She walked in looking fit. Lean. Athletic. The kind of person who trains five days a week and has done for years. Football on weekends. Plyometrics during the week. Cardio on top.
By any reasonable measure, Vicky was doing everything right.
Except she wasn’t.
Within ten minutes of screening her — a simple squat, a hop test, a single-leg glute bridge — the cracks started showing. Her femur rotated inward on both legs. Her core collapsed under a full-depth squat. Her left glute was considerably weaker than her right. And the plyometric training she’d been doing? It was making all of it worse.
This is what I see every single week. As a coach, I’ve worked with everyone from first-timers to world champions — and the pattern is the same. People who train hard, train consistently, and still get injured. Still plateau. Still wonder why nothing changes.
The answer is almost always the same: they’re hiding in their strengths.
The Pattern You’re Not Prepared For Is the One That Injures You
Here’s the thing. Most people do what they like. They do what feels good. They do what they’re already good at. In doing so, they strengthen the same patterns over and over — while the weak links stay weak.
It’s not a motivation problem. It’s a systems problem.
Vicky’s quads were strong. Her feet and ankles were actually great — nice toe splay, no pronation, solid foundation. But her glutes weren’t stabilising her femur. Her core wasn’t holding her pelvis. And her upper back couldn’t maintain position under an overhead squat. None of which she knew, because she’d never been properly screened.
This is the part people miss: you don’t get injured from your strengths. You get injured from the pattern you’re not prepared for — the movement you haven’t trained, the muscle that can’t stabilise when it needs to. And if you’re only ever doing what feels comfortable? You’re never going to find that pattern. Not until it finds you on a football pitch, under a barbell, or halfway through a sprint.
That’s not bad luck. That’s bad programming.
You Can’t Divorce the Screening From the Programming
I said this to Vicky during the session: you cannot divorce the screening from the programming. Everything I give a client has purpose. Nothing is random. And the only way to know what someone actually needs is to see how they move first.
When I screen someone, I’m not looking for perfection. I’m looking for the hierarchy of what breaks down. Where does the system fail? Is it the feet? The hips? The core? The upper back? Because the answer to that question determines everything — the exercises, the order, the tempo, the constraints, the load. All of it.
Think of it like looking under the bonnet of a car. You wouldn’t just throw premium fuel in and hope for the best if you hadn’t checked the engine, the oil, the tyres. But that’s exactly what most people do with training. They pile on load without knowing whether their body can handle it. They do plyometrics without knowing if their joints can absorb the landing. They chase intensity when what they actually need is integrity.
With Vicky, the hierarchy was clear:
- Stability first — specifically core stability and glute activation
- Strength second
- Plyometrics third — and only then
She had the cart before the horse. She was jumping before she could land.
And this is incredibly common.
Your Biggest Unlock Isn’t What You Think
When I say ‘stability,’ people’s eyes glaze over. They think of a physio office and a Swiss ball. That’s not what I’m talking about.
Stability is your body’s ability to hold position under load and under speed. It’s the difference between a plank where you’re just hanging out — passive, relaxed, could hold it for five minutes while checking your phone — and a plank where every muscle in your body is firing.
Real stability looks like this:
- Fists squeezed
- Glutes contracted
- Pelvis tucked
- Rib cage stacked on top
- The kind of plank where sixty seconds feels like it might genuinely end you
That’s real stability. And it transfers — to your squat, your deadlift, your landing mechanics, your sport. The passive version? It transfers to nothing.
I showed Vicky this in real time. Got her into a plank, tucked her pelvis, stacked her rib cage, told her to squeeze everything — and then I tried to push her over. The first time, she shifted. By the end, she was a rock. And she said something that I hear all the time: “I’ve never done a plank like that before.”
No. Most people haven’t. Because most people have never been taught what a plank is actually for. It’s not an endurance exercise. It’s a patterning exercise. You’re teaching your nervous system what total body stiffness feels like — so that when you’re under a bar, or landing from a jump, or changing direction at speed, your body knows how to brace.
If you get someone more stable, they express more power. Full stop. It’s not glamorous. But it works.
Stop Cueing. Start Constraining.
One of the biggest shifts in how I coach is moving away from verbal cues and towards constraints. Instead of telling someone “push your knees out” — which almost everyone interprets wrong — I put a band around their legs and let the band do the talking.
The band forces them into the correct position. They have to use their glutes. There’s no option to cheat it. And that means I don’t have to stand there repeating the same cue twenty times. The environment does the coaching.
This matters more than people realise. If I can get someone into the right position through a constraint, their body learns the pattern faster than if I’m just talking at them. My cues become one word. Sometimes they become unnecessary altogether. Because the system is set up so that the only way to do the movement is the right way.
With Vicky’s squat, I used:
- A counterbalance kettlebell to switch on her core
- A band at her ankles to activate her glutes
- A four-second tempo to slow everything down
Within two sets, her butt wink — the loss of pelvic control at the bottom of the squat — was gone. Not because I gave her ten cues. Because the constraints eliminated the problem.
From my coaching experience, this is the fastest way to clean up someone’s movement: Don’t talk them into better form. Build the environment that demands it.
It’s Not a Variation — It’s the Correct Way
Vicky asked me a question during the hip extension work that I hear constantly: “Is this a different variation, or should I always do it like this?”
I wouldn’t call it a different variation. I’d call it the correct variation.
Here’s what I mean. When you do a glute bridge with a narrow stance and your knees caving in, sure — you’ll feel your glutes at the bottom. But you’re also relying on your quads and hamstrings to carry the load. You’re not training the glute’s actual function, which is to stabilise the hip outward.
When I widened her stance, got her pressing against the band, and positioned her feet correctly, she felt it in a completely different place. The side of the glute. The part that stabilises her when she runs, jumps, lands, and changes direction. She said it felt like the abduction machine. And she was right — because for the first time, her glute was actually doing its job.
This is the difference between training a muscle and training a function. You can overload the glute all day in a narrow stance. But if you’re not training its function — hip stabilisation, femoral control, pelvic alignment — you’re leaving performance on the table and inviting injury through the front door.
It’s not about more exercises. It’s about the right positions.
The Pyramid: Stability, Strength, Speed
If there’s one framework I want you to take away from this, it’s the pyramid. This is how proper training is structured:
- Stability at the base
- Strength in the middle
- Speed and power at the top
Most people try to start at the top. They want plyometrics. They want explosive work. They want the sexy stuff. But without the base, the top crumbles. You can’t express power through an unstable system. The force has to go somewhere — and if your joints can’t handle it, it bleeds into tissue damage.
With Vicky, the plyometric work she’d been doing — three sets of twelve reps — was the wrong approach entirely. Plyometrics isn’t about endurance. It’s about explosion. Quality, not quantity. We’re looking at contact time on the ground. If you jump like an elephant — heavy, slow, loud — you’re just training bad habits and bad patterns. What you want is bouncy, fast, reactive. Think of those Russian weightlifters doing box jumps — they barely touch the ground before they’re airborne again. That’s the standard.
But you can’t get there if your body can’t stabilise the landing. So we build from the bottom. We get the core bracing properly. We get the glutes firing. We get the squat pattern clean. And then — when those boxes are checked — we layer on the speed work.
Different seasons, different priorities. But always built on the same foundation.
The Toolbox That Changes Everything
People ask me how I can train such a diverse range of clients — from someone who’s never been in a gym, all the way to world champions. The answer is the toolbox.
Early in my career, I looked at all the modalities of training: bodybuilding, powerlifting, weightlifting, gymnastics, strongman. And I thought — I’m going to spend time in every single one of these, but learn from the best in the world. My mentor, Charles Poliquin, trained over 800 Olympic athletes. That gave me a perspective that most trainers never get.
Because to a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Here’s what each discipline optimises for:
- Powerlifters optimise for strength and analyse patterns brilliantly — but their joints get beat up over time
- Bodybuilders can train for life without destroying their body — but they might lack explosive capacity
- Gymnasts have incredible mobility work that addresses the exact problems powerlifting creates
The bigger your toolbox, the more ways you can solve the same problem. Any movement can be regressed. Any movement can be progressed. The mastery is understanding the spectrum between the two — and knowing exactly where someone sits on it.
In other words, I’m not trying to make everyone train the same way. I’m trying to find the fastest path to results for each person, using every tool available. That’s why we can work with such a diverse range of people at Enterprise Fitness — because we’re not forcing anyone into a mould.
So What Does This Mean for You?
If you’ve been training for months or years and you’ve never been properly screened, you’re building on a foundation you haven’t inspected. You might be fine. You might also be six months away from an injury that a thirty-minute assessment would have prevented.
Here’s what I’d challenge you to do:
- Get screened. Not by a mate. Not by a YouTube video. By someone who understands the hierarchy of movement quality — stability, strength, then speed.
- Train your weaknesses first. Not after your ‘real’ workout. Before it. The activation and stability work isn’t a warm-up you rush through. It’s the foundation everything else is built on.
- Stop chasing load before you’ve earned the pattern. If your squat falls apart at the bottom, adding more weight isn’t going to fix it. Slow down. Use tempos. Use pauses. Get the position right — then add load.
Your strengths aren’t going anywhere. But your weaknesses? They’re either your biggest vulnerability or your biggest unlock.
Choose which one.
