Coaching and testing ain't the same thing
For years, I have heard that The Wire is one of, if not the best, television shows of all time. Recently, the New York Times ranked it as the second-best show of the 21st century in both its readers’ choice and critics’ lists. Breaking Bad came first in both, which, for what it’s worth, I agree with. Would I say The Wire is my second-favourite show of the 21st century? No. But it should be watched. I haven’t seen another show that feels so real despite having no meaningful connection to the places, institutions or people it explores.
The Wire was an HBO series made in the early-to-mid 2000s about the systems operating within Baltimore. The first season largely explores the city through drug organisations and the police officers investigating them, before later seasons turn towards politics, education and the media and the manner in which all these systems interact with one another. As the show progresses, the divide between good and bad becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. People respond to the institutions they inhabit, while those institutions become more concerned with protecting their methods than solving the problems they were created to address.
While watching it recently, a scene in Season 3 resonated heavily with some of the thoughts I’ve had about coaching. As is probably inevitable when you become obsessed with something, I find myself drawing inspiration from things that have absolutely nothing to do with S&C. This particular conversation between Major Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin and Sergeant Ellis Carver struck a chord with me.
Colvin is under pressure from his superiors to reduce crime in the Western District, an area notorious for drug trafficking and gun violence. Having concluded that the police will not stop people taking or selling drugs, he implements a fairly bold strategy behind his superiors’ backs. Drug possession and distribution are effectively legalised in several designated areas, which become known as ‘Hamsterdam’. The consequences are complicated, which is true of almost everything in The Wire, but crime falls across the surrounding neighbourhoods and residents begin to feel safer.
Carver, meanwhile, is an up-and-coming police officer. He works hard, has good instincts and, by the standards of the institution around him, is doing a reasonably good job. Colvin tells him as much before following it with a slightly less flattering assessment: when it comes to actual policing, Carver “ain’t shit”. Carver has learned how to perform the most visible parts of police work without developing much understanding of the community he is responsible for. He can raid corners, make arrests and produce the numbers his superiors ask for, but nobody in the neighbourhood trusts him enough to explain what is actually happening.
“Soldiering and policing, ain’t the same thing,” Colvin tells him.
Strength and Conditioning has to make the same distinction.
Soldiering and policing
Soldiering, as Colvin describes it, is reactive. It deals with the problem standing immediately in front of you and produces visible evidence that something was done. Another corner is raided, another arrest is made and another statistic is added to the report. Policing requires a different understanding of the job. It relies on knowledge of the environment, professional judgement and relationships with the people who experience that environment from within. Its purpose extends beyond responding to the visible problem towards influencing the conditions that keep producing it.
S&C has become considerably better at measuring athletes and tracking changes in physical qualities. That information has improved our ability to evaluate training, but it has also given the profession a convincing way to demonstrate success entirely within its own domain. A measured quality improves, the result is presented and the programme appears to have worked. Whether the problem the athlete experiences in their sport has changed remains a separate question.
That is the point at which testing and coaching separate. Testing records what an athlete produced in a particular task. Coaching requires an explanation for why the result exists, an understanding of whether it matters and a judgement about how changing it could influence the athlete beyond the testing environment. A profile can describe an athlete in extraordinary detail while revealing very little about why they perform as they do.
The same result can emerge from different processes. An athlete records a low score because they lack the relevant physical quality. Another produces the same score because of how they coordinate the task. Their confidence in the movement, interpretation of the instructions or willingness to exert themselves all sit behind a single number. The test captures the outcome and leaves the practitioner to determine what produced it.
I increasingly think about this through capacity, access and expression. Capacity describes the physical qualities the athlete possesses. Access describes whether those qualities are available within the sporting task. Expression is what survives when performance occurs under the conditions that matter. S&C testing largely tells us something about capacity. Coaching is concerned with the journey from possessing a quality to accessing and expressing it.
Coaching begins where the report ends.
The numbers game
The institutions in The Wire are obsessed with numbers because numbers make complicated problems manageable from a distance. Arrests can be counted, crime rates can be presented, districts can be compared and commanders can be held accountable. People then organise their behaviour around the numbers that determine whether they appear successful.
S&C may be operating under similar pressure. Practitioners are expected to justify their programmes and demonstrate that the time allocated to physical preparation is producing a return. Sporting performance is influenced by too many people and too many interacting factors for an S&C programme to claim it cleanly. Physical adaptations are much easier to attribute and present, so they become the evidence used to demonstrate that the programme worked.
The result is a closed system of accountability. The programme prescribes the intervention, selects the measure and interprets improvement in that measure as evidence of its own success. Athletes become better at the activities S&C has chosen to value, and the resulting numbers prove that S&C has delivered value.
The programme is both setting and marking its own exam.
The pressure to demonstrate progress also changes training. If one output becomes the accepted evidence of development, training naturally organises itself around producing that output. The athlete becomes increasingly familiar with the task and the conditions under which it is assessed. Successful testing then becomes indistinguishable from successful development.
I see this most clearly in speed training. It is easy to believe that sprinting fast is simply the product of repeatedly sprinting fast. If a 10 m fly is the main evidence used to judge speed development, the programme gradually becomes a collection of 10 m fly efforts. Every session provides another opportunity to express the quality and another number that can confirm the work is effective.
I have started to think of the process differently. Roughly 80% of sprint training is spent building what allows an athlete to run fast, with the remaining 20% giving them opportunities to express it. The numbers are not literal, but the distinction matters. Building speed includes work that sits above and below the intensity of the test. Technical changes require time before they become stable. Gym work contributes qualities that support sprinting while sometimes suppressing speed in the short term. A productive phase of training can make the athlete temporarily worse at displaying the outcome being pursued.
A programme organised around continual proof of improvement has little room for this. It rewards frequent expression because expression produces reassuring data. The athlete can repeatedly demonstrate their current level while the qualities that might shift that level receive less attention. The test was supposed to reveal what the training had built. Instead, the training becomes a rehearsal for producing the test result.
Previous generations of coaches had considerably less data available to them. Their evidence was often based on what appeared in the sport: the athlete hit harder, kicked further, held their speed for longer or finished games more strongly. Those observations were imprecise and vulnerable to bias, but they directed attention towards the domain the intervention existed to influence. Modern S&C often reverses that relationship. Evidence generated inside physical preparation is used to tell the athlete and technical coach why performance outside it has improved.
Carver is policing in the way his institution has defined policing. Raids, arrests and accumulated statistics are what the Baltimore Police Department recognises as the job. Colvin challenges that definition because the activity has become detached from the change it was meant to create. S&C faces the same divide between producing evidence of work and influencing the wider system.
Nobody willing to talk to you
Testing in private and professional environments often begins with a battery. Athletes move from one assessment to the next because that is what the programme does. They may finish with a collection of scores and little understanding of why the tests were selected, what the results represent or whether performing well or poorly has any relevance to them. Data has been collected, but very little meaning has been created around it.
The contradiction becomes obvious when an athlete who performs poorly across the S&C battery is among the fastest or most powerful performers in their sport. The athlete experiences themselves as highly capable in the environment they value, while the testing process describes them through a series of deficiencies. Telling them that a particular score needs to improve carries little weight when the connection to their performance has never been established.
The more interesting starting point is what the athlete wants from S&C. They may want to feel more stable in a contest, maintain speed late in a race or trust their body after an injury. The practitioner can connect that experience to a quality they have the expertise to influence. Testing then contributes to a shared problem rather than generating the problem on the athlete’s behalf.
Buy-in means something different under that model. It is often treated as the practitioner’s ability to persuade an athlete that the programme is worthwhile. A more meaningful form develops when the athlete recognises something they value within the training process. The data helps explain an experience they already understand, while the athlete can report whether changes in the programme are appearing where performance is actually felt.
That exchange relies on timing and language. A result returned weeks after testing has little relationship with the session or performance the athlete remembers. A dashboard filled with terminology that only the practitioner understands can be accurate without being useful. The loop closes when both people can connect the measure, the training decision and the athlete’s experience while those connections still matter.
Colvin tells Carver that nobody is looking out for him and nobody is willing to talk to him. Carver has accumulated activity without developing the relationships that would allow him to interpret what is happening. The S&C equivalent is collecting more information about an athlete while knowing very little about whether the information matters to them. More data passes through the system as the athlete remains disconnected from its meaning.
Knowing the territory
Colvin’s idea of policing depends on knowing the territory. A police officer learns the neighbourhood and builds relationships with the people inside it because they hold knowledge unavailable from the institution’s statistics. For S&C, the territory is the sport. Understanding it requires engagement with the people who know the performance problem from within.
The technical coach carries a vision of what the athlete needs to do in competition. They understand the athlete’s role, the situations that expose them and the qualities they value. The athlete knows how those situations are experienced and whether a change in training has altered anything meaningful. The S&C practitioner brings expertise in physical preparation and uses it to interpret how training can contribute to that picture.
Out of that relationship comes a shared model of performance. The technical coach is not handing the S&C practitioner a list of physical qualities to develop, and the practitioner is not arriving with a testing profile that independently defines the athlete’s needs. Their perspectives shape the problem together. S&C remains its own area of expertise, but its direction comes from the sporting environment it exists to influence.
Without that connection, the profession becomes capable of producing increasingly detailed information about qualities nobody has established are relevant. The numbers look precise because they are precise within the tasks used to produce them. Precision cannot decide what matters. That judgement depends on knowing the sport and remaining close to the people who understand it.
The amount of information now available makes this distinction more important. Even as a relatively young coach, the data currently present in my daily practice barely resembles what was available at the beginning of my career. Each new measure makes another part of the athlete visible and gives the programme another way to demonstrate change. It also creates another opportunity for the measurement to define the job.
I keep returning to one thing in the conversation between Colvin and Carver. Carver is producing the outcomes his institution recognises as police work. Colvin steps outside that definition and asks whether those activities are changing the community they are meant to serve. His version of policing is harder to represent through a single number because it exists in relationships, local knowledge and the gradual movement of a wider system.
Thinking like Colvin changes the question. The issue is no longer whether the athlete improved according to S&C. It is whether S&C influenced something the athlete, the coach and the sport recognise as improvement.
Testing and coaching, ain’t the same thing.
Thanks for reading.
Cheers,
Jack
Comments