Each of the 14 Exercise Categories of the SSOS is split into 4 ‘Themes’: Corrective, Fundamental, Challenge and Mastery. The reason for including these Themes in this Strength-Skill Operating System was primarily to improve communication between coaches and athletes but also between practitioners.
These broader Themes aim to describe the rough complexity of exercises deemed appropriate for the athlete and can be used as shorthand to describe their movement competency.
This article is an introduction to the idea behind each theme.
Level 1 in the Corrective Theme is THE most simple way of coaching the desirable movement patterning. There is no easier way that I have found to teach the most fundamental skill that I am prioritising.
For experienced athletes: I called it the Corrective Phase as these are the exercises that I use every day to re-establish desirable movement patterns in experienced athletes whose techniques might start to drift.
For rehabs: They are the exercises that after injury we revisit to restore optimal movement patterning through the repair site before progressing.
For beginners: This is the toolbox of exercises that I use to ensure the foundational principles of coordination are in place in inexperienced athletes. Most exercises in the Corrective Theme can be progressively loaded to some extent and used to create adaptive responses to strength training which is why I use them over what we would traditionally consider corrective exercises (low load, high volume repetitive ‘patterning drills’).
The goal is to get out of the Corrective Phase as quickly as possible. Far more potent training exercises are available to our athletes as soon as these basics are learned.
Characteristic of the Fundamentals Theme is the introduction of simple, dynamic exercises which create opportunities for heavy, adaptive loading. An underpinning philosophy of my approach to coaching for skill-sport athletes is to deepen the neural pathways for quality movement whilst adding horsepower using high-quality heavy strength training.
Exercises in the Fundamental Theme build directly upon the precise skills and movement principles honed in the Corrective Theme. Here we loosen the constraining shackles on exercise techniques and ask athlete to maintain the same postural excellence with additional complexity of exercise demand.
With greater opportunities for intensification in relatively simple exercises, many of these exercises form the bedrock of any strength programme that you can cycle back to again and again to re-establish sound technique under load.
The Challenge Theme is where Low Constraints and Exercise Intensity converge to test dynamic postural control under maximal loads. Where exercises in the Fundamentals theme were chosen for their ability to load with simple exercises, exercises in the Challenge theme are a noticeable step-change in exercise complexity under intense demands.
Where we used positive exercise constraints to teach movement in the Corrective Theme, the pendulum now swings the other way and we have an array of tasks that put quality movement to the test. Negative Exercise Constraints encourage the body to compromise, crumble or fold. The Challenge Theme asks athletes to defend optimal coordination strategies under intense loading that seeks to draw them out of their strongest position.
In doing so we aim to develop dynamic postural control in exercises selected for their functional relevance to sporting movement that are robust to the high forces experienced in sport.
Excelling in the Fundamentals and Challenge Themes demonstrates an extremely trainable athlete in the gym across 14 Exercise Categories. These exercises are the cornerstone of every successful strength programme and serve an athlete’s entire career. Each session of intense loading deepens and reinforces the neural pathways of local joint function nested within larger coordination strategies. Every % increase in strength with these techniques represents a further increase in robustness and readiness to perform high quality movement at ever higher standards of performance.
If the Challenge theme houses the mainstay exercises of performance strength training programmes then what is necessary beyond that? This is what I originally designed the Strength-Skill Operating System for:
What series of strength exercise would, if performed optimally, demonstrate the extremes of human movement and maximally test local and global stability strategies with high relevance to sports performance?
The Mastery Theme houses these exercises across 14 Exercise Categories. The most extreme demands of multiple Exercise Categories completely converge leaving absolutely nowhere for movement deficiencies to hide.
Together they demonstrate an exquisite balance of strength, flexibility and reactive stability.
This is what elite movement competency looks like in a gym setting and while it does not promise elite performance in the sports arena I believe it will ensure that an athlete demonstrating these athletic qualities will be able to practice and develop their sports skills without physical limitation.