What I learnt from Charles Poliquin

I did Charles Poliquin's strength and conditioning accreditation almost 10 years ago. If you haven't come across the name, he was a Canadian strength coach who worked with Olympic athletes across about two dozen different sports.

Donovan Bailey trained under him. So did long jump Olympic champion Dwight Phillips and world-ranked hurdler Michelle Freeman.

He wasn't a sprint coach. Never worked on a track. But the way he thought about strength has stuck with me, and there's one idea in particular I keep coming back to when I'm putting programmes together.

He called it structural balance.

The concept is straightforward. Every athlete has a strength profile. You can squat this much, deadlift that much, press this, pull that.

Those numbers by themselves are useful, but Poliquin wasn't interested in the numbers alone. He wanted to know how they sat relative to each other. Because that's where the real information lives.

Say you squat 180kg. That sounds strong, and it probably is. But if you can barely manage a single-leg RDL at 50% of that load, something is off.

Not a strength problem but a balance problem.

And balance problems don't tend to announce themselves in the gym. They show up on the track when the demand is highest.

Before Poliquin prescribed a single exercise for an athlete, he tested ratios. Posterior chain versus anterior chain. Single-leg versus bilateral. Hip dominant versus knee dominant. Pulling versus pressing.

He'd map out where the gaps were, and those gaps dictated what went into the programme.

That thinking translates well to sprinting when you consider what the body goes through at top speed.

Ground contact forces at maximal velocity can reach four to five times bodyweight, and all of that goes through one leg at a time.

Your bilateral squat tells you something about overall capacity. But it doesn't tell you much about how each leg handles force independently when you're moving at 11 metres per second.

So how do you actually test this?

It doesn't need to be complicated. Take a week where you assess a handful of key lifts across the categories that matter for sprinting.

Back squat against Bulgarian split squat or single-leg press. RDL against back squat. Nordic curl capacity against a quad-dominant movement. Barbell row against bench press.

You're not looking for perfect numbers. You're looking for where the gaps are and how big they are.

As an example, if you back squat 180kg but your best Bulgarian split squat is sitting around 60kg per leg, there's a meaningful difference between what you can produce bilaterally and what each leg can handle on its own.

That matters because the track doesn't care about your bilateral max. Every ground contact is a single-leg event.

When you look at the results, the useful question isn't "are these numbers good or bad?" It's "which side of the ratio is lagging, and by how much?"

A small difference might not need immediate attention. A large one should probably be driving your next block of programming.

The posterior chain is where this gets particularly important.

Hamstring injuries in sprinters tend to happen during terminal swing. That's the moment just before your foot strikes the ground, when the hamstring is working eccentrically at long muscle lengths to decelerate the lower leg.

If hamstring strength is low compared to quad strength, or eccentric capacity trails concentric, that imbalance is loading the tissue unfavourably every single stride.

Compare your RDL or Nordic capacity against your squat. If the posterior chain is clearly trailing, that needs to show up in exercise selection before anything else.

It's not about abandoning an exercise. It's about adjusting the balance of what you're prioritising.

Someone with a significant posterior deficit might shift from squatting three times a week to squatting once, with the other sessions built around RDLs, Nordics, hip thrusts, or glute-ham raises as primary movements.

The squat stays in the programme, but it's no longer running the show. And once that posterior gap starts closing, you can gradually bring squat volume back up knowing the balance is in a better place.

Poliquin applied this across the full body too. He looked at pulling versus pressing to assess posture and shoulder health.

For sprinters, that upper body balance matters more than people sometimes realise.

Arm drive contributes to rhythm and force application at high speed, and if pressing strength dramatically outweighs pulling, there's an imbalance affecting movement quality even if you can't feel it.

A simple row to bench press comparison can flag this. If the gap is large, adding more horizontal and vertical pulling volume is an easy adjustment that can improve how you hold posture and drive your arms under fatigue.

The real value of this approach is what it does to your programming decisions. Once you have the ratios in front of you, exercise selection stops being something you repeat out of habit and starts being something you can justify.

Why are we doing Nordics three times this week? Because testing showed the posterior chain is 35% behind where it should be relative to the anterior.

Why did we drop a squat session? Because bilateral strength isn't the limiting factor right now.

That's the shift Poliquin was after. Not just getting stronger, but getting stronger in the places that actually need it.

The programme shaped around the athlete rather than the athlete fitted into a programme.

I think this resonates for sprinters in particular because the consequences of imbalance are so specific. A quad-dominant sprinter with underdeveloped hamstrings doesn't just have a training gap on paper.

They have a mechanical vulnerability that shows up at the exact moment when forces are highest and tissue tolerance matters most.

It's not a complicated idea. But acting on it requires a step that's easy to skip. You have to actually test, sit with the numbers, and let them challenge what you thought the programme should look like.

The good thing is that once you start doing it, the process feeds itself. You test, you adjust, you train for a block, you retest. The gaps shrink.

The programme evolves. And the decisions you're making in the gym start to feel less like guesswork and more like responses to real information.

Poliquin built his entire career on that discipline. And while he was working with bobsledders and hockey players and shot putters more than sprinters, the principle doesn't change depending on the sport.

For sprinters, that kind of attention in the weight room might be the difference between a season that builds momentum and one that gets cut short by something you could have seen coming.