Concurrent Training: Designing Multiple Adaptations Around One Client
Behind the Design, Episode 30, with OPEX Coaches Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher
How many strength days should I program? Should the run come before the lift? How do we combine strength and endurance without interference?
Every coach has fielded some version of these questions, and most of the answers floating around the internet start in the wrong place. In episode 30 of Behind the Design, OPEX Coaches Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher make the case that concurrent training is not a scheduling puzzle. It is problem solving. And the coaches who get it right begin somewhere completely different than session counts and exercise order.
The Hybrid Trap: Doing Everything at Fifty Percent
Concurrent training, designing for multiple adaptations around one person, is nothing new. When hybrid training got popular a few years ago, Daniel looked at what most self-described hybrid athletes were actually doing and saw something familiar. Training strength and endurance together has been around for ages. The label changed. The training did not.
The problem is not pursuing multiple qualities. The problem is using multiple goals as cover. When you chase several adaptations at once, you are never fully exposed. If you only train for strength and you are not getting stronger, something is clearly wrong. But spread your goals wide enough and there is always an excuse. Not hitting strength PRs? Well, we run a fair share too. Times not dropping? We lift heavy, so that explains it.
Daniel sees it constantly in athletes bragging about volume, session counts, and two-a-days. Ask when they hit their last strength PR, or whether they are getting any faster, and the answer is usually that they have not really tested it. They are doing a lot. They are not necessarily progressing.
Brandon agreed. A lot of people fell into hybrid training because it let them do a bunch of things at fifty percent and still claim an identity. For a professional coach, he called it what it is: a cop out. The job is building a program where the client actually gets better, not just busier.
Start With the Problem, Not the Schedule
The most common concurrent training questions all live at the wrong end of the conversation. How many strength sessions? How many conditioning sessions? Running first or lifting first? None of it can be answered until you define what you are trying to do.
Program design and coaching are problem solving. So start with the problem. Does this person need to get faster? Do they need to lift heavier? What sits between where they are and where they want to be, and what adaptation closes that gap? The program comes after that definition, never before it.
Daniel offered a useful reframe here: strength and conditioning are categories, not adaptations. They are fine for communicating with clients, but they are too blunt to design from. Precise problem, specific adaptation, then the training solution. In that order.
Specificity Is Not a Property of the Exercise
This was the idea Daniel admitted he is still working through, and it may be the most valuable reframe in the episode. What if specificity is not a property of the exercise at all?
Take a cyclist limited by leg strength. On paper, more biking is the specific choice and the back squat is general work. But if maximal leg strength is the actual limiter, the back squat might be the most specific intervention available, more specific than riding, because it targets exactly what is holding performance back.
Brandon has lived the same lesson in MMA. Coaches attach bands to a fighter’s fists and call it specific because it resembles a punch. But punching speed does not come from punching against resistance. It comes from getting stronger, from better hip rotation, better movement of the spine, better reaction time. Those pieces make up the punch. Chasing the look of the sport in the weight room usually means you are, in Brandon’s words, four steps behind.
Daniel put it on a slide worth writing down: an exercise becomes relevant through its relationship to the problem. Specificity is relational. The same back squat can be general maintenance for an already strong athlete and the single most specific tool in the program for someone limited by force production.
Every Adaptation Has a Cost
Daniel’s finance background shows up in how he frames the next principle: every training decision carries a cost. Some costs are obvious, like the fatigue in your legs the day after heavy deadlifts. Others are easy to miss: recovery, soreness, attention, mental bandwidth, and the opportunity cost of everything you chose not to train.
If a client spends one hundred percent of their time on strength, they will get the strongest. Add an endurance session and some strength development goes with it. That is not an argument against developing multiple qualities at once. It is a reason to stop pretending the trade does not exist.
It is also where hybrid programs most often fall apart. Coaches take a powerlifting program built for someone who only powerlifts, stack a running progression built for someone who only runs, and put them on top of each other. Each plan assumed it was the only thing. Together they ignore every cost the other one creates.
The costs are not only physical. Daniel coaches competitive Hyrox and hybrid athletes who, on paper, should be able to bench heavy the day after a long run. Physiologically they are ready. Mentally they are drained, and the session falls flat. Even nutrition becomes part of the accounting. Strength work is fairly predictable energetically, but a long run can dig a real deficit, so Daniel plans fueling around those sessions to make sure the next day’s training does not start in a hole.
Push, Develop, Preserve
So how do you actually organize multiple adaptations without pretending you can develop everything equally? Daniel’s answer is a three-level hierarchy.
Push the one quality that moves the needle most. Develop a secondary quality where you have room. Preserve everything else with maintenance work. A strong athlete who needs to run better might barely touch resistance work for a phase. A fast athlete might put speed on maintenance while building the capacity to express it longer. The hierarchy decides where the training budget gets spent.
Brandon pointed out how cleanly this scales from macro to micro. The phase, the week, the session, and the exercise selection all follow the same priority logic. The most important work goes earliest in the week and earliest in the session, when the client is fresh. If a runner needs to get stronger, starting the week with a long run makes no sense. Let the priority lead and let everything else fit around it, because lower-priority work costs less to complete and recover from.
He applies the same thinking to fight camps. Early in a camp is the time to teach advanced movements in a relaxed setting and build the athlete’s ability to recover, because the final weeks before an event are no time to learn something new. Peaking is not about fixing weaknesses. It is about making the athlete’s best qualities shine when it counts.
One more thing both coaches stressed: say it out loud. Be transparent with the client about what you are pushing, what you are preserving, and what the trade costs. It takes courage to name the priority, and it is the only way to honestly evaluate whether the plan worked.
Protect the Adaptation
Priorities only matter if you protect the conditions they need. Speed needs to be fast. Heavy work needs to be heavy, and it needs a client fresh enough, physically and mentally, to get under the bar. Aerobic work needs time. If a quality is a true priority, guard what it requires inside the week. If it is on maintenance, stop worrying that it is not progressing. That is what maintenance means.
Adapt From the Athlete, Not the Spreadsheet
Even a perfectly reasoned program is still a best guess. Everyone is different, and there will always be a portion of uncertainty. The design is not done when it looks right on paper. It is done when reality confirms it.
That means watching what actually happens. Daniel uses the CoachRx dashboard to track sleep, recovery, and results alongside the coach and client conversation, with one standing rule: do not let the data overwrite the feelings of the client. The numbers are a complement to the relationship, not a replacement for it. Over time, that feedback loop becomes the real asset. After eight years with some of his powerlifters, Daniel can design their cycles in his sleep, because years of observed responses taught him exactly what works for each individual.
His parting advice for concurrent training: stop designing from categories. Define the problem and be specific about it. Name the adaptation that solves it. Weigh what it requires and what it costs. Prioritize it honestly. Place it in the schedule where the priority dictates. Then listen to what the athlete tells you, in results and in feelings, and adjust. Repeat every time you design.
Get Better at This, Because It Is Not Going Away
As Brandon closed the episode, concurrent training is always there. Outside of a handful of single-quality sports, nearly every client you coach will need multiple adaptations developed and balanced at the same time. You had better understand it and get good at it.
Catch new episodes of Behind the Design with Daniel Persson and Brandon Gallagher every week on the CoachRx Podcast Network. Both coaches’ DMs are open, and both work with general population clients, athletes, and other coaches.
Start your free 14-day CoachRx trial and bring principled programming, habit tracking, and high-touch communication all in one seamless coaching command center.
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
Start your free 14-day CoachRx trial and bring principled programming, habit tracking, and high-touch communication all in one seamless coaching command center.
