ago.
He wasn't dealing with one problem.
His hip had been troubling him for years. He had a history of athletic groin pain. He was dealing with sciatica. And rolling his right ankle had become a regular occurrence, sometimes while walking.
These looked like separate problems.
But Stefan did not need to become stronger. He was already lifting serious weight. His strength was concentrated in a few movements, the standard GAA gym work, heavily quad-dominant, while other parts of the body contributed far less than they should.
So the answer was not to add more general strength training. It was to balance the strength he already had.
A large part of the work became hip-dominant, single-leg training. That allowed us to strengthen the movements that had been neglected, stop the strongest areas from continuing to dominate everything, and build strength without simply adding weight to the same lifts.
Over time, the problems began to disappear.
The sciatica went first. The hip and groin pain resolved. The repeated ankle rolls stopped.
He's still running.
One thing he said has stayed with me.
"Squatting 200kg while not being able to put your socks on doesn't make a lot of sense."
Being strong in a few lifts does not mean the body is strong as a whole.
Sometimes the answer is not more strength. It is better-balanced strength.

Ask yourself how strong you are and you will probably think of three numbers:

Squat. Bench. Pull-up.

That is not accidental. Those are the lifts you are most often tested on, recorded on and encouraged to improve. So, over time, your training starts to revolve around them.

What gets measured gets trained. What gets trained gets measured.

The work that improves those three numbers gets most of your time and effort. Everything else gets fitted in at the end, if there is time.

Nobody decided that your hip extensors (call them glutes if you want), hamstrings or upper back do not matter. Those areas simply do not have the same clear number attached to them, so they are easier to overlook.

That is what makes the imbalance hard to see.

Nothing is being openly rejected. It is simply missing from the conversation.

Squat, bench and pull-up can be useful measures. The mistake begins when those three measures become the definition of a complete strength programme.

Most programmes are not badly written.

They are built around the things that are easiest to test.

Most programmes aren't unbalanced because someone chose badly. They're unbalanced because the gym quietly repeats what the sport already does in abundance.
This is the order I'd work in. Sport first. Then the gym. Then decide what the gym is actually for.
The point isn't to tick six boxes. It's to stop training the directions you're already drowning in.

A rugby and GAA player. Late twenties. Trains seriously - his numbers were good and his work was honest.

His injury history kept returning to the same areas. Repeated hamstring problems over several years. A hamstring tear that took months and never fully settled. A quadriceps tear. A groin injury.

His body kept failing in directions his training rarely developed.

I’m not going to tell you that a torn hamstring proves anything on its own. It doesn’t. Tissue tears for many reasons, and no programme can account for all of them.

But when the same areas fail repeatedly, while the training around them has always leaned heavily the other way, that stops being something you fix by working harder.

He wasn’t undertrained.

He had trained hard, for years, and heavily in only a few directions.

(Photo not related to the case)