Compensation Patterns: Jerome Simian on Fixing Weak Links

Based on Episode 92 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and French physical preparation coach Jerome Simian.

Few coaches have made compensation patterns as central to their work as Jerome Simian. The French physical preparation coach behind decathlon world-record holder Kevin Mayer has a blunt way of describing his job: he has an obligation of result, not an obligation of means. Athletes come to him with a problem, an injury or a plateau, and his task is to find why the body is not doing what it should and fix it now. Trained under Charles Poliquin and Jay Schroeder, Simian has built a system that treats the barbell as one tool among many and treats the athlete’s hidden compensations as the real limit on performance.

Key Takeaways

• Obligation of result, not means. The barbell is one tool, and getting stronger does not automatically make an athlete better.
• Movement is the brain hitting a goal. It calculates a sequence of muscle contraction and relaxation to reach an intention.
• Compensation patterns cap your power, then break you. Fix the weak link and the athlete accesses a new level.
• There is no packaged screen. Learn to see people move, and remember the faster the event, the less deviation it tolerates.
• Extreme isometrics are about creating a change. Done with intent and speed, not holding still, and not a warm-up.

Two mentors, one question

Simian traces his system to two influences he splits about evenly, Charles Poliquin and Jay Schroeder, plus what he has figured out himself. From Poliquin he took a habit of mind that still organizes everything he does.

What you have to look for is the limiting factor, always. Look for the limiting factor. Charles told me back then, there are 18 reasons why a muscle is weak.

From Schroeder he took a focus on movement quality and intention over sheer load. What connects the two, he says, is that both were chasing the same thing he was, a real change in how the athlete moves, and Schroeder simply offered different means to get there.

Why getting stronger does not make you better

Because Simian ran a private practice where athletes paid to solve problems, he could not hide behind a bigger bench. He learned early that strength gains often go nowhere.

I wanted to increase my discus thrower’s bench. She benched 100 kilos, 225 pounds, and you know what? She didn’t get any better at all. That’s the cool thing about track and field. You can’t hide. All your deficiencies get shown up.

That experience pushed him past traditional strength work around 2008. He is careful to say he still values getting athletes strong, but he came to see the number on the bar as almost beside the point.

A squat is not a squat, a deadlift is not a deadlift. It’s all in the way you do them that you’ll get a transfer or not. The weight on the barbell itself doesn’t matter. It’s really the way you do it.

Movement as intention: the brain and the mug

Simian describes himself as a systems thinker rather than a neurology specialist, and he reduces the brain’s job to something simple: you give it a goal, and it finds a way to hit it.

You give the brain an intention, a goal, and to achieve that goal it calculates a sequence of contraction and relaxation of muscles. If it doesn’t hit the goal, the feedback changes it until it does, and then commits that to memory.

His favorite illustration is reaching for a mug. If something limits your elbow extension, you will simply lean with your trunk to get there. The brain still reaches the mug, just through a worse solution.

Because I can’t extend my elbow, I’m going to bend my spine to grab the glass. I can get really good at bending my spine, but that doesn’t have as much potential as extending the elbow. Restore the elbow, and all of a sudden you grab it much faster.

Compensation patterns: the ceiling on power

That worse solution is what Simian means by a compensation pattern, and it is the heart of his model. A compensation lets you perform, but only up to a point.

A compensation pattern allows you a certain amount of power, after which you either break down or get inhibited, because the computer that guides the engine knows the frame won’t hold. They reach a certain amount of power, they get an injury, and they never fix the cause. Then they spend their whole career chasing the performance they had at 17.

Fix the cause, he argues, and the athlete jumps to a new level. He asks his athletes to report the slightest odd feeling, because it points to the next compensation before it becomes an injury.

If you fix the compensation pattern, they move better and access another level of power. And then a little something else comes up, you fix that, and boom, another level of power.

This is also his explanation for athletes who peak young and stall, and for Kevin Mayer, who did the opposite. By his account, Mayer was roughly an 11.2-second sprinter in the 100 meters with back and ankle problems when they started, and moved into the 10.6 range as they cleaned the patterns and fed him the right stimulus, an unusual gain to make in one’s mid-20s.

Finding the weak link

Coaches always want the packaged movement screen, and Simian will not give them one. His assessment is context-dependent and, above all, visual.

It’s a lot of having an eye, of understanding how people move and seeing deviation from the norm. You’ve got to learn how to see people move first. Watch videos of their event, see them walk, see them run.

He does believe there is an optimal way to move, and that the tolerance for deviation shrinks with speed. In the 100 meters, he notes, everybody runs nearly the same, while distance runners vary wildly, which is why faults hide in slow events and get exposed in fast ones. He also warns against hunting for a single guilty muscle, because a local weakness is almost always part of a whole-body pattern of organization.

Extreme isometrics, done right

One of Simian’s signature tools, adapted from Schroeder, is the extreme isometric, and he spends much of the episode dispelling how people misunderstand it. The duration, he insists, is a distraction.

It’s not holding two, three, four, five minutes. You only have that much time to create a change. So you have to think about speed, you have to go fast. You get out of it what you put in.

The point is not endurance in a static hold but forcing a change in how the muscles turn on and off. He is emphatic that it is not a warm-up, even though a correctly executed set can leave an athlete able to hit a max lift immediately afterward, and he notes it took him years, and a fair amount of self-inflicted injury, to extract a working system from his conversations with Schroeder.

Inside a session, and why athletes stall

A Simian session starts from what he calls core competencies, abilities he thinks every athlete needs regardless of sport, like hip flexors and extensors that can contract and relax against each other very fast. He teaches these through his own versions of “stops and rebounds” before any heavy lifting.

I always go coordination first. Even though you have a little bit of fatigue, if you’ve done it right, your movement quality is better afterward. Always do what you need most first.

From there he layers in whatever a given athlete lacks, more traditional lifting for someone with poor eccentric strength, more elastic or concentric work for someone else, always assessed against the individual and re-checked as the need changes. It is the same logic that explains why so many fast teenagers never improve as adults: heavy lifting helps a young sprinter overcome inertia and accelerate for a while, until a compensation pattern caps the return and the body starts protecting itself. Keep finding and clearing that pattern, feed the right stimulus, and the athlete keeps getting faster.

Frequently asked questions

What is a compensation pattern?
It is a less-than-optimal movement solution the brain uses to reach a goal when something limits the ideal one, like bending the spine to reach a mug because the elbow will not extend. Compensations let an athlete perform up to a ceiling, after which they plateau or get injured.

Why doesn’t getting stronger make you faster?
Because strength only transfers if it fits the movement. Simian has watched athletes add to their bench or clean with no change in their event; past a point, more barbell weight does nothing, and the real limit is a compensation pattern rather than a lack of strength.

How do you find an athlete’s weak link?
Mostly by learning to see them move, watching them walk, run, and jump for deviations from the optimal, rather than relying on a packaged screen. Simian pairs that trained eye with a mental checklist of the many reasons a muscle can be weak, and treats any local weakness as part of a whole-body pattern.

What are extreme isometrics and how do you do them?
They are intense positional efforts aimed at changing how muscles coordinate, not static endurance holds. Simian stresses speed and intent, treating the prescribed time as the window you have to create a change, and he is clear they are demanding work, not a warm-up.

Why do some sprinters stop improving after their teens?
Often because a compensation pattern that carried them as juniors reaches its ceiling, capped by inhibition or injury, and never gets fixed. Clear the underlying pattern and supply the right training stimulus, Simian argues, and athletes can keep getting faster well into their 20s.

About the authors

Jerome Simian is a French physical preparation coach best known as the strength and conditioning coach for decathlon world-record holder Kevin Mayer. He runs a private performance practice in France, has prepared athletes to more than 20 major-championship medals across track and field, tennis, and other sports, and built his methods on the work of mentors Charles Poliquin and Jay Schroeder.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach focused on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Jerome Simian on Just Fly Sports.