Most adults who invest in their health train hard – especially the ones I interact with on a daily basis: HIIT, CrossFit, ‘hybrid style’ training. The majority of people I speak to already have training as part of their lives.
They follow programmes, accumulate weekly sessions, lift weights, run, include conditioning – many, many check boxes are ticked. Some train four days a week, some six. Many are disciplined. Many are consistent. All have goals they want from training.
And yet, a lot of them still don’t look or feel athletic. And as a result, they often end up frustrated with their training.
They don’t move with ease, adjust well when something is unexpected or learn new movements ‘easily’. They don’t feel coordinated outside of the exact exercises they practice. They’re strong in predictable settings, but that strength doesn’t always translate into real movement.
So the question isn’t whether people are working hard.
It’s why hard training so often fails to produce athleticism and what the importance of athleticism actually is. For me, this often seems to be the missing piece of the puzzle for everyone I work with.
What most people think athleticism is
If you ask most people what it means to be athletic, you’ll usually get a list that sounds like this:
- Strong
- Lean
- Fit
- Fast
- Able to lift heavy things and do conditioning work
You may also get these opinions:
- An athlete is someone who competes
- You’re not an athletic if you don’t compete or train to a high level
- If you’re athletics you’re sporty and capable
And while none of that is wrong, it’s incomplete. The first ideas are outputs, measurements, capacities and the second opinions based on the impressions we get from external sources.
A strong person isn’t automatically athletic. A fit person isn’t automatically athletic. Even someone who trains frequently isn’t necessarily developing athletic qualities.
Because most gym training improves capacity in stable conditions.
Athleticism is about what happens when conditions are not stable and our ability to move in different ways.
Why we ALL need athleticism
When people hear the word athleticism, they often assume it belongs in sport.
Something for high level or competitive athletes, performance or something that only matters if you’re trying to compete, run faster, lift heavier, or ‘train seriously’.
But that misses the point.
Because athleticism isn’t just about sport, it’s about how you move through life.
Most people don’t lose athleticism in one moment. It fades gradually. You stop jumping, stop reacting, stop moving in unpredictable ways. Surely you’ve seen those videos of people asking their grandparents try to skip?! You specialise into very specific patterns: sitting, walking, lifting in controlled environments, maybe running in straight lines or following set movement patterns.
Over time, your body becomes good at doing fewer and fewer things.
And that’s where the problem starts.
Athleticism, at its core, is a protective quality. It’s your ability to absorb, adapt, and respond to the unexpected. That matters far more in everyday life than most people realise. Because real life is not predictable…
You step off a curb awkwardly. You slip on a wet floor. You turn quickly and misjudge your footing. You pick something up slightly wrong because you’re in a rush. You catch yourself when you lose balance.
None of these situations care how much you can squat or how great your programme looks on paper. They care whether you can respond accordingly!
And this is where athleticism quietly becomes a health and longevity factor, not just a performance one.
A more athletic body tends to:
- Handle unexpected positions better
- Recover more effectively from missteps
- Distribute force more efficiently under load
- Stay resilient under real-world stress
- Learn new movement patterns faster
Not because it’s ‘trained for sport’, but because it hasn’t lost the ability to adapt. This is also where a lot of frustration shows up in training. People feel strong in the gym, but that strength doesn’t feel like it transfers into life. They can lift heavy in a controlled setting, but don’t feel confident in unpredictable movement or trying something new.
So training starts to feel disconnected from reality. And that’s often the missing link.
Athleticism isn’t about becoming an athlete in the traditional sense. It’s about keeping and developing the qualities you need to be a human. And the word developing is important here – just because you are an adult doesn’t mean you can’t improve your athletic abilities!
It’s the ability to move freely, react instinctively, and trust your body in changing environments.
That’s not optional. It is fundamental human capacity.
What athleticism actually is
Athleticism is often misunderstood because it’s not one quality. It’s a combination of skills expressed through movement.
There are a few places where athleticism is broken into 10 different pillars, which are interesting to look into here.
But at a practical level, and to keep it simple, I’d break it down into three things:
1. Control
The ability to organise your body in space.
- Can you own positions under load?
- Can you stay stable during transitions?
- Can you maintain structure when things get messy?
Control is what stops strength leaking. Strength is essential here, but not necessarily the main component. There are other factors at play when it comes to being a well-rounded athlete or human.
2. Coordination
The ability to link different parts of the body efficiently.
- Timing between limbs
- Sequencing of force
- Smooth transfer of energy
Coordination is what makes movement look effortless, even when it isn’t. It requires mind-muscle connection as well as strength. Without the strength required, we wouldn’t be able to get the body to perform the action the brain requires. This is where we start to layer the parts that create athleticism. Coordination is often considered, but rarely trained. Like anything else, it can be improved with intentional practice.
3. Adaptability
The ability to adjust in real time.
- Something changes – can you still respond well?
- Can you recover mid-movement?
- Can you solve a physical problem you didn’t plan for?
This is the piece most gym training completely ignores. And yet it’s arguably the defining feature of athleticism. Because athleticism isn’t what you can do when everything goes right. It’s what you can still do when it doesn’t.
This is something we require in everyday life, not just sport. If we developed this ability more through training, we could likely reduce injury risk. How many times have you heard of someone being strong in the gym but putting their back out sneezing?
Why training hard doesn’t automatically build athleticism
This is where most adults get stuck. They are training consistently, often intelligently, but the system they’re training inside is not actually designed to produce athletic qualities. There are a few key reasons for that.
1. Training is too linear
Most strength and conditioning programmes are built on linear progression:
- Add weight
- Add reps
- Reduce rest
- Repeat
This works for building measurable outputs. It works very well for strength and general fitness. But athleticism is not linear. Movement in real life isn’t linear either.
Yet most training systems are. And while they work to build strength, they don’t always consider the bigger picture – which for me and my clients is the ability to keep training, learning, and growing throughout life.
2. There’s not enough variability
Most adults repeat the same movement patterns over and over:
- Same squat pattern
- Same press pattern
- Same hinge pattern
- Same cardio modalities
Even when exercises change, the structure stays the same.
Same tempo, environment and intent.
But athleticism is built through variation:
- Different speeds
- Different angles
- Different constraints
- Different reactions
Without variability, the nervous system becomes efficient but only within a narrow band.
3. There’s no decision-making
This is a big one.
Most gym training removes decision-making entirely.
You are told:
- what to do
- how many reps
- how fast
- in what order
And often, we go through the motions because these movements are so familiar (or so we think anyway!). It feels like there is no need to perceive, adjust, or solve anything.
But athleticism is built through the loop between perception and action. If you remove that loop, you remove the development of adaptability.
You might still build strength. You might still improve conditioning. But you won’t become more ‘athletic’ in any meaningful sense.
So many times I’ve encountered someone struggling with a movement pattern, and it’s more likely to be their ability to communicate with the body and get it to perform the action they need, rather than simply not being strong enough.
4. Strength gets isolated from expression
A lot of adults are strong.
But that strength is often trained in isolation.
So you get things like:
- Strong squat, but poor single-leg control
- Strong press, but limited overhead coordination
- Strong hinge, but inability to utilise this to create power for explosive movements
The issue isn’t strength. It’s that strength isn’t being expressed through movement. Athletic strength is different. It’s strength that can reorganise itself instantly depending on the situation.
The gap between gym strength and athletic strength
This is an important distinction, because this isn’t an argument against strength training. Strength training is essential – everyone I coach gets strength training. But gym strength and athletic strength are not the same thing.
Gym strength is predictable:
- Stable base
- Controlled tempo
- Known load
- Fixed pattern
Athletic strength is responsive:
- Changing positions
- Shifting base
- Variable timing
- Uncertain environment
Another way to think of this is training to improve your ability to create and generate power. Strength is required for this, but also needed for power and athleticism is the ability to contract muscles at speed.
What actually develops athleticism
If athleticism is missing from most adult training, the answer isn’t to throw away strength work. It’s to add what strength work doesn’t provide. There are a few key ingredients.
1. Movement variability
The body adapts to what it experiences.
If it only experiences repetition, it becomes efficient – but narrow.
Variability might include:
- Changing directions
- Different locomotion patterns
- Different joint angles
- Different speeds and rhythms
- Breaking down movements to work on speed and timing
The goal is not randomness for its own sake and this is where this kind of programming can go wrong 😅. It needs to be targeted toward the athlete or client’s goals.
Like strength training, these movement patterns can be repeated over a period of time to drive adaptation. Then, after review, they can be progressed or changed.
We need enough variation to force adaptation but also enough time for the body to actually adapt and express it in full movement patterns. There are more crossovers between movements than you sometimes realise.
2. Coordination-first training
Most people load movement too early. They add weight before they’ve actually built coordination. But if coordination breaks down, adding intensity just reinforces poor patterns.
So the order matters:
- First: can you organise the movement?
- Then: can you repeat it?
- Then: can you load it?
Not the other way around.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for increasing difficulty but it has to match where the client is currently at. It’s not always as simple as ‘just add weight and you’ll improve’. Everybody is different and the way they train therefore needs to meet them where they are at not what is in line with the ‘linear’ progression.
3. Reactive training
Athleticism is built when you have to respond.
That might include:
- Partner-based drills
- Individual games
- Unpredictable timing
- Catching or redirecting force
- Changing direction on cue
- Adjusting mid-task
The key element here is uncertainty. If you already know exactly what’s coming, you’re not really training adaptation – you’re rehearsing.
Even if you are training a specific movement, this type of work helps the body adjust when mistakes or unexpected situations happen – which, as we know, they do.
4. Integration of strength and movement
This is where most training systems miss the opportunity.
Strength work and movement work are often separated:
- Strength happens in the gym
- Movement happens elsewhere (if at all)
But athleticism emerges when force production and movement are integrated:
- Producing force while transitioning
- Stabilising while moving
- Expressing strength through movement
Why most people never train this way
If all of this makes sense, the obvious question is: why don’t more people train like this?
There are a few reasons. First, it’s harder to measure. Strength is easy to track. Conditioning is easy to track. Numbers go up or down. Coordination, adaptability, timing – these are harder to quantify. So they get ignored or pushed aside.
Second, most gym environments are built around simplicity and repeatability: machines, fixed sets, fixed reps, predictable progressions. This is efficient, scalable, and easy to follow.
On top of this, some training styles (like CrossFit) can create the impression of athletic development because workouts are varied, but often they are just repeated movements within a workout with no real intention or progression.
Not a criticism of any one method; this is just an observation that ‘variety’ doesn’t automatically mean ‘adaptation’.
And most people don’t realise there’s a difference until they hit a ceiling. They assume training harder will eventually fix the gap. But if the system doesn’t include variability, coordination, and adaptation, more effort just produces more of the same thing.
To finish up…
Most adults don’t lack effort.
They lack exposure to the kinds of demands that actually develop athleticism. They get stronger. Fitter. Leaner. More disciplined. But they never fully bridge the gap between fitness and movement quality. Because training hard is not enough on its own.
If your training only builds what you can repeat, it will never build what you can adapt.
And athleticism, real athleticism, is always about adaptation. And isn’t that what being a human is all about?
If you want to know where to get started with moving better, a great place to start would be my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harrietchiam