I had a mid-day break between client sessions, and I walked over to City Center Mall in downtown Columbus.

There was a Franklin Covey store there that had become one of my regular stops. I used their planning systems for everything. Daily planner, weekly reviews, annual goal mapping. The whole structure. It fit how I was trying to operate at the time: deliberate, systematic, always trying to get better at what I was doing and how I was doing it.

The reading habit was the same way. At this point, I was deep into studying anything I could find on strength and conditioning. Russian training manuals, exercise science texts, anything that explained how serious people got strong. I was also pulling from outside the training world, which is what the Franklin Covey store gave me access to. Books on performance, leadership, planning, how high performers think and operate. I was consuming all of it.

That day, I picked up a book called Everyone's a Coach by Don Shula and Ken Blanchard.

Shula needed no introduction. Blanchard had written The One Minute Manager, which I had already read. The book combined Shula's coaching principles from his years with the Miami Dolphins and Blanchard's framework for developing people. I read the whole thing over the next two days, mostly between client sessions and on the drive home.

Most of it was solid. One section stopped me in a way nothing else had that year.

The Concept That Hit Different

Shula called it "audible-ready." His term for adaptability. Not improvisation. Not throwing the plan out when it stops working. The specific ability to change course from a position of preparation, not desperation.

The idea was this: audibles in football are not last-minute guesses. They are rehearsed responses to anticipated situations. You think through the "what ifs" before the game starts. What if your quarterback goes down? What if the defensive formation at the line of scrimmage is nothing like what you prepared for? What if the plan you built all week is clearly not going to work in the first quarter?

The answers to those questions get worked out ahead of time. So when the situation happens, you are not starting from zero under pressure. You are executing a response you already have.

Shula's 1972 perfect season is the proof. When Bob Griese suffered a leg injury, Earl Morrall stepped in. Morrall led the team to eleven straight victories and a Super Bowl appearance. That did not happen because Shula panicked and improvised. It happened because Morrall had been prepared. The scenario had been thought through. When the moment came, the audible was already called.

That is the mindset. That is what audible-ready actually means.

The "what if" thinking happens before the game, not during it. By the time you need the audible, the decision is already made. You are just executing it.

Why It Hit When It Did

I was working with executive clients at a corporate fitness center in downtown Columbus. High-performing people, demanding schedules, significant stress loads. These were not athletes training for competition. These were people trying to stay functional and healthy while running demanding professional lives.

Their situations changed constantly. Travel pulled them out for weeks at a time. Work crises reshuffled their schedules on no notice. They would show up carrying a week's worth of pressure and no sleep, and the program I had written for them at full capacity was not appropriate for what they actually had available that day.

I was still approaching programming the way most coaches approach it: build a plan, run the plan, adjust only when something visibly breaks. The plan was the thing. Stick to the plan.

The problem is the plan breaks constantly when you are working with real people in real lives. And when you are scrambling to figure out what to do in the moment, under pressure with a client standing in front of you waiting, the decisions you make are worse than the ones you would have made if you had already thought it through.

Reading that chapter made the problem obvious. I was not building contingencies. I had no audibles. When the situation changed, I was flat-footed.

After that, I started doing the "what if" work before the sessions happened. What if this person misses two weeks? What if the knee is acting up? What if they come in today and are clearly not sleeping? I worked out the responses in advance, when I was calm and thinking clearly. Not in the moment, inventing something from scratch while the clock was running.

That shift made me a better coach. Not because the situations changed. They were the same situations. The difference was I already had an answer when they showed up.

This Is Where Autoregulation Started Making Real Sense

The Audible-Ready chapter was also when I started thinking more carefully about autoregulation. Not just as a training term, but as a philosophy that applied to everyone I worked with.

Autoregulation means training responds to what the athlete actually brings to the session, not just what the program says they should be doing. You read the body, you read the session, and you adjust. Most people hear that and think it means training without structure. It doesn't. Done right, autoregulation is exactly what Shula was describing. The base plan is there. The contingencies have been thought through. When the situation calls for an adjustment, you make one from a position of preparation, not desperation.

The coach who has never considered what to do when an athlete shows up beat up, overtrained, or running on empty will make a worse decision in that moment than the coach who already has a framework for it. The lifter who has never thought through how they handle a missed lift, a stalled training block, or a joint that stops cooperating will spiral faster than the one who already knows what the adjustment looks like.

I became more convinced of this in 1995 when I read that book. I am more convinced of it now than ever. And the reason I can say that with certainty is that this theme keeps showing up everywhere I look.

It Shows Up in Every Conversation

For years on Table Talk, I have sat across from athletes, coaches, and business owners who have built something that has lasted. Different sports. Different business models. Different training methodologies entirely.

But one pattern shows up every time.

Every person who has sustained anything real, whether it is a long competitive career, a business that survived multiple serious problems, or a coaching system that actually develops athletes year over year, has some version of audible-ready thinking built into how they operate. They do not just have a plan. They have already asked themselves what they do when the plan stops working. And they answered that question before the situation forced them to.

This comes up in conversations with world-class athletes talking about training blocks that fell apart and how they recovered. It comes up with coaches explaining how they adjusted to injuries that would have derailed a less prepared program. It comes up with gym owners describing pivots that looked decisive from the outside but were actually the result of thinking they had already done before the crisis hit.

The language changes in every conversation. The principle is the same every time. Shula called it audible-ready. The people who last in this industry call it by different names. But they all have it.

How It Shaped elitefts

When elitefts started in 1998, there was no fixed plan that stayed intact for more than a few months at a stretch. We started with a Q&A forum and a small product line. The model had to flex constantly. The community grew in directions we did not fully anticipate. What worked in year one was not the right approach in year three.

Every move from S1 to S5 was an audible. Not a failure to execute the original vision. A response to what the situation actually demanded.

S1 on Main Street was the step up from the spare bedroom. When we maxed out on inventory space and desk space after several years, we called the audible to S2 on Maple Street. Flooding drove us out of S2. S3 had propane heat costs I should have researched before signing, and had to correct on the way out. S4 expanded when the lumber yard next door downsized and made room available. S5 came in 2018: 30,000 square feet on three acres, built to last.

Each of those moves was thought through before it was necessary. Not because we had a perfect roadmap from day one, but because we were asking "what if" before the situation forced the question.

Businesses and gyms that get locked into a fixed game plan and refuse to adjust are not stable. They are fragile. The situation is always changing. The ability to respond is worth more than the original plan. What Shula built in Miami was not a rigid system. It was a highly prepared one. The preparation made adaptability possible.

What This Actually Requires

The mistake most people make when they hear "be adaptable" is they think it means having no structure. It means the opposite.

Being audible-ready requires more planning than a fixed approach, not less. You work through the base scenario, then the contingencies. What happens if this goes wrong? What is the response? What does the adjusted version look like, and at what point do I call it?

For a lifter: before the training cycle begins, you should already know how you will handle a missed week, a failed lift, a joint that is not cooperating, or a competition date that shifts. Work those answers out when you are calm and thinking clearly. Not mid-session under pressure. Not mid-cycle in a panic.

For a coach: your system needs contingencies already built in. Not every athlete responds the same way to the same stimulus. Not every training block goes as written. The coach who tells athletes to follow the program and has no answer for when the program is not working is not coaching. They are distributing a document.

For a gym owner or anyone running an operation, you have already asked yourself what you do when a key revenue stream drops, when a key person leaves, when the facility situation changes in ways you did not plan for. You answered those questions from a position of clarity, not crisis.

Where to Start

Pick one scenario you have been avoiding thinking about because it is uncomfortable. The training block that might stall. The client situation you know is fragile. The business dependency is a single point of failure.

Work through it now. Not when it becomes a crisis. Now, while you have time and perspective. What does the response look like? What do you need in place for that response to be available?

Write it down.

You now have one audible. Add another one next week.

That is how you build something that can take a hit and keep moving. Not by having a better original plan, but by having already decided what you do when that plan breaks.

Shula figured this out coaching NFL football. It applies in the weight room the same way it applies on the field and in every business in between. I picked up that book on a mid-day break in downtown Columbus in 1995, and I have been thinking about that chapter ever since.

The ideas that are worth something tend to hold up over time. This one has held up for thirty years.

Live, Learn, Pass On.

Dave Tate / elitefts