Means vs Modalities
Means versus Modalities
Why the engine doesn’t matter if the chassis can’t hold the road
Count the units in a sport science or human movement degree sometime. Physiology shows up three, four, five times across a degree — sometimes more once you get to a strength and conditioning master’s. Biomechanics gets one unit, if that. Then ask yourself why so many coaches graduate unable to explain how the strength they just spent years building in a gym actually gets onto the field.
That imbalance isn’t trivia. It’s the reason our industry still treats strength training and sport-specific conditioning as two separate departments that occasionally send each other a memo. They’re not separate. They’re a chain, and most programs are only building the first link.
General strength — what you build in the gym — has to convert into specific strength: the ability to apply force in the actual shape the sport asks for. A stride. A stroke. A change of direction on a court. And then it has to convert again, into the ability to apply that force at the rate and for the length of time the sport actually demands. Ninety minutes of repeated multidirectional speed efforts in a football code is a different demand to an eight- or ten-minute judo round broken up by grips, breaks, and restarts. Same starting material — force — completely different final product.
Here’s the way I put it to the coaches I work with, because it’s the only version of this that actually sticks: you can drop a massive engine into a Mini. The horsepower is real. None of it matters, because the chassis can’t hold the road at the speed that engine wants to go. The engine is metabolic fitness — aerobic and anaerobic capacity, the physiology side of the ledger. The chassis is strength: general strength built in the gym, then progressively shaped into the specific strength needed to actually run on the track or field. That’s the imbalance sitting inside every curriculum I just described — years studying the engine, almost none studying the chassis. Skip the chassis and the engine size doesn’t matter. You get a fast engine sitting inside a car that shakes itself apart at the first corner. And specific conditioning is just asking how long the whole car can hold together at race pace, once both pieces actually exist.
I had this exact discussion recently. Running athlete, old ACL reconstruction from a few years ago, likely under-rehabbed the first time around, plus a meniscus clean-up on the same knee more recently. The coach wanted to build an aerobic base before touching faster running again. Understandable instinct. Wrong one.
Aerobic capacity is the easiest physical quality in the entire toolbox to change. Running-specific speed and mechanics are the hardest — longest to build, longest to get back once lost, particularly when related to lower limb injuries that create huge gait changes — i.e., bad habits that set in and stay. So the plan for this athlete isn’t a base aerobic phase first. It’s shorter distances, built up carefully, with the actual work going into drilling, coordination, and ground contact strength — teaching the leg to tolerate and produce force again before asking it to do that at any real speed. This is a classic short-long development model — short, higher-intensity efforts standing in for what would normally be a continuous jog. Not sprinting. Just enough load, briefly and often, to make the leg produce force it currently can’t. Only once that’s in place does the running progress to a metabolic focus, and even then it’s quality. Even at that point the target isn’t exclusively aerobic fitness. It’s speed reserve. So that when this athlete is back running properly, there’s something left mechanically beyond jog speed.
There’s research that backs this up directly, even though it comes from a different event group. In middle-distance running — 800m and 1500m — the concept is called anaerobic speed reserve: the gap between an athlete’s fastest possible sprint and the pace their aerobic engine can sustain. Sandford, Allen, Kilding, Ross, and Laursen studied nineteen elite 800m and 1500m runners and found that reserve — not raw aerobic fitness — was what separated the fastest athletes from the rest. Makes sense once you say it out loud: you can’t access the higher speeds needed to express a VO2 max your force production can’t reach. The engine doesn’t matter if the chassis can’t get it to redline.
The Means vs. Modality
In preparing an athlete there’s an old Russian training axiom that more often than not confuses younger coaches (who no longer read extensively): means versus modality. The modality is what you’re doing — the drill, the exercise, the running. The means is why you’re doing it — the actual adaptation you’re chasing. Two things can look identical from the outside and be doing completely different jobs.
A dribble drill looks like running to anyone watching from the sideline. It isn’t conditioning. Done right, it’s repeated motor patterning aimed at pelvic and frontal-plane control and ground contact strength — a specific-strength activity wearing a running costume. Same story with a moderate effort on a curved treadmill for an athlete coming back from injury. Looks like some type of anaerobic conditioning work to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at. It isn’t aerobic or anaerobic work at all — it’s mechanically demanding in a way that builds strength and resilience back into a joint that needs it. Same modality, completely different means, and if you can’t tell the difference, you’re coaching the wrong thing.
I’m watching this exact mistake happen at scale right now — AFL pre-seasons, soccer World Cup buildups, American football at every level from college programs to the NFL. Teams pile on metabolic and anaerobic conditioning and barely touch whether the athlete’s mechanical chassis can produce and tolerate real speed in the first place. Then coaches get confused when an athlete “can’t get their heart rate up” during high-speed work and read it as a fitness problem. It isn’t. The legs aren’t strong enough to generate the speed being asked for, so the intensity the drill is supposed to create never actually shows up. You can’t rev an engine past the point the chassis lets it go.
“Build the chassis before you chase the engine.”
Fix the mechanics before you fix the conditioning.
Ask what you’re actually training — not what it looks like from the sideline.
There’s a bigger frame underneath all of this, one that I’m sharing regularly with clients across multiple domains — Capacity, Control, Chaos. What the athlete’s got. What they can do with it. What the game does to it once the whistle blows.
That’s the next one.
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Book a DemoReference: Sandford, G. N., Allen, S. V., Kilding, A. E., Ross, A., & Laursen, P. B. (2019). Anaerobic Speed Reserve: A Key Component of Elite Male 800-m Running. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 14(4), 501–508.
