I met a long-time athlete’s teammates while observing a practice recently and was flattered when one of them celebrated the minimalism I call for in my book Fast Kids Don’t Train Slow.

The player implied that their old method was “wrong,” while my method was “right.”

I may have put them off a bit by immediately pointing out an interesting counterexample – another athlete I work with who definitely needs more running and more lifting and just…more.

In a few months of experimenting together, I observed that my other athlete thrives on high volume with wild variation in intensity. That’s big contrast to the team I spent most of my time with in Ultimate, who collectively needed a lot less but at far higher quality (intensity) than they were used to.

But it was never lost on me working with that team that some of the most seasoned people also needed more volume and they needed more recovery. It’s a weird sentence even now: some athletes need MORE work and MORE restoration in order to progress.

Here’s the real point: Myers-Briggs gave us 16 personalities; Gallup talks about 34 strengths; traditional medicines often have 3 or 4 elements that characterize people. The pattern-selling part of our humanness is looking for clear partitions we can use to make decisions and organize our thinking by. But development is an N=1 study.

There are principles that seem to work in sports. Deliberate practice; vision of excellence; repetition, repetition, repetition.

Those are for skills. There’s a few principles that seem to work for conditioning: specificity to competition; balancing load and recovery; decision-making under fatigue.

And there are norms and standards that seem to work for categories of sport, ranging from strength to endurance to armor, covering court to field to mat, contact and collision and technical.

But what doesn’t work is fitting an athlete to a “type”, then writing One Program To Rule Them All. Every coach has a philosophy and a broad set of biases. Every coach’s approach works for *someone*.

But the measure of a coach is no different than the measure of a teacher: it doesn’t matter what is taught, it matters what is learned.

So my method of preparing athletes isn’t “right.” I don’t even have a method, in the sense that you could point to a program I’ve written and identify it as “100% Dunte” then use that program for yourself with any expectation of success. If you’re training on a way that (1) isn’t producing injury and (2) keeps you progressing or performing at the level you want, YOUR program is right!

…but my “method” has worked for a lot of athletes. My method is…personalize the training.

You know, my Myers-Briggs profile identifies me as a Commander, someone with vision and the ability to synthesize lots of inputs to make a contextual decision. My StrengthsFinder results point to context, strategy, and individualization, a person who looks for the unique path through a given maze. And my approach to coaching goes like this: don’t hurt the athlete, prevent the athlete from getting hurt, increase the athlete’s capacity for high performance. Assess, intervene, repeat.

General programs work for beginners because everything works for beginners.

General programs work for a majority of intermediates because the majority of athletes need the structure of a program to be consistent.

But the remainder of intermediates, like those who come from structure in Sport A to any condition for Sport B, and for all advanced athletes and for everyone with a major injury in their past, general programs don’t work. They need modification. They need personalization.

The “right” method is the one that makes you better. And effective training programs have never been and will never be one size fits all.

One Size Fits One.

Go find your size.

If you’re a performer chasing a high-level in your sport, I can probably help you find it.