In this stumbles episode of Performance Strategies and Stumbles, I'm joined again by Jesse Green — a sports scientist whose career has taken him from Australian rules football academies to the NBA and NHL — to explore the mistakes and learning experiences that have shaped how he operates as a practitioner.

This isn't a conversation about failure for its own sake. It's about what happens when you're willing to look honestly at the moments that didn't go to plan — and use them as a reference point for how you develop. Jesse covers three distinct stumbles across different stages of his career, each one revealing something important about programming, bias, and how we manage the people around us.

The first takes us back to his early days working with the Brisbane Lions Academy, where a lack of deloading before a key fitness test meant that months of solid conditioning work didn't show up in the results. It's a story about assumptions, the pressure of performance KPIs, and the cost of not asking for help when you need it. The second moves to his time at the Sacramento Kings, where a recency bias towards heavy bilateral loading — driven by research he'd been reading — led to a significant back spasm in a player whose anatomy simply wasn't suited to that stimulus. It's a sharp reminder that what works for you, or what you've just read, isn't always what the athlete in front of you needs. The third examines the challenges of middle management — specifically, what happens when you give a practitioner genuine autonomy to develop a new testing protocol, sign off on it without enough scrutiny, and then watch it fall apart in practice. Jesse unpacks the concept of fail-safe experiments: how to give coaches real ownership within a structure that protects both them and the athletes, and what he would do differently to ensure the fail is genuinely safe before anything reaches the floor.

There's an honest thread running through all of it — that mistakes are rarely the result of carelessness. They tend to happen when capable people are moving fast, trying to prove themselves, and not yet asking enough of the right questions. What matters is what you do with them.

This episode is supported by TeamBuildr — strength and conditioning software built for coaches who take programme design seriously. TeamBuildr gives you the tools to build, deliver, and track training across your entire athlete group in one platform. If you're spending more time building spreadsheets than building athletes, it's worth exploring.

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