The Transfer Assumption Fallacy Principle
Most coaches have seen it—and if we’re being honest, most have fallen into it at some point.
An athlete comes into a program, starts getting stronger, moving more weight, looking sharper in the weight room. Their squat goes up. Their lifts get cleaner. They feel more confident. From the outside, everything looks like progress. And naturally, the assumption creeps in: this must be making them better on the field.
But that assumption is exactly where many programs go wrong. This is what I call The Transfer Assumption Fallacy Principle—the belief that improvement in an exercise automatically leads to improvement in sport performance.
At first, it makes sense. Training is supposed to improve performance. And early on, it often does. A weaker athlete gets stronger, and you see clear carryover. They run faster, jump higher, and move better. But then something interesting happens. The relationship starts to change.
Take sprinting, for example. You might see an athlete dramatically improve their squat numbers. Initially, their acceleration improves alongside it. But over time, there’s a tipping point—where continuing to chase squat strength no longer improves speed, and in some cases, actually begins to interfere with it. The athlete gets better at squatting, but not better at sprinting.
That’s the fallacy.
Just because an athlete is improving at a task doesn’t mean they’re improving at the task that actually matters.
The problem is that exercises are often mistaken for outcomes. Coaches program movements, track progress within those movements, and assume that progress equals performance. But sport is not a collection of exercises—it’s a collection of highly specific, coordinated movement patterns executed under time, space, and decision-making constraints.
The weight room is controlled. Sport is chaotic.
And improvement in a controlled environment doesn’t automatically transfer to chaos.
This is where many well-designed programs still fall short. They build capacity, but not always usable capacity. They improve outputs, but not always the right outputs. The athlete adapts—but sometimes in ways that don’t align with the demands of their sport.
The key shift is understanding that transfer is not guaranteed—it’s earned.
Every exercise exists on a spectrum of transfer. Some have high relevance to sport, others are more general. Both have value, but only if you understand their role. General exercises can build a foundation, but they must eventually give way to more specific, sport-relevant work if performance is the goal.
Otherwise, you end up with athletes who are impressive in the gym—and unchanged where it actually counts.
The best coaches don’t just ask, “Is the athlete improving?”
They ask, “Improving at what—and does it matter?”
That question changes everything.
Because once you recognize the Transfer Assumption Fallacy, you stop chasing progress for the sake of progress. You start designing training with intent. You begin to evaluate whether adaptations are actually moving the needle in performance, not just in metrics.
And that’s where real coaching begins.
Not in building better lifters—but in building better performers
