The Individualisation Trap: Have We Got Our Priorities Wrong in Team Sport S&C?

A Dominant Narrative

There is a rhetoric that has become almost impossible to challenge in strength and conditioning circles. It goes something like this: the more individualised the programme, the better the outcome. Tailor everything. Optimise everything. Build the perfect programme for each athlete.

On the surface, it sounds right. Of course a programme built specifically for one person should outperform a generic one. The science supports individualisation. The best coaches preach it. So why would anyone argue against it?

Because in the context of team sport, and specifically in a club environment where you have twenty players in the same room and two coaches on the floor, pushing individualisation to its logical extreme does not produce better athletes. It produces worse sessions. And that distinction matters enormously.

The Wrong Thing at the Centre

Here is the fundamental error: we put the programme at the centre of performance, when what actually drives results is the execution of that programme.

These are not the same thing. A programme, however perfectly constructed, is just a document. What produces adaptation is what happens when athletes actually do the work. And what determines the quality of that work is not the sophistication of the Excel sheet. It is the athlete's engagement with it.

Engagement comes from several things. It comes from the athlete understanding what they are doing and why. It comes from confidence in the process and in the coach delivering it. It comes from enjoyment, from showing up to a session and actually wanting to be there.

But in a team environment, there is something else that matters enormously and gets almost no attention in the S&C literature: the energy of the group.

When twenty players train together, moving through the same structure at the same rhythm, something happens that no individual programme can replicate. They push each other. They compare themselves to each other. They encourage each other. The competitive instinct that defines team sport does not disappear when they walk into the gym. It amplifies the session. An athlete who might stop at six reps alone will find an eighth when the player next to him is still going.

That collective energy is a training variable. A powerful one. And extreme individualisation destroys it.

What Happens When You Fragment the Group

Imagine applying true individualisation to a squad of twenty players. Twenty different warm-up routines. Twenty different training objectives. Twenty different loading schemes running simultaneously.

The moment you go beyond three or four distinct training groups in the same session, the room fragments. Players stop interacting. The shared rhythm disappears. Everyone retreats into their own corner, doing their own thing, with no reference point beyond their own programme. You could remove the other nineteen players from the room and the session would feel exactly the same.

From a coaching standpoint, this is also operationally impossible. With two coaches managing twenty athletes across ten different training focuses, the quality of coaching collapses. You are no longer coaching. You are supervising. You are spending your mental bandwidth trying to remember who is doing what rather than watching how they are doing it, correcting technique, driving intensity, and actually being present with your athletes.

The result is a session that is theoretically optimised on paper and practically mediocre on the floor.

A Better Model: Group Prioritisation

This does not mean abandoning individualisation. It means applying it at the right level.

The most useful framework I have come across for this in rugby comes from Ashley Jones, the New Zealand strength and conditioning coach with a long career at the Crusaders and across professional rugby. Rather than individualising by athlete, you individualise by priority group. Players are assessed and assigned to a group based on their most significant physical development need at that point in time. The programme varies between groups, not between individuals.

In practice for a rugby squad, this tends to produce four or five groups.

The first is the metabolic group. These are players who are not fit enough: excess body fat, insufficient aerobic capacity, or both. Their training focus is conditioning, body composition, and building the physical base that everything else depends on.

The second is the mechanical group. Players who are fit enough to train hard but lack the muscle mass their position demands. They are not big enough to compete physically at the level required. The priority here is hypertrophy: building functional muscle that translates to presence and resilience in contact.

The third is the strength group. Players who have sufficient mass but whose force production numbers do not meet the standards expected for their position. On the key movements, squat, bench press, chin-ups, the big bilateral patterns we actually test and track, they are below where they need to be. The focus here is maximal strength development.

The fourth is the neural group. Players who have checked the boxes on mass and strength and now need to develop power output. The training focus shifts toward the force-velocity curve: explosive movements, Olympic lifting derivatives, plyometrics, work that converts their strength base into athletic expression.

Some squads add a fifth group: the maintenance group. Older players in the final years of their career who do not need to be pushed into new development. The goal for them is to stay physically available, manage accumulated wear, and not add more stress to bodies that have absorbed a career's worth of contact. Protecting them is more valuable than developing them.

Within each group, exercises can still be modified for individuals. A player in the strength group with a knee history does not have to squat the same way as everyone else. Load adjustments happen. Assistance work varies. But the training focus is shared, the rhythm of the session is shared, and the energy of the group is preserved.

The Skill We Are Not Talking About

There is a deeper point here about what makes an effective S&C coach in a team environment, and it is not the ability to build a sophisticated individualised programme.

It is the ability to make twenty athletes want to train.

Creating a session with genuine energy. Building a room where athletes compete with each other and pull each other forward. Making players confident enough in what they are doing that they give full effort rather than going through the motions. These are coaching skills. Soft skills, in the language of professional development. And in my experience, they produce more physical adaptation than any amount of programme optimisation.

An athlete giving everything on a programme that is eighty percent optimal will always outperform an athlete going through the motions on a programme that is one hundred percent individualised to their profile. The effort is the variable that matters most. And effort, in a team environment, is largely a function of the environment the coach creates.

Too many S&C coaches in team sport spend their best professional energy on the spreadsheet. On the perfect loading scheme. On the individualised periodisation model. And not enough time thinking about how to make tomorrow's session one that their players will actually want to show up for, push hard in, and come back from having been genuinely tested.

That, more than any programme, is what moves the needle.

Where This Leaves Us

Individualisation is not wrong. Knowing your athletes, understanding their physical profiles, and building development priorities around their actual needs: all of that is good coaching.

The mistake is treating individualisation as the primary lever of performance in a team context, and allowing the pursuit of the perfect programme to come at the expense of session quality, coaching presence, and group energy.

The group prioritisation model offers a practical middle ground. Enough differentiation to address meaningfully different physical needs. Enough shared structure to preserve the collective energy that makes team sport training what it is.

The best sessions I have been part of, and the ones where I have seen the most consistent physical development across a squad, were not the ones with the most sophisticated programmes. They were the ones where players walked out having genuinely pushed each other, in a room where the energy was right and everyone knew what they were working towards.

That is the environment worth building. The programme is just the scaffold.