Benchmarks and Models: Tools, Not Truths
Behind the Design, Episode 39 with OPEX Coaches Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher
What are you actually tracking with your clients? When a one rep max moves, do you know why it moved? And when a benchmark says one thing and the person in front of you says another, which one do you believe?
Over the last month Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher have worked through the client side of the work: setting the goal, building the progression, and facing the moment it stops working. This episode is the bow on top. Every one of those conversations came down to the same thing underneath. How are we tracking it, what are we tracking, and what are we doing with the information? Brandon calls that the hardest part of coaching, and the two of them arrive at it from opposite ends. Brandon has never been a numbers guy. For years he made decisions by eye, looked at a movement, decided it looked good, and tried it. Daniel built his early coaching around numbers, structural balance, and detail, and found that comforting. Both of them have moved toward the middle, and the episode is about why.
The title is Daniel's, and it is the whole argument in four words. Benchmarks and models are tools, not truths.
What a Benchmark Is For
Brandon's definition is simple. A benchmark is a piece of training that lets you see whether your design is working. It is how you watch your exercise selection and program design play out, from the first day you sit down with someone to the end of a cycle. A one rep max that moves over a block, if that is the goal. A mile time that drops. A body weight that goes down. Anything you can look at on day one and again on the last day.
The caveat arrives in the same breath. Just because a number says something does not mean it is the truth. Numbers can be manipulated, and the information going into them can be wrong, which means what comes back out can be wrong too. That idea runs through the whole episode, and Brandon credits Daniel with it: how accurate can anything be if the information going in is not right?
Redefining Precision
Daniel started his coaching journey deep in the numbers. He spent a long time learning structural balance and the many ways to describe and understand what he was seeing with a figure attached. He developed his methods and tools in detail, with what he believed was accuracy, and he admits why. It felt good. It was comforting to feel he was getting closer to the truth by making the system more precise, and it created value with clients, because a method that looks scientific is easy to sell.
He has not abandoned any of it. His coaching is still structured, still built on percentages and calculations, still uses structural balance. What changed is what he thinks precision means. Is precision making the method more accurate, or is it making the decisions and the interventions he chooses for a client more accurate?
Take a one rep max back squat. The client might not have eaten well that day. They might not have slept. They might be afraid to go to the top end of their capacity at all. There is a lot going into any test you expose a client to, and that test is what you then build your system on. Or take critical speed. To calculate it you need a one kilometer and a five kilometer run. Daniel is honest that if you asked him for a five kilometer run right now, he does not have it in him to push to his end capacity. Calculate his critical speed from that run and the number is useful, but it is not the truth, because what went into the model includes feelings, emotions, and how he happened to perform that day.
So the highest value for him, when it comes to precision, may not lie in the method at all. It lies in the decisions, and in what he reads into what he puts into the method.
It Depends, and That Is the Point
Brandon connected this back to where the series started. When you sit down with someone and develop a goal, that is where the benchmarks get built. That is where you find out what matters. If running is part of the goal, a five kilometer time might be very important. If running is one small piece of getting better overall, does the five kilometer run really matter? Probably not. Does the one kilometer matter? Maybe. Whatever gets the client to the goal is what matters, and the rest is noise.
He knows how it sounds. It depends is the worst coach's answer. But benchmarks and models genuinely depend on who you are with and what you are working on. Having a way to develop them is essential. A strict, structured rule about what to look at, what to track, and what not to track usually is not, at least not when the job is prescribing training for an individual.
Lifestyle Clients, Competitive Athletes, and the Outlier
Asked how he tracks fitness to make better decisions, Daniel split the answer in two. With a lifestyle client, there is nobody to beat. He takes what they expressed in goal setting and translates it into actions and, if you want to call them that, KPIs that reflect the bigger goal. I want to feel more athletic, lighter, fit overall. That might connect to a weighted strict pull-up, or simply to getting a strict pull-up. With a competitive athlete, the demands of the sport set the KPIs, and the client needs to outperform other people in that sport.
This is where he has drifted from what he used to do. In CrossFit, a sport he has spent a lot of time coaching, there are averages. If you look at the Games there is a threshold of strength you need. But the winner is an outlier anyway. Chasing the average benchmarks of a competitive athlete will get you to a level. He is not sure it will get you a win. There is a missing piece, and it is the individual.
His weightlifting example made it concrete. There is the classic relationship between absolute strength and speed, and coaches tend to look at it as just how it is and push people into it. What they skip is the opportunity cost of chasing a specific quality. Daniel works with a lot of masters weightlifters. For some of them, mobility and technical issues would take a very long time to resolve. The structural balance calculation might say they have enough absolute strength and should practice the snatch. But if he can turn the absolute strength up even more, that can still be the net positive decision, and he can leave the structural balance alone. Benchmarks and averages are a useful way to understand what you are looking at. You still have to relate them to the individual and the path you want to take them down, and the failure mode is forgetting to look at the person because you already have a picture of what a good, balanced athlete looks like.
Brandon's takeaway was that you can set metrics as a baseline and you are still going to adjust as you go, as the person changes, as the goals change, or, in CrossFit, as the events change. He has connected with mixed modal training and fight sports for the same reason. The underlying design of both is that you had better be ready for whatever comes your way and at least proficient at it. So you track things that matter in that moment, under a general umbrella of things you always track, and when it is time to progress or regress someone you sit down and ask whether what you are tracking is actually giving you the information to do that.
What Actually Matters When You Track
Daniel's list is short on purpose. If strength is part of the goal, which it is for most people, he keeps one absolute strength expression, or some strength expression, for each movement pattern in his design. They do not all have to progress at once. One of them is the backbone. For work capacity, something like the ten minute air bike test does the job. And on the lifestyle side, KPIs can be habits: how consistent are you with certain things, and, however the nutrition has been designed, compliance is a good KPI in that sense. Where there is a sport specific demand, the KPIs come from there. For a weightlifter the snatch and the clean and jerk are the backbone. For a powerlifter it is squat, bench, deadlift. For a lifestyle client it is something in each pattern at the appropriate complexity and the appropriate type of contraction.
Then he returned to a thread from earlier in the series. Be nuanced even in the wins. Coaches are very good at explaining a bad day. You did not sleep well. You could have eaten more before the session. It is equally important to highlight what went into a good day, not just the absolute weight on the bar, so that you are nuancing the input in both directions. Take credit for a slightly untrue win and you have to live with that logic later. And if you only ever nuance the misses, it starts to sound like excuses.
Brandon added the reason this happens so often. People pick too many goals inside a training block. Even in a setting like CrossFit, or his years training people who had to be ready for anything, you still have to pick a goal, because you cannot hit ten goals in one session and get the most out of any of them. Pick one, and the information coming back gets better. What matters inside tracking is whatever moves the needle most right now. A powerlifter gains nothing by spending time cleaning and snatching. An Olympic lifter gets some transfer from squat, bench, and deadlift, but the goals need to be shaped differently because the output is different. And if someone wants to peak for a powerlifting meet and run their fastest half marathon in the same block, one of those is going to suffer, if not both. You pick the one that matters most, you let the other one come second, and you go explore it at a different time. Otherwise you are tracking strength numbers while running, running, running, and the one rep max on the sheet is not really a one rep max.
When Someone Can Punch You in the Face
Daniel had a question for Brandon that opened the most interesting stretch of the episode. In CrossFit, nobody can punch you in the face during the workout so you cannot finish it. In fight sports, your opponent affects your performance directly. If the two of them fought and Brandon's strength was the first round while Daniel had a shot by the third, you could analyze Brandon as needing more endurance for round three, or you could make sure it never gets to round three. Is that a real difference from sports where you are not relating to an opponent that way?
Brandon said yes, and then described how hard it was to accept. He is always trying to get someone ready for five rounds no matter what. But there were people he knew would struggle mentally regardless of their conditioning once they got punched, and a lot of what he saw in the gym was mental capacity rather than physical capability. He has watched people with amazing cardio, who could go for hours on a bike or in grappling, get kicked once in the stomach or hit in the chest and have their cardio, their strength, and their reaction time disappear. He tries to bring some of that into training. Pressure on the chest and restricted breathing before a conditioning piece. Holding heavy kettlebells for sixty seconds, then a bench press or a pull-up, to mimic the feeling. But nothing really mimics getting hit, and at some point you have to let that go and get them as prepared as you can in the time you have.
Daniel sees the same thing in competition prep for weightlifting. He has a flow he likes in design, speed movement first, and he will still break it leading up to a meet, because if an athlete has never snatched with their quads blown up and then gets bike intervals straight into a one rep max snatch, it hits different. They will hesitate, miss lifts, and abandon the task. Part of this is just experiencing things. At some point you need to race, lift, or fight and find out what the actual problem is. Getting the best input is sometimes doing the task itself and working backward, rather than analyzing too much before you go in. You can strategize a workout and plan the rep splits, and the best information is still going to come from taking a swing and adjusting.
What Would It Take to Abandon This?
That led Daniel to the habit he thinks every coach with a system should have. Ask what it would take to falsify it. What would it take for you to abandon this statement? Then, when you analyze your athlete's output, actively look for those things, because that is how the model changes and improves. The problem is that when you spend years making a model more accurate, you pour your coaching identity into it, and it becomes very hard to change. He admits this is why he is annoying in class. When a mentor explains a model, his first question is where the faults are and what the gaps are. If he looks for them and cannot find them, that is the best guess he has for now.
Brandon's version of the same lesson came from the fight gym. Early on he would track benchmarks and someone would get knocked out in the first round. Or a fighter would hit none of them and win. The in-gym work did not reliably translate to the fight, which is rare among sports, and it forced him to step back and ask what he actually needed to track. The answer was almost embarrassingly simple. Sessions completed. If a fighter completed at least two sessions a week with him, their probability of winning went up a lot. Most of his real tracking moved to the off camp period, where he could set numbers, a ten minute bike test, a bench press, and compare them the next time someone came out of camp. In camp, where intensity and session count went up while food went down and the weight cut began, the metrics that mattered were sessions completed, feeling good, and watching sparring. He did not abandon the numbers in camp. He got more flexible, relied more on his eye and on what the fighter told him, and found that people were happier, completed more sessions, and won more.
He also remembered a UFC fighter who took off his wearable every time he was in camp, because he did not want to be told he had not slept well while in a large caloric deficit and training three times a day. Brandon's point was not that the data is wrong. The performance institutes have the numbers for a reason. It is that in that sport, in that phase, it is very hard to sit down with a sleep score and conclude you are doing something wrong.
Daniel put a structure around all of it. There is the input layer, everything going on in the person's life that feeds the model. There is the layer of numbers you track. In a sport there is a skill layer, because in CrossFit you can be strong with great endurance and still be uncompetitive if you cannot handstand walk. And in a sport like MMA there is one more layer, because your opponent's skills can end it in a few seconds. Football is ninety minutes plus extra time. A fight could be five seconds or twenty five minutes. Every layer you add pushes your strength and endurance KPIs further from the actual output.
Finding a Limiter
Brandon's last big question was practical. You track, you find something lagging. What then? His own example was a back squat that could go up another twenty pounds with better thoracic extension through the bottom. When is that worth building into the program, and when do you acknowledge it and keep moving?
Daniel answered with the snatch. If an athlete's technique and speed look great and they cannot get past a certain weight, it is probably a strength issue, and if moving the snatch is the goal, that becomes the top priority in the design and everything else is arranged around it. He keeps the snatch in the program but drops the intensity and probably the frequency, treats it as practice and skill maintenance, and turns the back squat up. And he tells the client exactly that: this is what I see, this is the road I think we should take.
The more interesting case is when the numbers do not add up. The athlete looks good, gets stuck at a weight, and already has a strong back squat. Then it is probably not technique and not absolute strength, and he starts asking whether they are scared or struggling to get under the bar. Now design gets creative instead of numerical. How can he contextually challenge them so that a weight they can lift feels heavier and confidence builds? With newer weightlifters he has had success with a mental barrier trick. Two plates a side gets in someone's head, so he switches to a fifteen kilo bar with the same plates, five kilos lighter, until they are used to seeing those plates, then quietly switches the bar back. He starts by analyzing, weighs the opportunity cost of each decision, and refuses to look at his athletes through the model as though everyone can be molded into it. The model is where he starts reflecting. The decision about where to take the person is individual.
Brandon's process starts with how important the limiter is in the grand scheme. If fixing it could plausibly add twenty pounds to the squat, you figure out how to work on it. Then comes understanding what the limiter actually is, because most people fall into recognizable buckets. Some squat poorly because they lack hip internal rotation. Some lack core stability. Some simply are not strong enough for the position. He warned about the rabbit hole here. Internal rotation is a big driver of squat depth, and coaches will spend weeks on ankle mobility without ever mentioning the hip. So he tests quickly. Does this hurt? Can you do this? Try this drill. One, two, maybe three things that confirm what he thinks he is seeing. Then it goes into the design, and then he tracks it. If the squat depth looks better in three weeks, or the butt wink that came with the internal rotation problem starts to fade, that is a great thing to track alongside the performance itself.
He also made the case that this is the exact reason accessory work exists. In general fitness, accessory work can be extra stuff you do to feel like you worked out. In performance, where the job is to create adaptation, accessory work is a mobility drill supersetted with a strength drill to improve movement or awareness, or a specific detail of the main lift isolated and trained on its own so the main lift gets better. And for general population clients, if they have not voiced that they want to get better at a movement, the efficient choice is often to walk around the limiter rather than spend weeks on it. On the performance side, when the limiter is the difference between second and first, you spend the time.
Coach People, Not Programs
Daniel closed by bringing it back to precision. How precise can he be in what goes in? How precise can he be in the decisions he makes, and in where he puts the emphasis in his coaching? The old line, coach people not programs, is everywhere now, and what it means to him is specific. Do not dress up your program and method so they look accurate and then forget to coach the person and everything that goes into the model. The model is a tool. It is great for navigating what you see. It is not the truth. With enough confirmation bias you end up believing in the model so much that you stop looking at the individual, and a lot of coaches get stuck there, because once your identity is in the model, you cannot run the exercise of trying to falsify it.
So keep the curiosity about what you put in. Keep asking whether the model is missing an aspect. And make individualized mean something. Look at the person first, before you try to mold them into benchmarks and averages, and before those averages become the filter you look at everyone through. A one rep max back squat will give you information. It is not truth. Do not be unfair to the client by making what comes next look super scientific, taking a lot of credit when it goes well, and then struggling to explain it when something hits the method that the method cannot account for. You need models to make progress. Keep them as models.
Brandon's summary for coaches: none of this is an exact science. How you track, meaning where you record it and how you read it, should be consistent. What you put in has to change from person to person, and the goal has to change from person to person, because it has to match the human in front of you. Your job is to digest that information and send back better information. Get the right information in, and better information comes out.
Where to Go From Here
This episode closes the second block of conversations. Daniel and Brandon are sitting down to plan the next batch, and they are asking for suggestions. Drop a topic in the comments or message either of them on Instagram.
The thinking in this episode, benchmarks that serve the individual rather than define them, and a coach who keeps asking what would falsify the model, is the design work taught inside the OPEX Method Mentorship. The October cohort kicked off today, sold out early again, with Brandon in the room. Enrollment is open for 2027, which runs as two semesters, and seats are already filling. Book a call with a coaching advisor, who is a graduate of the program rather than a sales rep, to explore it.
Behind the Design releases weekly on the CoachRx Podcast Network. Questions on this one go to Daniel and Brandon on Instagram.
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For the full pathway into this kind of program design, look at the OPEX Method Mentorship.
Connect with the coaches
Brandon Gallagher:Brandon’s Instagram (@bgperform_)
Daniel Persson:Daniel’s Instagram (@danielcapersson)
Join us live on Tuesdays mornings 11:30am EST on the OPEX YouTube Channel
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