When I first started training, I think I was overly focused on volume.
Then somewhere along the way in my weightlifting career, I shifted completely the other direction. Everything became about top-end strength. I wanted the heaviest lifts possible, and honestly, I stopped caring as much about how much work I could actually tolerate over time.
Now, getting further into my career and training as a master’s athlete, I’ve started realizing something really important:
Max strength matters.
But volume tolerance is what allows you to keep building it.
Especially in weightlifting, we do the same things over and over again.
There’s a simplicity to the sport, but at the same time, there are so many variations and so many ways to manipulate training. The difficult part is figuring out how long something stays productive before it just becomes repetitive noise.
And that answer changes athlete to athlete.
I have athletes that thrive in six-week blocks because it takes them that long to adapt, clean up movement patterns, and finally get to the point where we can really push training.
Then I have athletes where after three weeks, we’re done. Mentally, physically, technically—it’s no longer productive. It’s just becoming monotonous.
That’s where communication matters.
Because I wouldn’t know any of that if we weren’t having conversations.
I think coaches sometimes try to force systems onto athletes before they actually understand the athlete in front of them.
That relationship piece has to come first.
Before I can tell you what’s going to work for you, I need to know:
How you recover
How you respond to stress
How quickly you adapt
How long you stay engaged mentally
Those things matter just as much as the sets and reps.
Recently I’ve talked a lot about improving minimums instead of obsessing over maximums.
And I honestly think this matters more than most people realize.
Obviously, long-term, an athlete needs to improve their max strength. That’s part of the sport.
But inside training blocks, especially when we’re looking years down the road, I care just as much about what an athlete can consistently handle every single week.
Because if we can improve the baseline—the weights they confidently move, the volume they consistently tolerate, the work they recover from—we create way more opportunities for growth later.
If you can train heavier more consistently, now volume increases. Tonnage increases. Rep quality improves.
Everything starts stacking on top of itself.
That’s why early on we spend so much time building general preparedness.
And I think newer coaches skip this way too often because it doesn’t always look flashy.
But GPP phases are where athletes actually build the ability to train.
Running, sprinting, hopping, unilateral work, plyometrics, different ranges of motion—those things build healthier athletes. They build foundational strength. They allow us to increase volume at lower stress levels so that later on we can handle more intensive phases.
We’re not just training the sport yet.
We’re building the athlete that can tolerate the sport.
That’s a huge difference.
And honestly, this is where overtraining usually starts.
Coaches try to skip the foundation and jump right into intensive work because they want fast progress.
But when you push volume an athlete can’t actually recover from, they’re not adapting anymore.
They’re just surviving.
And eventually that catches up.
Sometimes it becomes injury.
Sometimes mental fatigue.
Sometimes the athlete just checks out completely because they’re exhausted by the process.
That’s lost time.
And lost time matters way more than people think.
When we’re working with higher-level athletes, we absolutely flirt with that line of how far we can push them.
That’s part of high-level sport.
But we still have to know where the threshold is.
Because if we cross too far over it, we lose weeks of productive training trying to recover from what we did.
So instead of constantly smashing the ceiling, we want to slowly raise the threshold over time.
That’s how athletes become capable of handling more volume without breaking down.
I think one of the best questions a coach can ask is simple:
After a hard session, is the athlete getting better… or are they just beat up?
Because those are not the same thing.
I’m not coaching for soreness.
I’m not coaching so athletes leave destroyed every day.
I’m coaching for improvement.
And if athletes constantly feel wrecked, we need to step back and ask whether we’re actually building something—or just pushing limits for the sake of pushing them.
At the end of the day, max strength is important.
But volume tolerance is what allows strength to keep developing year after year.
Because the athlete that can consistently train, recover, adapt, and come back ready to work again is always going to progress further than the athlete who can hit one huge lift but can’t sustain the process around it.
That’s the difference between being strong for a moment… and building something that actually lasts.