How to Get Stronger: Athlete Archetypes and What to Do About Them
This is one of my favorite topics. Getting stronger is where my obsession with coaching started, and it’s something I’ve been watching athletes succeed and fail at for long enough to have pretty strong opinions about why things go wrong and what to do about it.
The approach this time is a little different. Instead of talking about programming in the abstract, we’re going to walk through athlete archetypes. Real profiles that show up in gyms, in Telegram, and in remote coaching inboxes. If you’re an athlete, the goal is to find yourself on this list. If you’re a coach, you’ve got all of these athletes in your program right now. Either way, knowing which category you’re in changes everything about how to approach the next training block.
Before we get into it, one disclaimer worth making.
If you go into a gym and lift weights, do enough volume relative to the intensity of that work, and do it consistently, you will get stronger. The specific rep schemes matter less than people think. More sets, more reps, more weight, the product of those three things is roughly interchangeable in terms of the adaptation you get. So while we’re about to spend a lot of time talking about exactly how to approach this for different athletes, it’s important to say up front: don’t get so cute with your programming that you forget to just go pick up heavy things. The science is always in service of a simple goal. Lift, recover, repeat.
Now, the archetypes.
Archetype One: The GPP Monster
You know who you are. You slay anything that keeps the barbell light. The moment weight shows up, you’re doing damage control and hoping the workout stays short.
This is the most common one I see. And the first thing worth saying is that if you’re genuinely fit but not strong, you probably move reasonably well. You’ve been in this sport long enough to know what a good squat looks like. So we’re not starting with a technique overhaul in most cases. Where I usually find the real issue is in the ability to intensely brace across a full set, not just for one or two reps but for five, eight, ten. And in the resistance to using the tools that would actually help.
Athletes who aren’t strong love to avoid belts and knee sleeves. I understand the instinct. But those tools exist to let you put more weight on the bar, and more weight on the bar is the point. If you want to raise the ceiling on what you can lift, you have to actually overload the system. A four-inch leather belt lets some athletes add five pounds to their strict press and a lot more to their deadlift and squat. That’s the ceiling going up. Use the tool.
The flip side is also true. If you only ever lift with a belt and you never train in flat shoes without any assistance, that’s a problem. These things are for heavy days, not for every single rep of every single session. Context matters. But if you’re in the archetype where strength is the limiting factor in your competitive performance, the resistance to these tools is ego, and ego is the one thing that definitely won’t make you stronger.
The main target for this athlete is classic one-to-six rep sets with real rest. Two to four minutes minimum. The resistance to resting long enough to lift with the same intensity or heavier weight is baffling to me, and I say that as someone who coaches this athlete constantly. You are already fit. You have already proved that. You are not proving your fitness by doing your rest periods in 45 seconds. You’re just proving that you haven’t figured out what we’re trying to do here.
Where I like to start with these athletes is not at the heavy end of that prescription. I use their GPP against them. Higher rep ranges first. Raise the floor. Teach them what it means to brace correctly across a full set of ten, not just the first three reps. We have a 20-week linear squat cycle that I don’t share as often as I used to because handing someone 20 weeks of programming makes it very easy to find a reason to deviate from it. But the structure is simple: start at sets of ten, add five pounds to every set every week, and 20 weeks later you’re doing your old or new one rep max for a double. It has never not worked on an athlete who actually completed it without shortcuts. Getting someone to do their old one rep max for a double is one of the best trust-building moments in coaching.
The other piece that I can’t skip is the headspace. Finding the version of yourself that can bring intensity to the barbell is not optional if you want to get stronger. I call it meathead mode. Stomp your feet, put the right music on, wear your favorite shirt, whatever it takes. You need to find the environment where you can bring real intensity to the weight. And then your actual job, the one that takes years, is reverse-engineering that headspace so it doesn’t require a perfect setup anymore. You need to be able to lift with intensity after a MetCon, before a MetCon, in a crowded gym, in an empty gym, in front of the coach you love and the coach you find annoying. Because competition is not going to give you perfect conditions. The gym has to teach you not to need them.
Subtype: The Lil Fella
Undersized and under-muscled can muddy the waters considerably when it comes to figuring out a long-term strategy for this athlete. The barrier to entry of mass moves mass hasn’t been arrived at yet, and until it is, it’s genuinely hard to know what the real problem is. Maybe you’re 14 and you grew three inches last summer. Maybe you came from an endurance background and never had a reason to put on muscle. Maybe there were body image pressures that kept you small for a long time.
Until you get over that hump, the diagnosis is premature. What I do know is that eating more than you burn and lifting heavy weights is an undefeated combination. That program produces results every single time for athletes who actually do it. Once there’s some size and strength on the frame, the real archetype shows itself and we can figure out the right path from there. It’s also worth knowing that this athlete could eventually find themselves back in archetype four. The long lever to pull right now is simple: eat and lift.
Subtype: The Perfect Mover
You’ve seen this athlete. It’s a MetCon. Everyone’s flying around. This person walks up to the barbell with real intention, works both thumbs into a perfect hook grip one at a time, pulls down into tension, hits a beautiful lift, drops the bar, and it bounces halfway across the gym. They have to go find it, reset the hook grip, and by the time they’re ready, half the class has lapped them.
Obviously I’m exaggerating a little. But not by as much as you’d think.
The perfect mover has had good coaching somewhere along the way. Someone convinced them, correctly, that technique matters. And they took it more to heart than the situation calls for. The result is an athlete who treats every rep in a MetCon like a demonstration set and then wonders why their scores don’t reflect how well they move.
The thing I want coaches to understand about this athlete: you have to figure out what’s causing the resistance to intensity. Fear of injury is common. Fear of going to a dark place is common. Sometimes it’s just a deeply ingrained personality trait that we have to work around. There’s only so much you can do on the remote coaching side when you write two paragraphs of notes and then watch the video nine days later and it looks exactly the same. In person, you can interrupt it in the moment. Remotely, it’s harder. And honestly, sometimes there’s a version of this athlete where you just have to wait for them to make a decision on their own. You can lead the horse to water.
The tool I use most often is volume singles with explicit instructions on speed. As many reps as possible in a minute at 50% of their max. Or 12 singles with a specific rest period that doesn’t allow them to go slowly between reps. The bar hits the ground and they’re already squatting down to pick it up. Not a touch and go where they stop at their hip and reset. Clang and bang. The weight is light enough that technique isn’t going to fall apart, but the format forces them out of the careful deliberate mindset they’ve built.
For the former endurance athlete who falls into this pattern, the bridge I use is the one thing I know they can’t argue with: I know you can go hard, I’ve seen what you can hold for 20 minutes. This is a shorter window. This is less time. Now get after it. That reframe works for a certain type of athlete who just hasn’t made the connection between the intensity they bring to conditioning and the intensity they’re leaving at the door in the weight room.
Archetype Two: The Naturally Strong Athlete Who Can’t Translate It
Big deadlift. Pressing strength. An around-parallel back squat that looks painful to watch but has impressive weight on it. The flying muscle snatch where somehow the bar gets from the floor to overhead and you’re not totally sure how. These athletes move weight. And then you put them in a MetCon and the bar goes really high but never quite lands where it’s supposed to, or they can hit the first two rounds unbroken and then fall completely apart.
Technique and mobility must be addressed here. There’s no shortcut. But the way you address it matters enormously, and the place to start is test-retest. Can you get into the position I’m asking you to get into? Let’s go find out. Let’s try A, B, and C and see which one moves the needle after one set. Can we get the arms overhead? Can the hips get below parallel? Is there a little more ankle mobility available after we address the hip flexor? Those are checkpoint moments that make this work feel productive rather than endless, which is important because this is a long process and athletes have to feel like something is happening or they’ll stop doing the thing.
Barbell therapy is the tool I come back to most. If you don’t know what that is, it means starting at the hip with a muscle snatch or muscle clean, then working down through power position, mid thigh, below the knee, and eventually from the floor. Doing the whole sequence correctly before adding weight. And when I say correctly, I mean in the positions we actually want, not the positions their current mobility allows. We’re drilling the standard, not accommodating the limitation.
The time horizon here matters. A lot. Getting an athlete to a point where they can run all the way through barbell therapy as a warm-up without deviation is sometimes a two or three year process. That’s not a failure. That’s what it takes. Every time you restart at the beginning of a new offseason and run through the whole sequence, your starting point is a little higher than it was. That’s compounding. That’s the job.
One practical note on GPP for this athlete: it’s still the most important lever even here. If you’re strong and not fit, you’re not going to be able to express that strength on a competition floor. That’s just the sport. You have to get fitter while you’re getting your positions and technique sorted. One of the tools I use for that is lowering the weight of the implement in conditioning pieces, not scaling the movement, just the weight. If the program says 95-pound thrusters and the weight is what’s causing the athlete to break down in round two, drop it to 75 and get three rounds of unbroken work instead. Then progress it back up over time. You’re adding the concept of linear progression to the MetCon itself. That makes a real difference both physically and in terms of the athlete’s relationship with that movement.
Archetype Three: 1RM Strong, Can’t Translate It to Sport
This athlete’s one rep max looks easy. Add ten pounds and they genuinely cannot do it. Not a confidence issue, not a technical issue. They just don’t have the strength beyond that one explosive effort.
The issue here is usually reliance on the stretch reflex. The bounce out of the back squat. The pogo stick out of the handstand pushup. The timing-dependent clean where everything has to happen perfectly because there’s no raw strength underneath it when it doesn’t. These athletes are typically fast-twitch dominant with great positional awareness and genuine explosive power. They just can’t sustain it once the weight gets heavy relative to their actual muscle mass.
Volume, tempo, and accessory work are the prescription, but there’s a nuance. If you ask this athlete to do sets of ten on a back squat and let them free-fall into the bottom and use that bounce to stand back up, you’ve essentially given them a different workout than the one you wrote. They need to be in control of the descent on every single rep. Not a strict pause. Not an exaggerated three-second negative. Just control.
These athletes are also hyper-responders to velocity-based training once they have a foundation to build from. Move the concentric portion of the lift as fast as physically possible. If you’re already fast and you move the weight fast, you get significant force production without crushing your nervous system the way heavy slow lifting does. The West Side Barbell dynamic effort method is worth looking into if you want the detailed version. The practical version is: on speed days, use a moderate percentage of your max and prioritize bar speed above everything else.
One caution: diverting too many resources away from conditioning for this athlete is a mistake. The underlying GPP issue is almost always present even when strength is also an issue. CrossFit is genuinely one of the greatest strength accessory programs ever created. The rep counts in gymnastics movements, light squats, power snatches, all of it is accumulating volume in the same patterns that the barbell work is building. Don’t give up conditioning to fix a strength problem. Figure out how to do both.
Subtype: Gumby Vibes
We might not be talking about a real power athlete here, but stabilization is still the issue.
The hypermobile athlete can get into beautiful positions. They just can’t get out of them with any power or control because they’re hanging on their tendons rather than supporting themselves with their musculature. They look great at the bottom of a squat and then grind to get out of it. They have overhead mobility for days and zero pressing strength to show for it.
Many of the same principles from archetype three apply here, but with one important difference: this athlete is not a hyper-responder to velocity training. They need to build the muscular support around those beautiful positions before speed becomes the priority. Traditional strength work first, one-to-six rep range, three-to-five sets, standard percentage progressions. They’re not going to blast their nervous system with it because they’re not strong enough yet to create that kind of demand. Foundation first, then speed. Once that foundation is in place, the principles from archetype three and the reference chart in the addendum both apply.
Archetype Four: Mr. Volume Monster
The name is in quotes because there’s nothing monstery about doing a bunch of work at moderate intensity.
This athlete does a lot. Two lifts, two MetCons, two skills, all the accessory work. They complain about being beaten up. They wonder why they’re not getting stronger. The answer is that they are never actually recovered enough to produce quality in any of it. They’re doing maintenance on everything instead of building anything.
There’s a more sympathetic version of this athlete worth acknowledging first. Some of the best athletes in the world hit this wall at a certain point in their career. They’ve reached a level where the thing that’s limiting them is that they’re not as strong as the top of the field, and the only way to close that gap is to back off from the intensity they love and spend a meaningful chunk of the offseason just getting bigger and stronger. That is a real and hard thing to ask of someone who has built their identity around high-intensity work. But it works when athletes actually do it.
The more common version is the athlete who has convinced themselves that volume is the path to progress, and uses adding more pieces to their training as a substitute for actually executing any of the existing pieces with real quality. More is easier than better. More has visible proof of effort. Better is harder to quantify and requires honesty about whether what you’re doing is working.
For this athlete, the narrative has to be built around rest. Actual full rest between sets. Actual rest days where they’re not sneaking in extra conditioning. Actual sleep and nutrition, which at a certain point become the limiter more than programming ever could. And the justice scales conversation is useful here: one side is what you’re putting into your body through training and life stress, the other side is what you’re giving yourself to recover. If those two things aren’t in balance, you’re surviving, not thriving. The goal in the offseason is to be thriving. That’s when you actually move the needle.
The athletes I respect most in this sport understand how to rest. Genuinely rest. It looks boring from the outside. It’s what makes the training work.
Where to Go From Here
You know which one you are. Maybe you’ve known for a while. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself a story that kept you from admitting it.
The programming we build at Misfit Athletics is designed with all of these archetypes in mind. That’s why there are choices every single day in what you can add to or subtract from your program. One size fits all doesn’t work for different athletes, and we stopped pretending it did a long time ago. If you want the most personalized version of this, remote coaching is the answer. If you want to take a run at it yourself, email me at coach@misfitathletics.com and I’ll point you toward the right tools.
Go find your archetype. Be honest about it. Then go do the work it actually requires.
The Protocols
Throughout this article I reference specific programming tools without fully explaining them. Texas Method, barbell therapy, the volume training progressions, in-WOD lifting, and others. I kept those explanations out of the article deliberately. Stopping to define a 20-week squat cycle in the middle of an archetype breakdown makes for a bad read. But the information matters and you deserve to have it.
The addendum to this article covers every protocol referenced here in full detail, including a downloadable sheet for the 20-week squat progression. If you read this article and found your archetype, the addendum is where you find out exactly what to do about it.
Download the addendum here: LINK
Questions on strength work? We answer them daily in our free Telegram community. If you want to hear the full conversation, check out the Misfit Podcast: Listen / Watch