In high-performance team sports, the challenge is clear: building a strong collective while addressing the individual needs of every athlete. Strength and conditioning coaches Matías Suhurt & Julia Wedman, currently working with EWE Baskets Oldenburg and Swedish Basketball, share their practical approach to solving this balance, explaining how individualized strength training can be effectively implemented within a team setting. In this article, they break down how XPS Network helps coaches organize, monitor, and manage this process in everyday practice.

After many years working In high-performance sports, one of the biggest challenges is balancing team structure with individual needs. While we train and compete as a team, every athlete comes with a unique profile: different injury histories, training age, physical qualities, specific game demands, and recovery capacities.

For this reason, individualized strength sessions are extremely necessary. We have to help each player improve what they need the most, keeping them available to perform at a high level throughout the season.

XPS Network allows us to structure this process in a practical, organized, and efficient way. It connects strength training, medical information, monitoring data, and daily scheduling into one system, making real individualization possible inside a team environment and chaotic schedule.

Complete Athlete Profile

Before prescribing a strength program, we need to build a performance profile that includes:

This information will give us context. Two players might both play in the same position but their physical needs can be completely different. For example; One might need more posterior chain strength, while another needs more deceleration capacity or ankle and foot strength & mobility.

By using XPS Network we can centralize this data, allowing the performance staff, medical team, and coaching staff to stay on the same page.

Individualize the Load Proposal

XPS Network not only allows us as coaches to develop training programs, but also to track the status of players. Using Readiness and Training/Game Load forms, we can obtain highly visual information that helps us make decisions by individualizing strength sessions as well as workouts on the court. 

With XPS, we can:

Preventive and Corrective Strategies

Basketball is a high-intensity sport dominated by changes of direction, jumps, accelerations, and decelerations, as well as contact situations in the fight for space and the ball. This is why some structures are subjected to very high demands during competition. There are some points where, as coaches, we must pay special attention. 

Using XPS, we can assign individualized preventive protocols such as:

We can create these individual programs with our physiotherapist and easily share them with players using the mobile app, which makes our work extremely practical. At the same time, we can print individual sheets from our computer for those coaches who do not want to use phones in the weight room. 

Athlete Interaction

For us, it is very important that the athletes can adhere to our training program. To do this, they need to find the training system attractive. In this regard, XPS Network is great because players can upload information during their training sessions and view their own statistics throughout the season. This creates a personal challenge that keeps players motivated to maintain their level and improve it over the weeks. 

At the same time, during the season, each player’s situation can change significantly due to various factors such as injuries, accumulated fatigue or participation in national teams. For this reason, XPS allows us to create individual notifications with updates on specific training sessions or programs, as well as the assignment of team or individual forms. 

Our Final Idea on Individualizing with XPS Network

As we mentioned earlier, the ability to individualize is essential to achieve the requirements of a high-performance sports team. In this way, XPS Network gives us the tools not only to personalize our work, but also to make it attractive and easy to communicate with athletes and the rest of the coaching staff. We are happy to have this powerful tool that truly makes our work more efficient and enjoyable. 

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