Who is the strongest?

Who is the strongest? The answer depends on what we’re asking them to do.

The powerlifter will almost certainly lift the heaviest barbell. The gymnast may be able to hold their entire body horizontal to the floor, supported only by their hands. The sprinter can apply enormous force to the ground in a fraction of a second. The climber may hang their entire bodyweight from a hold barely wide enough to support the tips of their fingers. The rower can repeatedly apply high force to an oar for six or seven minutes, while the Ironman athlete can continue producing useful force, contraction after contraction, for eight, ten or fifteen hours.

In real-world sport, fatigue is another important variable to consider when asking that question - strong at what point in the game/event? Fresh and fully rested, the powerlifter would comfortably win any conventional lifting contest. But, ask the powerlifter and the Ironman athlete to complete ten hours of continuous work before repeating the test and the rankings might begin to change. At the very least, the Ironman athlete would retain a much greater percentage of their starting strength. The same would be true if we asked them to sprint, power their bike up a hill or repeatedly move a moderately heavy object. This gives us another important dimension to consider...

Strength isn’t only about how much force an athlete can produce. It’s also about how much of that force remains available when they’re tired.

...we might call this strength under fatigue, muscular endurance or fatigue resistance, depending on the task and how we’re measuring it. Whatever term we use, it matters enormously in sport (& life!). The strongest athlete at the beginning of a contest may not be the strongest athlete at the end. So, who’s the strongest?

Well... as you’re beginning to see, it depends. It depends on what we’re asking them to move. It depends on how quickly they must move it, how long they have to apply force, how many times they need to repeat the effort and whether they’re moving an external object or their own body. This might sound like a cop-out, but it gets us to the first key principle of the book:

Strength only has meaning in relation to a task.

In fact, all biomotor qualities only have meaning in relation to a task - endurance, speed, agility etc. And, furthermore, any task is a blending of these abilities. Even if we take it to the extreme...

Figure 1.1: Every athletic task blends force, velocity and duration. The position of each event is illustrative - the exact blend changes with the athlete, event and conditions.

The triangle gives us a more useful way to think about athletic ability. A maximal isometric contraction - where the weight doesn’t move (zero velocity), and lasts only for a split second (minimal duration), sits very close to the force corner. A more realistic example - the Olympic lift moves toward velocity because the athlete has to accelerate a heavy load quickly - i.e. they need a combination of force and velocity - very high power. Sprinting moves even further down that line because it requires quite a high force, especially at the start, coupled with a very high velocity, but for only a short duration.

Rowing - a ~6 minute event of multiple moderate force contractions, moves further toward duration, while an Ironman - an 8-17 hour event sits close to that duration corner without ever completely escaping the need to produce force and movement speed. None of these tasks occupies a single point in the real world - when considering, individual differences and different priorities over an athlete’s development we could think of it more as a medium-sized range circle within the triangle - a range of potential FVD combinations that might “work” depending on the individual particulars of the athlete. But, the larger point being, this mental model makes the central idea clear - in the real-world...

Even the most apparently pure strength events contains some requirement for speed and endurance.

And, contrary-wise, even the events at the endurance extreme of the triangle carry some requirement for strength!

When most people hear the word strength, they picture a powerlifter deadlifting a heavy barbell. That’s understandable. A heavy lift is one of the cleanest and most visible demonstrations of force production. But, even in that case, there’s an element of endurance and speed at play...

A deadlift is a “grind” lift, meaning that it can take several seconds to get the weight to a point of lock-out. So, an essential part of being a good deadlifter is sustaining very high force output - not for the milliseconds that a sprinter or Olympic lifter might have to, but over the several seconds that it takes to complete the lift. Therefore, even the powerlifter has elements of speed and endurance at play. The closest thing to a true force event would be a very short isometric contraction - basically applying force quickly to a bar that doesn’t move. Not exactly a spectator sport :) As soon as you introduce movement or sustained contraction(s) over time, you get a blend of force, speed and endurance.

This is only one example. Each of the athletes we’re considering above - the rower, the lifter, the rock-climber, the triathlete - will have a different blend of force, speed and endurance - both absolute and relative to their body weight - that can leave them appearing either strong or weak depending on the task at hand...

The powerlifter might struggle to complete ten strict pull-ups, while the climber may not have an impressive squat. The Ironman athlete may have tremendous muscular endurance but very little force reserve, while the gymnast may control their own body beautifully but lack the absolute strength required to move a heavy opponent.

At modest levels, these qualities don’t necessarily compete. A relatively untrained athlete can improve their maximal strength, pull-up performance and fatigue resistance at the same time (and should!). But, as the athlete becomes more developed and we push one expression of strength toward its limit, the trade-offs become increasingly apparent. The muscle mass and bodyweight that help an athlete produce enormous absolute force must also be lifted during every pull-up and carried through every step of a long event. Likewise, training the fast-twitch fibers to produce a brief maximal effort isn’t the same as developing the metabolic and muscular characteristics required to repeat submaximal contractions for hours. Training time and adaptive resources are finite, so emphasizing one part of the strength profile inevitably leaves less room for another...

The closer we move toward the extremes, the more strength development becomes a series of trade-offs.

...the athlete with the highest deadlift probably won’t be the athlete who can complete the most pull-ups. Nor are they likely to retain the greatest percentage of their strength after several hours of continuous work. This isn’t a flaw in either athlete - it’s the nature of specialization...

It’s common for people to have an unrealistic view in their head of what their training is moving toward - a vision of themself as Superman/Superwoman - able to run a sub-two-hour marathon while nabbing a 1,000-pound deadlift on their way to the finish line...

The mythical super-athlete: on their way to a sub-two-hour marathon, with a casual 1,000-pound deadlift along the way.

Much of a good coach’s job is to bring them back down to earth, to ask the important questions and focus in on the optimal combination that the athlete’s task demands require - the most useful compromise - i.e. where on the triangle do you wish to sit?

Range of motion adds another constraint. An athlete may be able to support an enormous load in a quarter squat but be unable to control a much lighter load through a full squat. The muscles are being asked to produce force at different lengths, the joints are moving through different positions and the leverage changes throughout the movement. We see this in the back-breakingly cringey posts on social media - “I did 5 (6 inch reps) today with 600 pounds 💪” Did you? Did you, really? These posts make it clear that strength isn’t only specific to the movement - it’s also specific to the range and joint positions through which it’s expressed. This is why a test result must always tell us how (and over what range) the movement was performed, not just how much weight was moved.

Stability places a similar constraint on strength expression. Most athletes can produce more force in a machine leg press, where the load and body are externally supported, than in a barbell squat. They’ll generally express less again in a split squat or lunge, where they have to control the pelvis, trunk and multiple joints over a smaller base of support. The sporting task is likely to be more demanding still - think of a footballer trying to accelerate while off balance, on turf, with an opponent closing in. The force-producing machinery might be there, but without sufficient control and an effective pathway for transmitting that force into the specific environment, much of its potential remains inaccessible. In my opinion, neither of these factors are considered enough when looking at, and testing, strength...

Range and stability aren’t separate qualities to strength. They are firm constraints on how much ‘pure strength’ the athlete can actually express in the real world!

...this is why restoring movement options and establishing control must come before the most aggressive loading in our developmental framework - because, as the old maxim goes - “You can’t shoot a cannon from a canoe!”

You can’t shoot a cannon from a canoe.

That is, in order to apply large levels of force, you need a stable (stability) base. These are key concepts that we will keep coming back to throughout the book. We’re not pursuing mobility or stability as cute additions to the “real” strength training or as isolated ends. We’re giving the athlete access to the positions required by the task and the ability to produce, accept and redirect force within them in the real world

For all of the reasons above - the range that we are expressing strength over, the movement and surrounding environment in which we’re trying to express the strength, how quickly we need to express the strength, whether our bodyweight is a significant part of the load we’re trying to overcome, there is no universally strongest athlete...

There is only the athlete who is (or isn’t) sufficiently strong for the task at hand.

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While writing The Endurance Code, I kept coming back to one key observation…

“Muscle moves stuff”

It doesn’t matter whether that “stuff” is a barbell or your own body. Ultimately, if you want to move a mass faster, you must apply more force - and apply it at the right time and in the right direction.

Consider an Ironman athlete pedaling at 90 rpm and producing 200 watts at his aerobic threshold, i.e. making full use of the majority of his slow-twitch muscle fibers. If cadence remains constant and the athlete wants to produce 220 watts, they must generate approximately 10% more torque (i.e., force) through each pedal cycle with those fibers. In order to produce that larger amount of force, those muscle fibers will need to become larger or stronger in some way, shape, or form.

Importantly, here, all of the positive adaptations covered in The Endurance Code, that come with endurance training, e.g improved oxygen delivery, greater mitochondrial density, and increased fat oxidation, help the athlete become more efficient - that is, to fuel and repeatedly sustain those muscular contractions. But they don’t remove this fundamental mechanical requirement for going faster:

To go faster, more force must be produced!

At a certain point, therefore, improving endurance performance requires us to address strength.

Of course, for strength and power athletes this is even more the case. In modern training for power/speed sports, time in the weight room features heavily. While athletes can develop specific neural adaptations that result in improved strength and power for a given amount of muscle mass, these gains are relatively limited when compared to the morphological changes that can occur with a long period of strength training. And, ultimately, if an athlete wishes to throw further, sprint faster, or jump higher, over a long period of development, they must find ways to continually increase their ability to apply more force.

Not only does strength become a potential limiter in power production, it can also become a limiter in endurance. The ability to maintain good mechanics as fatigue accumulates, tolerate training, and remain durable across a long season is largely dependent on the durability of your muscles. Athletes who struggle with weak muscles susceptible to damage are unable to fully express their metabolic and cardiovascular fitness, experiencing degradation in ability to produce power both across a race and across a training build.

These concepts are an essential element of an effective training plan and something that I wanted to cover from the outset of writing The Endurance Code – only problem was – I ran out of space! Even at the largest size book, and the highest possible number of pages, the Endurance Code hit up against the publishing limit and so it became clear that strength deserved more than a section, or an abridged chapter, it deserved its own book!

In fact, it deserved a complete system of its own.

So, I’ve decided to begin work on a companion book:

The Strength Code: The Science and Practice of Maximal Athletic Development

Although it has grown out of my work with endurance athletes, this will not simply be a book about “strength training for endurance athletes.”

For this one, I’m shooting much broader.

In The Strength Code, I want to explain how we systematically develop a complete athlete - from movement competency and tissue capacity to muscle, maximum strength, explosive power, and the ability to repeatedly express that strength without breaking down.

In other words, this will be a book for anyone who wants to become stronger, more powerful, more capable, and more durable.

Strength is more than lifting heavy weights

Over the course of my coaching career I’ve been exposed to a number of top-grade strength coaches – many whose philosophy grew out of the periodization programs of the Eastern Bloc countries, looking at strength training as a multidimensional blending of a number of aspects – dynamic mobility, muscle balance, tissue tolerance, muscular hypertrophy, neural strength and, finally, sport-specific application of the above. These days, however, with the rise of the internet influencer, it seems that we have re-entered a strength training dark age that looks at strength training as simply lifting heavy weights.

These days, when most people hear the words strength training, they often think of one particular style of training.

Some picture bodybuilding: sets of eight to twelve repetitions designed to build muscle.

Others picture powerlifting: heavy squats, bench presses, and deadlifts.

Others picture CrossFit or HYROX: resistance exercises performed quickly and under substantial metabolic fatigue.

Others still think of corrective exercise, functional training, or physical rehabilitation.

Each of these methods can be useful. Problems arise when one method is mistaken for a complete system, or the one method is applied without regard for the athlete’s needs, competency, and total training load.

Ultimately, a comprehensive, balanced athlete will require elements of all of the above methods at different times in their development!

The beginner may first need to develop sufficient movement competency and tissue tolerance to train consistently. Another athlete may possess plenty of mobility but lack the stability to control it. A more experienced athlete may need additional muscle, maximum strength, explosive power, or fatigue resistance.

Therefore, the question isn’t:

Which system of strength training is best?

The question is:

What physical quality does this athlete need next, and what is the safest and most efficient way to develop it?

This is a direct extension of the core questions that we introduced in The Endurance Code…

1/ Is the training producing the desired adaptation?

2/ If not, why not?

3/ Based on that information, what is the next right move for this athlete?

These will also be the central questions of The Strength Code.

And, because the answers to those questions will change over the athlete’s long-term development, The Strength Code is not about just one of the elements of strength training mentioned above. No. It is…

A complete system for developing the complete athlete!

With that in mind, the overall developmental framework for the book is:

First, we assess the athlete and the demands of their sport.

Where necessary, we restore useful movement options.

We then develop the control required to use those options effectively.

From there, we build the athlete’s capacity for training - their technical competency, tissue tolerance, general muscular development, and strength-training work capacity.

Once that foundation is established, we can place greater emphasis on muscle growth, maximum force production, explosive power, or muscular endurance according to the athlete’s individual needs.

This is not intended to be a rigid staircase in which we permanently “complete” one quality before moving to the next.

Mobility, stability, hypertrophy, strength, power, and muscular endurance overlap. Advanced athletes continue to train most of these qualities throughout the year. What changes is the relative emphasis and the minimum dose required to maintain the qualities that are not currently the priority.

We will go into detail on just how, from a very practical perspective, we go about “blending” these objectives across a training session, a week, a season, and a lifelong athletic development.

But, overall, similar to endurance development, the goal is to identify what is currently limiting this athlete and prioritize the various elements of a comprehensive strength training plan accordingly.

Assessment before prescription

As you probably gathered when reading The Endurance Code, I like tests and benchmarks very much :) In fact, I don’t believe you can put together an effective training program without them. And, this one will be no different - a significant section of the book will focus on assessing the individual athlete.

This will include:

• individual range-of-motion testing;

• manual muscle testing;

• functional movement screening;

• strength and strength-endurance testing;

• jumping and reactive-strength assessment;

• identifying common movement constraints and compensatory patterns.

However, counter to some “systems” that assume fragility and demand that athletes be impossibly perfectly “in balance” before doing any real training, these assessments won’t be presented as diagnostic tools or crystal balls for predicting injury. Nor will every asymmetry be labeled a dysfunction that must be corrected before the athlete actually trains.

Their purpose is far more practical than that:

To improve our decisions in making the athlete better while managing (and addressing) risk.

When a movement looks “sketchy” or potentially risky, we need to ask why. Is the limitation caused by unavailable range of motion? Is the range available passively but not actively? Is the athlete weak in that position? Are they unfamiliar with the movement? Are they protecting a painful area? Or does the exercise simply not suit their structure?

The same visible movement problem can have several different causes - and therefore shouldn’t automatically receive the same corrective exercise.

The assessment process should help us decide whether to:

Restore, strengthen, modify, monitor, or refer.

Corrective exercise (and corrective yoga)

I introduced Yoga in the endurance code as a key recovery protocol – a way to downregulate, to “flip the switch” from a sympathetic-dominant “fight or flight” nervous system to the parasympathetic “rest and recover” state that we need the athlete to be in to grow – to get better.

In this book I also want to explore the use of yoga as a corrective training tool.

Traditional yoga poses are generally taught as standard shapes. The only problem is, athletes don’t arrive with standardized bodies, histories, or movement needs!

A pose that helps one athlete develop useful hip mobility may encourage another athlete to further compensate through the lumbar spine. A passive stretch that benefits an athlete with genuinely restricted range may be counterproductive for a hypermobile athlete who already has more movement than they can control.

Unfortunately, yoga is often sold as a great way to restore mobility and balance in an athlete. However, a yoga pose is not inherently corrective, and a dirty little secret of the yoga world is that many teachers & yogis struggle with lingering musculoskeletal issues, despite being globally very flexible. We certainly don’t want our yoga to worsen any dysfunctions or imbalances that the athlete may have; we want it to balance these out, to improve them. We want our yoga, in addition to being relaxing and aiding recovery, to be corrective.

Yoga becomes corrective when it is selected and modified for a particular athlete, in line with the individual limitations and objectives.

With this goal in mind, we will look at how traditional poses can be modified using changes in stance, support, range of motion, muscular activity, breathing, and props such as blocks, straps, bolsters, walls, and chairs to address and correct specific movement issues.

Most importantly, every intervention will connect back to that initial assessment finding and a relevant retest:

Did the intervention produce the change we wanted - and did that change improve the athlete’s movement or performance?

Building the strength base - and measuring it

Just as endurance athletes need an aerobic base, strength athletes need a strength-training base.

Before an athlete can benefit from sustained periods of heavy or explosive training, they must possess the technical competency, tissue tolerance, general muscular development, and recovery capacity necessary to tolerate the work.

A key metric within this section will be tonnage:

Total tonnage = Sets x Repetitions x Load

Tonnage is not a complete measure of training stress. Ten tonnes of leg pressing is not equivalent to ten tonnes of squatting, and tonnage captures body-weight exercises, isometrics, and plyometrics poorly. However, just like measuring total calories of work in endurance training, when exercise selection and counting conventions remain reasonably consistent, tracking plain ol’ tonnes lifted can be an extremely useful way to quantify an athlete’s work capacity and progression.

We will examine tonnage at the exercise, session, weekly, and training-block levels. I’ll also present practical target ranges for the different levels and types of athletes introduced in The Endurance Code - from the Level 1 “Metabolic Melvin” health-and-fitness athlete all the way to the Level 6 “World-Class Wendy” - while accounting for body mass, relative intensity, sport demands, and the athlete’s other training.

While tonnage is the number, the overall objective isn’t simply to lift more weight each week. It’s to develop the overall work capacity to complete, recover from, and adapt to the amount of training required for the athlete’s next level of development.

Planning the strength training program across every timescale

As with The Endurance Code, this book will connect individual workouts to the larger developmental plan.

We’ll examine strength development across:

• the athlete’s lifetime;

• the annual plan;

• the training block;

• the training week;

• the individual session.

We will also examine how strength fits alongside endurance training, speed development, sport practice, competition, work, family, and the many other demands placed on a real athlete.

Strength training is, in many ways, one of the most stressful forms of training that the athlete will undertake, and the best strength program on paper is not the best program if the athlete can’t recover from it – or if it takes away from their other sport-specific training or overall life!

Planned Contents

The following is the current working outline. The current plan is to follow the same general pattern as The Endurance Code. However, just like The Endurance Code, I’ve no doubt it will evolve as I write and in response to your (dear reader’s :) feedback.

Part I — Understanding the Athlete

1. What Is Strength?

2. First Principles of Effective Strength Training

3. Modeling the Strength Athlete

4. Assessing the Athlete

Part II — Restoring and Building the Foundation

5. Understanding Movement Dysfunction

6. Corrective Training and Mobility

7. Stability, Control, and Movement Skill

8. Building the Strength Base

Part III — Developing the Components of Strength

9. Hypertrophy: Building the Athlete’s Engine

10. Maximum Strength: Increasing Force Capacity

11. Power and Explosive Strength

12. Muscular Endurance and Strength Endurance

Part IV — Programming the Strength Athlete

13. Exercise Selection and Transfer

14. Prescribing the Training Dose

15. Fatigue, Recovery, and Adaptation

Part V — Planning Across Time

16. Long-Term Strength Development

17. Designing the Annual Strength Plan

18. Designing the Training Block

19. Designing the Training Week

20. Designing the Strength Session

21. Monitoring and Adjusting Training

Part VI — Applying the System

22. Strength Across Sports

23. Athlete Archetypes and Practical Programs

Supporting resources will include assessment forms, movement-pattern profiles, a corrective-yoga library, exercise progressions, programming templates, testing protocols, tonnage calculators, and example programs.

Strength for endurance athletes - and everyone else

My background means that strength training for endurance athletes will receive particular attention…

We’ll explore how strength affects running, cycling, swimming, triathlon, rowing, skiing, and other endurance sports. We will look at concurrent training, the interference effect, fatigue management, strength maintenance during high-volume endurance phases, and how to become stronger without adding unnecessary mass.

But this is not an endurance training book – that was the other one! 😊 This one will cover strength training comprehensively and will show how, while the relative emphases may differ, the exact same framework can be applied to a developing youth athlete, a field- or court-sport player, a recreational lifter, a masters athlete, or someone training primarily for health and longevity.

The developmental principles remain consistent. What changes is the required dose, the relative importance of each quality, and the way that strength must ultimately be expressed.

Building the book in public

As I did with The Endurance Code, I plan to release early versions of the chapters here on Substack.

Just like the Endurance Code, these will be working chapters rather than immutable final versions. I make no apologies for this. It’s by design. You all helped me write the first one and I’ve no doubt that you will help me write this one as well. Your questions and feedback will help reveal where an explanation needs greater clarity, where an important topic is missing, and where the practical applications need to go deeper.

Fundamentally, my aim, just like the first one is to produce a workbook for those ready to do the work, i.e. a practical guide that explains how to develop an athlete from beginning to end—and enables coaches and self-coached athletes to incorporate the useful parts directly into their own training.

With that in mind, to kick things off, I would particularly welcome your thoughts on three questions:

1. Which aspect of strength development do you find most confusing?

2. Which assessments or training metrics do you currently use?

3. Are there any athlete types, sports, or practical situations that you would particularly like the book to address?

Please leave your suggestions in the comments. This outline is provisional, and your feedback will help shape what the book ultimately becomes.

The first chapter will begin with the most fundamental question of all:

What do we actually mean when we call someone strong?

For those who were on the long Endurance Code journey with me, I hope you’ll stick around for this one.

For those new to the Science & Practice of Maximal Athletic Development series, I hope you’ll join us. 🙏

So, for this episode of MAD Science Meets Real Life, I sat down with Iñaki to take that idea out of the spreadsheet and into the real world.

And Iñaki is a particularly good person to have this conversation with.

When we first started working together almost 20 years ago, before the Ultraman World Championship win and his years racing as a professional, he told me something that stuck with me:

His most important goal was to maintain a good relationship with sport for his entire life.

Nearly two decades later, he’s still doing exactly that.

So this conversation became less about optimizing VO₂max and more about how you actually build an athletic life.

We talk about:

• Why maintaining fitness as we age probably requires progressively more movement, not less.

• The “Couzens Immortality Quotient” and what an extra 15 minutes per week each year might add up to over a lifetime.

• Why your basic week may be more important than your biggest training week.

• Looking backwards at what you’ve actually sustained rather than sideways at what everyone else is doing.

• Building your life to remove friction from movement.

• Why frequency and consistency usually beat heroic bursts of training.

• How big athletic goals can actually sabotage long-term development if we push too far from our sustainable baseline.

• The importance of protecting the habit—and, ultimately, your identity as an athlete.

• And Iñaki’s simple idea of making small promises to yourself and keeping them.

Perhaps the biggest theme of the conversation is that lifelong fitness isn’t primarily a motivation problem.

It’s a systems problem.

Build a life in which movement fits.

Establish a basic week you can repeat.

Add a little.

Keep the promise.

And then do it again next year.

That’s how you build not just a training plan, but an athletic life.

For more on the practicalities of just how Iñaki has been able to maintain top fitness in the context of a real life over so many years, be sure to check out…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

A Decade of Training: An Athletic Life

After a great conversation with Alan Couzens, which we’ll be releasing soon, and reading his latest article, Your 50-Year Training Plan, I felt inspired to share what a decade of training really looks like: the good, the ugly, and the unfiltered reality of all while being a husband, father, entrepreneur, and advisor-coach to individuals and organizations…

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a month ago · 23 likes · 5 comments · Iñaki de la Parra

How quickly should I ramp my mileage for the marathon? How many hours can I add to my next training block? How high can I push my CTL before my next race?

These are useful questions. But they aren’t the most important ramp.

The most important ramp isn’t the one that takes you from 40 to 60 miles per week over the next three months. It’s the one that takes you from being a healthy, active 30-year-old to a healthy, active 70-year-old!

It’s the ramp that enables you to keep doing the things you love as your body gets older.

And, unlike the ramps in most training plans, it’s not measured in TSS per week or month, it’s measured in decades!

The cost of standing still

One of the uncomfortable realities of aging is that the same training will not produce the same fitness forever.

It’s certainly been my experience my experience in working with Masters athletes, that it takes progressively more training to hold onto a given level of aerobic fitness as we age - often to a surprising degree…

A healthy, relatively lean 25-year-old may be able to maintain a VO₂max of 50 ml/kg/min with a fairly modest amount of deliberate aerobic training - the kind of physical activity that is just fairly typical for a healthy active person in their 20’s. However, by middle age, the amount of activity that it takes to maintain this level of fitness is up in the serious endurance athlete category. In the later decades, it is up in the elite masters athlete category!

In other words, if the training remains constant, the fitness usually does not.

As we get older, we need more!

This led to a relationship that author Alex Hutchinson informally dubbed the **Couzens Immortality Quotient** It goes like this…

To offset the roughly 0.4 ml/kg/min of VO₂max that we lose with each passing year, we need to add approximately one hour *per month* to our annual training volume with each passing year.

In other words, if you’re a 40 year old training 30 hours per month, at 70, to hold a similar level of fitness, you can expect to need 60 hours per month of aerobic training! When looked at over long time frames, that sounds like a lot, but viewed year to year, the addition is actually very small:

Approximately 12 extra hours per year—or about 15 extra minutes per week!

And, that’s kind of the point of this post - to keep the most important ramp, that tiny little ramp, in mind, and to quote Goethe - to never put things that matter the most at the mercy of things that matter the least.

This “gentle but firm” ramp is shown graphically below…

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Most complex machines come with an owner’s manual.

Your car comes with one. Your washing machine comes with one. Even the weird little Bluetooth meat thermometer that you bought during your “I’m going to reverse sear everything now” phase comes with one.

Your heart, on the other hand, does not.

Which seems like a fairly major oversight, given that it’s the one piece of equipment that you truly *depend on*. Forget to put oil in your car and blow the engine? Bad day. Blow up the engine in your chest? Considerably worse day.

Furthermore, it is the one machine that is expected to operate continuously, under wildly varying conditions, for somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 billion beats(!) over 80 to 100 years - often while caffeinated, sleep deprived, emotionally unstable, metabolically challenged, and occasionally sprinting uphill because… Strava.

And, not to be a downer, but, even for active people, for about a third of us, failure of this all important engine will ultimately be the thing that takes us out – as I explained here

So, consider this a small attempt to correct this glaring omission from your yellowing pile of owner’s manuals.

This isn’t a cardiology textbook. Nor is it a replacement for seeing an actual cardiologist if your dashboard lights start flashing. Instead, it’s a practical owner’s manual for the endurance athlete, aging athlete, or generally health-conscious human who would like to understand what this organ is, what can go wrong with it, and how training can be both one of the best things you can do for it and, in a few specific contexts, something that needs to be handled with a little respect.

Because, as André La Gerche and Guido Claessen emphasized in our recent Mad Science Meets Real Life podcast conversation , the heart is not just a passive lump of meat that reluctantly supports your training habit. It is a highly adaptable, highly trainable organ. It remembers what you have done. It changes dramatically in response to load. And, like any high-performance engine, it can become beautifully upgraded through sensible use - or occasionally develop some annoying “quirks” if you insist on redlining it every time you leave the driveway. So, without further ado, let’s get to know yours!

Part 1: Meet your machine

Congratulations on your ownership of the cardio-thumper 2000!

With a little knowledge and a little TLC, your cardio-thumper will serve you faithfully for decades to come.

Let’s begin by looking at the operation of your cardio-thumper 2000 in a little more depth and exploring some of its features…

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That much, most of us understand.

If you want to move a lot of oxygen for a long time, you need a heart that can move a lot of blood. And, over years of training, that is exactly what happens. The endurance athlete’s heart gets bigger. It fills more. It pumps more. It becomes, in a very literal sense, a bigger engine.

But, as with most things in physiology, the story is not quite as simple as “bigger is better.”

One of the central themes of this episode is that there are big healthy hearts and big sick hearts - and confusing the two leads to a lot of bad takes. A large athlete’s heart is not the same thing as an enlarged diseased heart. In fact, for a serious endurance athlete, a bigger heart is not a pathology. It’s the point!

At the same time, fitness is not immunity.

That may be the most important message of the conversation.

You cannot be too fit to have a cardiac problem.

That line, from Guido Claessen, gets right to the heart of the matter. Being fit lowers risk. It improves function. It gives you capacity and margin. But it does not make you invincible. Athletes can still develop atrial fibrillation. They can still have coronary plaque. They can still have rhythm disturbances. They can still get myocarditis after viral infections. And because athletes often have such enormous functional reserve, the signs can sometimes be subtle.

So, in this episode, we tried to do something that is often missing in conversations around endurance sport and the heart:

We tried to hold both truths at once.

Exercise is overwhelmingly good for you.

And…

There are some cardiac considerations that become relevant when you train hard, train long, and do it for decades.

To help us unpack this properly, we were joined by two of the best people in the world on the athlete’s heart: Andre La Gerche and Guido Claessen.

We talked about why the athlete’s heart remodels, why low-intensity volume may be such a powerful stimulus for building the engine, why masters athletes often get the intensity distribution wrong, why atrial fibrillation is common but usually not catastrophic, why “gunk” in the arteries is more complicated than most people think, and why training hard when you’re sick is rarely a sign of toughness.

But the episode ends in exactly the place it should.

Not with fear. With perspective…

As Andre put it, if people sat in his clinic and saw the 70- and 80-year-old lifelong athletes walking - or running - into the room, they would not be scared of exercise.

They would understand the real prize that a lifetime of exercise brings:

Not just more years.

More life in those years!

To dive a little deeper, be sure to check out this one from

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

The Athlete’s Heart

Let me start with the question that brought me to Guido Claessen when I began digging deeper into my own health earlier this year…

Read more

4 months ago · 25 likes · Iñaki de la Parra

Alistair Brownlee in full flight! | Tina Williams/Alamy

Recently, while preparing for our conversation with two-time Olympic champion Alistair Brownlee on Mad Science Meets Real Life, I revisited a presentation that I saw a long time ago from his long-time coach Malcolm Brown.

What struck me about revisiting the presentation this time around, wasn’t that it contained some revolutionary training method or hidden physiological insight. In fact, the opposite. The further I got into it, the more I was reminded of a simple truth…

Most of the things that create elite endurance athletes aren’t particularly fancy or mysterious. In fact they’re quite simple. But even simple things can be really really difficult to execute for long enough to build a champion!

This is an important distinction because endurance sport, these days, has become fascinated with novelty. We’re constantly searching for the next breakthrough, the next training methodology, the next supplement, the next technological innovation. Yet, when you step back and actually look at, listen to, the development of athletes who have reached the very highest levels of the sport, their is a common “vibe” that emerges. You might have sensed it when listening to our podcast with Joel Filliol, coach of Olympic Champ, Simon Whitfield or our chat with Arild Tveiten, coach of another Olympic Champion - Kristian Blummenfelt, or maybe our chat with Johan Rojler, coach of another Olympic Champion - Nils van der Poel. And the vibe is this…

The athletes who become champions are rarely those who did something fancy, or discovered some ‘secret’ that nobody else knew. More often, they’re the athletes who became exceptionally good at patiently and progressively building their training volume over extraordinarily long periods of time.

This was the same vibe that I felt when I walked on deck at the Australian Institute of Sport for the very first time - a level of seriousness mixed with a reality that this is a long-term project that we’re all committed to - best settle in and get comfortable, we’re going to be here a while. And those same familiar feelings, those same lessons came up again when chatting with Alistair.

His story is not a story about an athlete who trained hard. Lots of athletes train hard. It is not simply a story about an athlete who laid down impressive workouts in Olympic years. Again, plenty of athletes lay down impressive workouts - at least sporadically. No, Alistair’s story is one of patience. It’s one of progressively building the volume over many years, while having a good time along the way. It’s one of an athlete who simply built a tremendous work capacity over many years that enabled him to do training that nobody else in the world was doing at the time. The key question. The question that you really want to answer in order to determine how Alistair became a multiple Olympic Champion, is how did he build himself into the kind of athlete who could absorb the training that he did?

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“I have a busy life and only have x amount of hours available to train each week. Surely I need to make those hours count by pushing the intensity a little more?”

At first glance, that sounds logical.

If training time is limited, shouldn’t we try to extract as much benefit as possible from every session?

The problem is that this perspective overlooks a critically important fact:

Training doesn’t occur in isolation.

Every workout is applied to a physiological organism that is already dealing with the demands of everyday life…

Work deadlines.

Financial pressures.

Relationship stress.

Poor sleep.

Travel.

Illness.

Family responsibilities.

All of these stressors influence how much training stress the body can successfully absorb and adapt to.

When we add large amounts of high-intensity training to a system that is already carrying a substantial life-stress load, the results are predictable: Recovery slows. Motivation wanes. Consistency drops. Sleep quality deteriorates. Performance plateaus. Injury and illness become more likely.

Eventually, the athlete finds themselves working harder but improving less. Anyone who has been involved in endurance sport for any period of time is familiar with these periods - you start a high-intensity block all gung-ho and you’re buoyed by quick improvement, but then the rate of improvement starts to slow, and the effort required for the improvement starts to increase. You’re gritting your teeth, struggling through one painful workout after the next, and getting less and less to show for it. Eventually, the improvement stops altogether, and you find yourself regressing despite working as hard as you possibly can. Eventually, despite your true best efforts, your body cries Uncle!

This isn’t a mental weakness, it’s a physiological reality. When it comes down to it, you’re a physiological organism, and there are biological limits to how much stress any physiological organism can tolerate!

While concepts such as “anti-fragility” and “hustle culture” have become increasingly popular, physiology still operates according to biological constraints. We are not infinitely adaptable. Every organism possesses a finite capacity to absorb stress, recover from it, and remodel itself in response.

This observation is not new.

Many decades ago, pioneering stress physiologist Hans Selye observed that when organisms are exposed to chronic stress, they tend to progress through three predictable stages: alarm, resistance and, if the stress continues long enough, exhaustion.

Importantly, while these three phases of the stress response are common to all stressors, when it comes to their duration and magnitude, not all stressors are created equal…

While many different forms of stress activate similar physiological systems, the magnitude of the response and the speed with which exhaustion occurs can vary dramatically. Some stressors can be tolerated for months or even years. Others can only be sustained for relatively short periods before performance begins to deteriorate.

This distinction has profound implications for endurance training.

In particular, it helps explain one of the most important observations in coaching:

Athletes can often tolerate surprisingly large volumes of low-intensity aerobic training for extended periods, while only a few weeks of highly intensive training can leave them stale, overreached, or overtrained.

To understand why, we need to introduce a concept that coaches have been discussing for generations - what Hans Selye called adaptation energy and what many top coaches through the years have discovered as adaptation reserves.

Adaptation Energy: Why Base Training Builds It and Sharpening Spends It

Read more

Few athletes in endurance sport have embodied the combination of aggression, durability, and aerobic depth quite like Alistair Brownlee.

A two-time Olympic Gold Medalist (London 2012 & Rio 2016), multiple World Champion, Commonwealth Champion, and one of the defining athletes of modern triathlon, Brownlee helped redefine what was possible in short-course racing through his relentless front-foot style and extraordinary run ability. At his peak, he wasn’t just winning races - he was dictating them from the front with a level of intensity and aerobic dominance that changed the sport.

Yet, while the level of performance that Alistair brought to the world stage was a true step-change in triathlon performance, what struck me most from our conversation was how much of it came back to proven, timeless principles…

Consistency.
Repeatability.
Low-intensity volume.
And the quiet accumulation of training over many years.

At one point Alistair said:

“You don’t accumulate a lot of hours by doing a lot this week.
You accumulate a lot of hours by doing that for 200 weeks in a row.”

That line may honestly be one of the clearest descriptions of elite endurance development I’ve ever heard.

And it highlights perhaps the biggest disconnect between elite development and recreational thinking.

Most athletes still think in:

• workouts,

• weeks,

• blocks,

• or races.

Elite development happens across:

• years,

• habits,

• routines,

• and slowly building, building, building that work capacity.

“I saw my body as training to train.”

On that note, one of the most interesting themes from the conversation, and something that I think will surprise a lot of folks who think of short-course triathlon as a very speed-focused event, were the sheer weekly training volumes involved in Alistair’s training through the years - all extending the idea that elite endurance performance is less about specific isolated fitness, and more about building enormous capacity for work.

Alistair described it beautifully:

“I saw my body as training to train.”

That’s such an important distinction.

Most athletes focus on the type of training that will get them specifically fit.

Truly world-class athletes focus on becoming the type of organism capable of absorbing more of that specific training than any of their competitors when the time is right.

That means:

• building durability,

• connective tissue resilience,

• autonomic stability,

• mitochondrial density,

• movement economy,

• and the ability to tolerate load repeatedly without breaking down.

The athlete who can consistently absorb training over years almost always wins in the long run - this was Alistair’s thesis - and he proved it in the most convincing manner possible!

The power of routine

Another major theme was how much Alistair relied on routine and habit formation.

He talked about removing the need for motivation.

Removing decision fatigue.

Building weeks that were repeatable.

He described knowing exactly what every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday looked like — because the structure itself became automatic.

That’s a massively underrated piece of endurance development.

These days, many athletes constantly seek novelty:

• new workouts,

• new gadgets,

• new training systems,

• new “optimizations.”

Meanwhile, the elites quietly repeat highly sustainable weeks for years.

Alistair even talked about choosing where he lived based on:

• access to trails,

• quiet cycling roads,

• swim facilities,

• and training groups.

Everything was designed to reduce friction and make consistency easier.

That’s what high-level endurance training really looks like:
not motivation…
but systems.

Why easy training must be EASY

This was probably the physiological centerpiece of the discussion.

Alistair repeatedly emphasized that the key to doing a lot of training was making the low-intensity work truly low intensity.

“The way to do a lot of training was to make the low intensity as easy as possible.”

Importantly, he didn’t initially arrive at this conclusion from physiology textbooks.

He arrived there pragmatically.

When he and his brother made the mistake of pushing the easy sessions too hard:

• he accumulated more fatigue,

• recovered less effectively,

• and couldn’t perform the quality sessions properly.

Simple.

And, as you know by now, I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes modern endurance athletes continue to make!

They drift into the gray zone:

• not easy enough to recover,

• not hard enough to stimulate major adaptation.

Alistair’s (clearly very successful) philosophy was the opposite…

Protect the quality sessions.

Accumulate as much low-intensity volume as possible.

And make the easy work easy enough that it doesn’t bring down the quality of the high-intensity work.

Later, his physiological knowledge/study explained what experience had already taught him:

• lower autonomic cost,

• better volume tolerance,

• preserved mechanical freshness,

• improved stroke volume development,

• greater repeatability.

But the practical insight came first.

The role of intensity

Now, none of this means all the training was soft.

Far from it.

The volume was enormous, but the hard work was also very hard, more than hard, very fast. In fact, Alistair’s coach, Malcolm Brown, put a lot of emphasis on pure basic speed…

Track sessions around sub-2:40/km pace.

Aggressive VO2 swim work.

Hard bike race simulations.

Incredibly highly polarized training - with a very small, tiny, percentage of threshold+ work, but that work being of an exceedingly high quality.

That’s an important nuance.

The easy work enabled (didn’t detract from) the quality work.

Intensity was not the foundation.

It was the expression layer built on top of the aerobic foundation.

That distinction matters enormously.

One of the greatest athletes ever… with almost no data

This was another fascinating aspect of the conversation.

For much of his career, Alistair barely used technology.

No HR.

Minimal power.

Almost no lactate testing.

He said something that really stuck with me:

“If recording the data today didn’t change what I did tomorrow, I stopped recording it.”

That’s an incredibly useful filter.

This isn’t anti-science.

It’s anti-noise.

And honestly, I think too many modern athletes have become trapped in the illusion that monitoring equals improvement - to the point that, going along with Alistair’s greater theme, it adds noise and decision fatigue.

We now have:

• endless metrics,

• dashboards,

• recovery scores,

• readiness scores,

• optimization algorithms.

All potentially telling us something different at any point in time.

But the fundamentals still matter most:

• accumulated low-intensity volume,

• consistency,

• sleep,

• recovery,

• durability,

• and sustainable long-term progression.

Interestingly, when asked what metrics matter most today, Alistair emphasized something very simple:

Consistency.

Not a single heroic workout.

Not one magical metric.

Consistency.

The Leeds environment

One particularly interesting part of the discussion was hearing about the Leeds training environment during that era.

Before everyone was talking about “the Norwegian method,” Leeds had quietly become one of the most successful endurance environments in the world.

And, when I think back to other high performance environments that I’ve been a part of, e.g. my time at the Australian Institute of Sport, the culture sounded remarkably familiar…

• everyone showed up,

• everyone trained consistently,

• easy sessions stayed easy,

• hard sessions were hard,

• and people accumulated years together.

That’s something I think we often overlook when analyzing elite performance.

Great environments normalize consistency.

Not hero workouts.

Living near the edge

Of course, elite performance isn’t without risk.

Alistair was very honest about the injuries he dealt with throughout his career.

One line stood out to me:

“I wanted to get to the Olympic start line 99.999% ready… and sometimes that meant going to 101% and falling off the cliff.”

That’s elite sport.

There’s always a tension between:

• maximizing adaptation,

• and exceeding recoverable load.

He openly acknowledged that many of his injuries likely came from simply pushing the load ceiling extremely high.

But what was interesting was how he approached injury management.

Rather than complete shutdowns, he increasingly focused on:

• maintaining movement,

• maintaining fitness,

• cross-training,

• and finding ways to continue adapting while injured.

Again:
training to train.

The real lesson

I think the biggest takeaway from this entire conversation is that elite endurance development is actually remarkably unglamorous.

Modern endurance culture often glorifies:

• novelty,

• complexity,

• optimization,

• hacks,

• and metrics.

But the greatest athletes in the world often succeed through something much simpler:

They build systems that allow them to consistently absorb & build training over many years.

They repeat sustainable routines.

They recover well.

They keep easy training easy.

And they avoid interruption.

Which brings us back to perhaps the most important takeaway of the entire discussion:

“You accumulate a lot of hours by doing that for 200 weeks in a row.”

That’s endurance development.

Not a single block.

Not a single season.

Not one magical workout.

But the quiet accumulation of consistent training, repeated patiently and progressively over many years.

In the last piece, I introduced the idea that while the general sequence of endurance training adaptation is relatively universal, the magnitude of response to the different phases of training can vary dramatically between athletes. In the post before it, I outlined how almost all successful endurance programs follow a similar broad structure - an early focus on aerobic development, followed by progressively more specific work as the event approaches. But, within that overall structure, athletes differ substantially in which phases they benefit from the most and how long each phase should last.

Some athletes respond strongly to sharpening and race-specific intensity. Others derive their greatest benefit from long periods of stable aerobic loading. Some improve rapidly with concentrated intensity blocks, while others seem to improve almost exclusively through long, uninterrupted periods of consistent low-intensity work. And while these differences can often feel anecdotal or intuitive from a coaching perspective, when you start looking at long-term training response data from different athletes – i.e. how much their fitness shifts in response to different training “blocks”, these patterns become remarkably obvious.

For this one, I want to wrap up this three-part series on season-planning with a nice bow by getting down to where the rubber meets the road and putting together a case-study on the way that we can use this information on athlete types to individualize the training plan.

If there’s one athlete who perfectly represents the latter category above - the athlete who simply continues improving from large amounts of aerobic work - it’s my friend and MSMRL co-host, former Ultraman World Champ, Iñaki de la Parra.

After having the privilege to work with Iñaki for more than a decade now – collecting mounds of metrics, workout files and test data, I’m left with one undeniable conclusion…

Iñaki really is a diesel engine! 🚂

Give him a long enough runway of steady aerobic work and he will just continue going from strength to strength. There’s very little drama to it. You don’t typically see the sudden breakthroughs or the dramatic “switch-on” moments that you often observe in more intensity-responsive athletes. Instead, his progress tends to unfold slowly and steadily over very long periods of time. At first the changes are subtle enough that you barely notice them from week to week. Then eventually, after months of uninterrupted work, you look back and realize the entire system has shifted upward & you’re looking at a completely different athlete!

This is the defining characteristic of what I described in the previous article as the “Slow Base Builder.” A reminder on what defines that type…

These athletes tend to tolerate high volumes of aerobic work extremely well. More importantly, they continue deriving benefit from that work long after many other athletes would have plateaued. While a more intensity-oriented athlete may begin to feel stale or flat from prolonged base periods, the slow base builder often continues adapting quietly beneath the surface. The mistake with athletes like this is rarely that they are undertrained. More often, the mistakes fall under two broad categories – cranking up the heat and trying to “fast cook” the athlete or “pulling the athlete out of the oven early” i.e. interrupting the build before the aerobic adaptations have had sufficient time to fully mature. Over the years, I’ve made both! 😊

However, this Ironman France prep has been a good reminder of the power of using the “right” pattern of preparation for this “slow base builder” athlete.

If we compare his response profile to some of the “fast sharpener” or mixed-profile athletes discussed in the previous article, the contrast becomes very obvious. Relative to the athlete population, Iñaki derives dramatically less benefit from late-stage Z5 sharpening work and dramatically more benefit from early low-intensity aerobic volume. In contrast, athletes like myself sit much further toward the opposite end of the spectrum - showing strong positive responses to late intensity while deriving comparatively less benefit from prolonged easy volume.

In many ways, they represent almost mirror-image athlete types.

For me-type athletes, the sharpening phase acts almost like a booster rocket. Once intensity enters the program, performance rises rapidly and visibly. These athletes often feel noticeably sharper and more competitive within a relatively short period of time. However, they also tend to be more fragile with respect to prolonged loading. Extend the build too long or carry too much fatigue into the final phase, and performance often stagnates or regresses.

Iñaki is almost the complete opposite of this.

For him, the “main engine” is the long aerobic build itself. The sharpening phase matters, but it functions much more as a final refinement of fitness that has already largely been established rather than as the primary driver of peak performance. In practical terms, this means that as long as the aerobic load remains appropriate and stable, fitness simply continues to rise.

And this pattern becomes very obvious when you look at the long-term training data…

Read more

Scroll through X for five minutes and you’ll see everything from banded “run-specific” exercises to maximal lifting protocols, to hybrid systems promising that you can be both a powerlifter and an Ironman champion at the same time.

Most of it misses the point.

So in this episode of MAD Science Meets Real Life, we sat down with one of the best in the business - someone who has quietly worked behind the scenes with Olympic medalists, Ironman champions, and some of the most durable endurance athletes in the world - to strip things back to first principles.

And what emerged was refreshingly simple…

You Can’t Shoot a Cannon from a Canoe

One of the lines that stuck with me from my early days in strength and conditioning was:

“You can’t shoot a cannon from a canoe.”

It’s a crude metaphor—but an accurate one.

As endurance coaches and athletes, we spend the vast majority of our time trying to build a bigger engine:

• More VO₂max

• More threshold

• More watts per kilo

• More volume

But at the same time, we often neglect the structure that has to carry that engine.

And when that structure isn’t prepared?

The system breaks down.

Not always immediately. But inevitably.

The Biggest Mistake: Strength That Looks Like the Sport

One of the clearest takeaways from this conversation is that most “strength training” for endurance athletes is misguided from the start.

Instead of complementing the sport…

…it copies the sport.

Exercises that mimic pedaling.
Movements that look like running.
Endless band work reinforcing the exact same patterns already being trained for hours each week.

But as Erin put it:

The goal is not to “do more of the same”—it’s to build a supporting system around what you already do.

Or more bluntly:

Don’t exhaust the tissue that’s already exhausted.

The Real Goal: Restore → Then Strengthen

Endurance training is inherently repetitive.

And repetition, over time, creates predictable patterns:

• Tight hips

• Locked thoracic spine

• Forward head posture

• Anterior pelvic tilt

None of these are “bad” in isolation - they’re often part of being an efficient athlete.

But when you get stuck in them, they begin to limit performance.

So the job of strength training isn’t just to add load.

It’s to:

1. Restore balance

2. Return the body to neutral

3. Then strengthen that position

That order matters.

Because strengthening dysfunction just reinforces it.

Why This Matters for Performance (Not Just Injury)

A lot of athletes mentally file strength work under:

“Stuff I’ll do when I get injured.”

But that misses the bigger picture.

Movement quality is performance.

You can see it clearly in the lab:

• Two athletes with the same VO₂max

• Same aerobic engine

…but vastly different speeds.

Why?

Because one can express that engine efficiently - and the other can’t.

Tightness, poor sequencing, and compensation patterns all come at a cost.

And that cost compounds over time.

The Hidden Edge: Recovery, Not Just Strength

One of the more interesting threads in this conversation was the role of strength work as a recovery tool.

Endurance athletes live in a predominantly catabolic state:

• Breaking down tissue

• Burning through energy

• Accumulating fatigue

But well-executed strength work—especially when combined with breath work—can shift the system back toward anabolic recovery.

Even more importantly, it can help athletes transition faster from:

• Sympathetic (“fight or flight”)
  → Parasympathetic (“rest and digest”)

And that might be one of the biggest untapped performance levers in endurance sport.

Not just how hard you can train…

…but how quickly you can recover from it.

The Trap of “More”

There’s a natural temptation—especially among driven athletes—to take a good idea and push it too far.

If some strength is good… more must be better.

But as we discussed in the episode:

If strength alone determined performance, the strongest athlete would win every race.

They don’t.

At a certain point:

• More strength adds fatigue

• More muscle adds cost

• More load adds risk

And the returns diminish quickly.

The goal isn’t maximal strength.

It’s sufficient strength—applied in the right way, at the right time.

Thinking Beyond Performance

As we wrapped the conversation, things naturally drifted toward a broader question:

What is all of this actually for?

Because performance is only one phase of the journey.

And if the way we train doesn’t support:

• Long-term movement

• Posture

• Independence

• Health

…then we’re missing something important.

Endurance sport has a way of pulling us forward—literally and figuratively.

Without intentional work to counterbalance that, the long-term trajectory isn’t great.

So part of this conversation is about racing faster.

But part of it is about something bigger:

Building a body that lasts.

Listen to the Full Episode

This was one of those conversations that cuts through the noise and brings things back to what actually matters.

If you’re an endurance athlete trying to make sense of strength training—or a coach trying to apply it more effectively - we think you’ll get a lot from this one.

For a deeper dive, please check out, this one from me…

This one from Inaki…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

Build a Body That’s Hard to Kill = Lifelong Strength + Endurance

If you want a body and a life where you are actually capable you need a simple system…

Read more

9 months ago · 60 likes · 7 comments · Iñaki de la Parra

And a plethora of resources for the endurance athlete ready to get serious about their strength and mobility work can be found on Erin’s website…

https://www.ecfitstrength.com/

We started with a simple model - Mr. Middleman - and walked through how a well-sequenced year stacks adaptations: base as the main engine, intensity layered as staged boosters, fatigue carefully managed across the build, and fitness peaking exactly when it matters. Get the sequence right, and you arrive at the start line with lift-off. Get it wrong, and you end up with a series of misfires - good work, poorly timed.

But there was an important caveat at the end of that piece.

The blueprint works… for Mr. Middleman.

And most athletes aren’t Mr. Middleman.

While the general sequence we outlined—Base → Tempo → Threshold → Sharpening -is physiologically dictated by the time course of adaptation, the time spent in each phase and the benefit derived from each can vary dramatically between athletes.

This is especially the case for the latter phases. In this piece we’ll focus on the last half of the season - the Specific Prep period where we start to tailor the training to the specifics of the athlete. For the General Prep phase, the base phase, that we discussed as the early season emphasis in the last post, developing a solid work capacity is a general attribute, that all athletes will benefit from to a large degree, irrespective of the specifics of their physiology and event.

However, when we get to the latter half of the season, you’ll find that athletes respond differently to the various options - large volumes of tempo work, focused threshold training, or more intensive interval work. For this reason, identifying some of these differences between athletes can make a significant difference in how much performance improvement occurs for that athlete in the latter half of the build.

From the General Blueprint to Individual Adjustment

When I began looking at some of these differences in athlete response through a mixed-effects model, that point became even clearer…

At its core, a mixed-effects model separates what tends to work across the group from how each individual deviates from that pattern. In coaching terms, it’s the difference between the default sequence and the way a specific athlete bends that sequence.

What emerges from that isn’t a completely different plan for every athlete. It’s something much more practical…

The structure stays the same. The sequence is still there. But the weighting of that sequence - the relative importance of each phase, and the timing with which those phases arrive - shifts depending on the athlete.

So the coaching task becomes one of interpretation rather than invention. We are no longer asking, “What plan should this athlete follow?” but rather, “Where does this athlete sit relative to the model, and how should the ‘prototype season’ be adjusted accordingly?”

A Very Brief Geeky Interlude… 🤓

For those curious what sits underneath this, the following analysis comes from a mixed-effects model - a statistical approach that looks at two things at once. It captures the average response across a group of athletes (what tends to work in general), while also estimating how each individual athlete deviates from that average. In practical terms, it allows you to separate the “default plan” from the way a specific athlete bends that plan - toward more base, more intensity, or different timing of both.

But, something very important that I want to emphasize:

You don’t need a mathematical model to see this.

A trained coach’s eye, given enough exposure to athletes over time, will start to recognize these patterns intuitively. You’ll notice the athlete who doesn’t come alive until the final weeks. The one who just keeps improving the longer the build goes. The one who only seems to move when tempo is introduced.

The model doesn’t create these patterns. These are (likely genetic) archetypes that have existed long before computers started to mathematically describe them! The model just makes some of these patterns easier to see…

Making the Invisible Visible

One of the challenges with the idea of different athlete ‘types’ is that, without some way of visualizing it, it can feel abstract. Since we’re looking at response to multiple training zones over multiple time lags, e.g.

• How much does zone 5 work impact the athlete’s fitness 30 days out from the race?

• How about 120 days out?

• Which is a better emphasis 60 days out - zone 5 sharpening or zone 3/4 tempo work?

In other words, there are a lot of variables in play at any one point in time. We can talk about athletes responding “more” or “less” to certain types of work at certain points within the training build, but that’s difficult to hold in your head in any structured way.

That’s where mapping and clustering some of these differences into different athlete “archetypes” comes in very handy…

Read more

The biggest breakthroughs rarely come from something new.

They come from finally understanding and applying those simple, persistent, enduring, principles.

—

In this episode of MAD Science Meets Real Life, we sit down with Joel Filliol—one of the most experienced and respected coaches in the sport - coach of the 2000 Olympic Champ - Simon Whitfield…

Simon Whitfield storms home to take gold at the Sydney Olympics - David Ashdown | Alamy

,,,,along with 3 Olympic medals, 6 World Championships, 30 WTS wins and 100 WTS podiums over the last 30 years of coaching.

But what makes Joel interesting isn’t just the consistent results.

It’s the consistency of his message.

Over decades in the sport, while trends have come and gone—threshold this, polarized that, now Zone 2 everything—his core philosophy has steadily converged toward something surprisingly simple:

Build that low-intensity base
Progressively. Over time.
And most importantly… don’t rush the process.

—

We spend a lot of this conversation unpacking where things actually go wrong for athletes.

Not in theory—but in practice.

Why intensity is still the biggest trap.
Why “easy” training is quietly getting too hard.
Why many promising athletes plateau (or disappear) despite doing all the “right” things.

And perhaps most interestingly…

Why so much of good coaching is built not on success - but on mistakes…

The sessions that went a little too far.
The moments where instinct said “pull back”… and we didn’t.
The hard lessons that shape how we think about training years later.

—

There’s also a broader theme running through this one that I think a lot of you will resonate with:

We’re living in an era of infinite information.

Every athlete now has access to everything—methods, metrics, marginal gains, the latest “secrets” from the top of the sport.

And yet…

Performance still comes back to the same fundamentals:

Consistency.
Patience.
And getting the basics right—over and over again.

—

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering:

• Am I doing too much intensity?

• Am I actually going easy enough on my easy days?

• Am I chasing the wrong things?

…this one will hit close to home.

—

As always, this is a conversation that sits right at the intersection of MAD Science and Real Life—where physiology meets practice, and where the messy reality of coaching shapes what actually works.

Enjoy.

And, for a deeper dive, please check out Joel’s excellent Substack -

Real Coaching

High performance principles from 30 years of coaching the world's best triathletes — without the noise.

By Joel Filliol

And this stellar in-depth Q & A with Joel and Inaki…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

What 30 Years of Coaching Taught Joel Filliol

Join 4,000+ athletes, coaches, and everyday winners reading my Substack, where I consistently share conversations like this, along with insights on performance, mindset, and systems for sport, family and life…

Read more

5 months ago · 59 likes · 18 comments · Iñaki de la Parra and Joel Filliol

“Putting together a good training plan is rocket science” - me

It’s a sad fact: Most athletes don’t arrive at their A-Race start line at their fitness peak.

They sign up for their race, often pay significant sums of money, put in a year or more of solid work, but rack up to the start line of the big event knowing that they aren’t where they should be. And, as such, often get beaten by athletes who have put in less total work, but are better prepared because the work was progressive and properly sequenced.

They fail because they trained chaotically, swayed by their motivation in the moment, coupled with whatever methodology happened to cross their current timeline. They might have included all of the pieces of the puzzle at various points throughout the year, but they put the right training in the wrong place. For example…

Too much intensity too early.
Too much fatigue carried too late.
Too much dispersion of the “good sessions”… that never quite add up to a great season.

And the frustrating part?

In a global sense, they know they did “the work”; they just didn’t get the timing right.

And that’s what this one will be about - setting up your season plan to ensure you get the timing right.

When it comes to the time-course of the different physiological adaptations, it helps to think of your season like a rocket…

It’s not powered only by one big (base) engine, but by a sequence of carefully timed boosters - each one designed to fire at exactly the right moment, do its job, and then get out of the way.

Get the sequence right, and you “have lift off” - arriving at race day with maximum speed and precision.

Get it wrong?

You have a bunch of random misfires that never give you the power that you need to achieve the altitude you desire, the altitude you deserve.

In the last article, we looked at this concept of “timing” and the underlying principles that govern how training actually works:

• Delayed training effects

• Residual training effects

• The idea that fitness is built not just from what you do, but when you do it

We covered all of the key theoretical concepts. But theory doesn’t win races - practical execution does. So, in this piece, we’re going to move from theory to application - to what this actually looks like when you sit down with a blank calendar and try to build a season that peaks exactly when it matters.

To do that, we’ll start with a simple model.

Not a perfect athlete. Not a special case.

Just… Mr. Middleman.

About as “middle of the road” as you can get - a middle-aged, intermediate athlete preparing for a middle-distance triathlon, with middle-of-the-road physiology and a fairly typical training response.

Why start here?

Because if you can understand how a typical season should unfold, you’ll have a reference point - a blueprint = that makes it far easier to recognize when (and how) to adjust for your own unique strengths and limitations.

We’ll get to how to adjust for some of those individual differences in the next piece.

But first, we need a baseline.

Below you’ll find that baseline - a sample season template that illustrates how training load, intensity, and timing interact across the year - how we stack adaptations, manage fatigue, and ultimately bring everything together for a peak at exactly the right moment.

Let’s begin with a brief rundown on what is included in this very busy Annual Training Plan chart….

Read more

Athletes feel amazing in February and March…
And wonder what went wrong by June.

The problem?

They mistake early-season sensations for real fitness—and start chasing more.

More volume.
More intensity.
More racing.

Until the whole thing collapses.

In this conversation, we unpack why that happens—and what to do instead.

🔑 Key Ideas

• Early “fitness” is often just fatigue + freshness illusions

• Big training camps don’t carry you through the season

• More racing = less peak performance

• Stability beats constant progression

• The best athletes aren’t just fitter - they’re more predictable

🧠 What We Get Into

• The CTL trap (and why it misleads athletes)

• Why you can’t rush adaptation

• How to actually time your peak

• When to push—and when to hold steady

• Using races as training vs performance

• Why most amateurs lose fitness after early-season camps

• The missing phase in most training plans

For a deeper dive on effective season planning, please check out…

from Alan and this one from Inaki…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

Why Most Misjudge Their Progress Every Year

Every December (or January) we all slow down and many: Open a notebook. A Notion page. A Google Doc titled “Yearly Review…

Read more

8 months ago · 26 likes · 7 comments · Iñaki de la Parra

May your 2026 season be as mistake-free as possible, and have you peaking when it matters the most!

Most athletes interrupt adaptation before it has a chance to happen!

You planted the seed.

So why isn’t it growing?

Because you keep digging up the ground to add more seeds!

Training works the same way. You apply a stimulus, the body begins to adapt - and then, before that process has time to fully play out, you add more. More volume, more intensity, more stress. Not because it’s needed, but because it feels like progress should be happening faster than it is.

March is when athletes start blowing up their seasons.

The sun comes out, motivation rises, and suddenly the training that felt controlled in January begins to accelerate. Volume creeps up. Intensity sneaks in. What started as a well-thought out plan becomes an emotional reaction to good weather, good legs, and the feeling that progress should be happening faster than it is.

On the surface, it all looks like commitment. But underneath, something more subtle is happening. The athlete is no longer building toward a peak - they are chasing a feeling of improving fitness. And that shift, from patient restraint to an addiction for more, more, more is where things begin to unravel.

And this is where things start to go wrong.

Not all at once - but through a series of common mistakes that most athletes don’t even realize they’re making…

Mistake 1: The illusion of early strength

A season is a lot like the bike leg of an Ironman. The early miles feel deceptively easy. You’re fresh, you’re not that far removed from your off-season, energy is high, and the body is primed to perform. The temptation is always to press - to take advantage of that feeling and “bank fitness”

But there is no such thing as banking fitness.

Unlike a bank, when it comes to fitness, your money flows out without you consciously withdrawing it. Maybe you could think of it as a really bad bank with some of the worst fees on the planet, that causes your balance to just progressively whittle away without you doing anything wrong.

In other words, it’s important that you don’t grow your balance too quickly, but that you pace yourself so that your fitness balance is highest when you need to make the most important withdrawal.

Or returning to our “pushing too hard in the early miles of the Ironman” metaphor, a 300 watt acceleration early doesn’t give you “free distance” – putting your further up the road for the rest of the race. No, you pay that back and then some, as you lack the energy, the resources in the latter stages when it matters most. Whether talking about the Ironman race or your season…

The athletes strongest at mile 10 are rarely strongest at mile 100.

Mistake 2: Doing everything at once

Most athletes don’t derail their season with a single bad decision. Instead, they layer small, well-intentioned choices that collectively push them off course. The most common of these is increasing volume and intensity at the same time.

This typically happens gradually. A bit more volume because things are going well. A bit more intensity because the athlete is riding with a buddy and feels strong, or gets excited about the recent “reverse periodization” article they read in their favorite magazine. Neither decision seems unreasonable in isolation. But together, they create a mismatch between the rate of stress being applied and the rate of adaptation the body can sustain.

One of the first pieces of wisdom that my coaching mentor, a man with multiple Olympians in his palmares imparted…

“Never increase volume and intensity at the same time”

Read more

I’m not sure there is a more over-hyped word in the health and fitness space right now than the “L” word – Longevity. From death-deniers to gym bros it seems everyone is weighing in on what it’s going to take for you to steer clear of that guy – first name Grim, last name Reaper.

But, like information on pretty much any topic at the moment – misinformation abounds, with opinions ranging from – “You need to avoid the sun at all costs and pay me a million dollars a year for my patented supplement stack” to “You need to revert to your carnivore roots – spend all your time either in the gym lifting anything not bolted down or running around in a loin cloth outside running down wild game.” In this article, I’d like to move away from all that and first principles this thing by taking it back to the simple question…

What’s going to take you out?

People are terrible at estimating risk.

We imagine that our inability to deadlift 2x bodyweight is what does us in, in the inevitable Grizzly bear fight that we’re preparing for. We imagine that our ability to run a sub 6 minute mile is what’s going to make all the difference… in the looming Zombie apocalypse? In our brains, it’s always dramatic, cinematic endings.

Meanwhile, the processes that will really end our lives are slow, silent, and unfolding over decades.

If longevity matters to you, and especially longevity with good function and health throughout, we need to stop thinking like movie directors and start thinking like physiologists.

Because the biggest threats aren’t exciting or dramatic. They’re the cumulative result of a lifetime of low-grade abuse.

When you look at lifetime mortality in a fit, non-smoking Western human with good fitness and decent health at midlife, the picture is not dominated by rare catastrophes. It is dominated by slow biological processes: vascular disease, cancer biology, neurodegeneration, and the gradual decline in basic physical resilience that comes with aging.

So, without further ado, let’s break down what’s actually most likely to take us out so we can focus our preventative efforts on the things that actually matter…

Read more

• VO₂max.

• Lactate.

• Training paces

• Heart rate zones

We slice performance into metrics and sub-metrics and optimization frameworks. And all of that is useful. Necessary, even. But underneath all of it - beneath the physiology, beneath the psychology, beneath the training plans - there is something more fundamental:

Energy.

Not calories in the simplistic input-output way we usually consider them. Not your daily “macros”. But energy as a finite currency. A budget. An overall capacity of the athlete that can be directed well or mismanaged.

In this conversation with Aitor Viribay, we kept circling back to a deceptively simple idea: Energy is not limitless. And if that’s true, then performance becomes less about “spending more” and more about building more while allocating what you have wisely.

That’s a subtle but profound shift.

Aitor works at the absolute highest levels of endurance sport — Tour de France riders, ultra-distance athletes, competitors operating at the edge of what human metabolism can sustain. It would have been easy for this conversation to revolve entirely around fueling protocols and carbohydrate oxidation rates for these athletes. And yes, we discussed those 😊

But what struck me most was how often we drifted into bigger, almost philosophical, territory.

Debt.
Capacity.
Adaptation.
Uncertainty.

At one point, Aitor used a financial analogy that I think will resonate far beyond sport. You can drive the Lamborghini without having the money. But that’s called debt. And eventually, the bank shows up with the bill.

The body works the same way.

You can overspend training load.
You can overspend psychological stress.
You can overspend social comparison and external validation.
You can even overspend carbohydrate intake without the mitochondrial capacity to use it.

For a while, it might look impressive. But eventually, the bill arrives.

One of the most important themes in this discussion was the order of operations.

Modern culture wants hacks. It wants fueling strategies before it wants fitness. It wants 120 grams per hour before it wants 10 years of aerobic base. It wants metabolic flexibility through food restriction rather than through movement.

But, as Aitor points out…

“mitochondria don’t grow because you eat avocados". They grow because you move. Because you stress the system. Because you created demand and then recovered from it.

Capacity first. Resources second.

That hierarchy matters.

Fueling is powerful. In the right context, it’s performance-defining. But fueling without capacity is noise. Or worse — it’s additional stress layered onto a system that already lacks adaptability.

We also explored something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in sport science: the energetic cost of modern life.

The brain is expensive. Uncertainty is expensive. Social comparison is expensive.

When you’re arguing with your spouse, worrying about contracts, refreshing social media, or trying to live inside the gap between expectations and capacity, that energy isn’t free. It doesn’t exist in a separate psychological silo. It shows up in the physiology. In the tolerance to training. In recovery. In decision-making under fatigue.

The highest performance environments don’t just add more inputs. They remove noise. They reduce uncertainty. They conserve energy for what matters.

That may be one of the most transferable lessons from the Tour de France to everyday life.

We closed on metabolic flexibility — a term that is often misunderstood.

Metabolic Flexibility is not about restriction. It’s about building range & using the right substrate at the right time.

It’s the ability to flow between substrates depending on the demands placed upon you. To burn predominantly fat at low intensities and shift decisively into carbohydrate when the moment calls for it. To be metabolically calm when nothing is required and explosively responsive when everything is.

That adaptability is not built through dogma. It’s built through exposure. Through intelligent intensity distribution. Through respecting the energy budget.

And ultimately, through humility.

Managing your energy is managing your life.

That’s true whether you’re racing the Tour de France or simply trying to show up well for your family and your work.

We hope that the conversation with Aitor strikes you in the same profound way that it did us, and hopefully leads to you examining your own energy in more depth…

• What are you currently working with?

• Does your current nutrition reflect that?

• Where are your current “energy leaks”

• How can you build more energy in your life?

If you’d like to go even deeper into the concepts of energy budgets, fueling limits, capacity building, and the psychology of performance mentioned in the podcast, please check out ‘s interview with Aitor below…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

You Don’t Have a Nutrition Problem: You Have an Energy Problem

Endurance nutrition has a conceptual problem…

Read more

8 months ago · 19 likes · 4 comments · Iñaki de la Parra

Ample Movement 🚶
Healthy Nutrition 👨‍🍳
Low-Stress Living 🧘

Remove one… and the whole structure begins to fail.

You can’t out-diet a lack of movement.
You can’t power your body on low-octane fuel.
You can’t efficiently burn fat with chaotic stress hormones.

For foundational health, you need all three.

Metabolic Health Is About Flexibility, not Fitness

One of the most persistent misconceptions I see - both in athletes and in otherwise health-conscious individuals - is the belief that metabolic health is synonymous with body composition or aerobic fitness. In reality, metabolic health runs much deeper than either. It reflects how effectively the body regulates fuel supply, storage, and utilization across ever-changing energy demands…

At its core, metabolic health is about whether the body can supply the right fuel, at the right time, in the right amount, without instability or excessive hormonal cost.

In athletes with strong metabolic health, we typically see stable energy levels throughout the day, smooth transitions between intensities during training, and predictable recovery patterns. In contrast, metabolically fragile athletes often experience energy crashes, strong dependence on carbohydrate intake, inconsistent recovery, and difficulty sustaining training loads despite appearing outwardly “fit”.

And, make no mistake about it, good aerobic fitness coupled with very poor metabolic fitness and health is not uncommon…

There are many athletes out there with impressive VO2max numbers, with top-level threshold output, with single digit body-fat levels, who are in absolutely awful metabolic shape. I see it in the lab all the time…

One key way that we can assess metabolic fitness is to look at what fuel the athlete is burning at rest (and low-intensity efforts) – a very simple way to do this is to hook the athlete up to a metabolic cart, have them lie down, take a nap if they like 😊, and record their fuel burn while in a completely rested state.

And, when we do this, we often get some surprises…

Athletes who put up really strong values on the VO2max test, often put up really abysmal values in the resting metabolic test, i.e. it is not uncommon to see athletes with VO2max values of 60ml/kg/min or more who are dependent on getting 60% of their resting energy requirements from carbohydrate!

These are typically the type of athlete who gets their impressive fitness from excessive intensity rather than volume – always reinforcing one particular energy system – glycolysis.

They are the type of athlete who (often because of this training bias) overeats carbohydrate – both within and away from training…

Read more

This Substack isn’t about hacks, workouts of the week, or chasing the latest fad. It’s about proven long-term athletic development - staying healthy, capable, and improving for decades, not just seasons.

Everything I write here is guided by a small set of principles I’ve arrived at over the past 30 years working as an exercise physiologist and coach with athletes ranging from “off the couch” to world champions.

Rather than starting chronologically, this post will point you to the pieces that best explain how I think - and why the rest of the archive looks the way it does.

The core principles behind everything here

At a high level:

• Movement is medicine, to be taken over the lifespan

• Training works when the right dose is applied at the right time

• The right dose is highly individual and shaped by life stress

• Consistency beats heroics

• Aerobic volume is the foundation; intensity is a tool

• Robust athletes are built through variety, strength, recovery, and restraint

If those ideas resonate, you’ll feel at home here.

1. Why living an athletic life matters (beyond performance)

These pieces explain why I view athletic training not as a phase of life, but as a lifelong practice tied to health, resilience, and identity.

• Chapter 1: The Importance of Living an Athletic Life
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-1-athletic-development-through

• Your Whole Day is a Workout, and These are Your Zones
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/your-whole-day-is-a-workout-and-these

• A Day in the Life of Perfect Health

  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-perfect-health

2. First principles of training (the backbone)

Most disagreements about training come from arguing individual protocols without understanding universal principles.

• First, Principles – The Key Ingredients in Any Successful Training Plan
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-2-first-principles

• The Foundation of Fitness – Building a Strong Base
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-4-the-foundation-of-fitness

3. Individual response: why the same plan doesn’t work for everyone

One of the biggest mistakes in endurance sport is assuming the “right” plan works for everyone.

• How Do Athletes Differ in Training Response?
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-9-are-you-responding-to-your

• Rise Stronger – A Comprehensive Guide
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/rise-stronger-a-comprehensive-guide

4. Metrics, HRV, and readiness (how to interpret signals)

Data is useful - but only if you know how to interpret it correctly.

• Weekly Planning to Maximize Readiness
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/weekly-planning-to-maximize-readiness

• Understanding HRV on the Next Level
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/taking-your-understanding-of-hrv

5. Consistency, restraint, and why people stall

Most athletes don’t fail because of physiology or genetics - they fail because of impatience.

• It’s Time to Get Real About the Work Required
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/its-time-to-get-real-about-the-work

• The Importance of Knowing - and Sticking - to Your Training Zones
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-knowing-and-sticking

• Commitment
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/commitment

6. Longevity: where this all leads

Zooming out beyond performance to what really matters…

• Getting Real About Longevity: What’s actually going to take you out?

  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/getting-real-about-longevity-whats

• Relationships Between Ageing and Training
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-1-athletic-development-through

• Recovery, Lifestyle & Stress Management
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-24-case-studies-of-athletic

How to use this archive going forward

You don’t need to read everything.

But if you understand the ideas above, you’ll be able to place new posts - and your own training decisions - in context.

When you’re unsure where to go next, ask yourself:

• Am I sticking to the universal, proven principles?

• Am I misreading signals?

• Am I trying to rush something that takes time?

Chances are, the answer already exists somewhere here.

Want to go deeper - or share the journey?

If you’re looking for a place to apply these ideas, ask questions, and share the ups and downs of training over the long term, that’s exactly what the MADcrew forum is for.

It’s a small, thoughtful community of athletes who care about:

• Long-term development over quick wins

• Health and performance co-existing

• Doing the work, consistently, without noise

Many of the ideas in this Substack are discussed, debated, and refined there - often with real-world context from athletes at different stages of their journey.

You can learn more about the forum here:
👉 https://forum.madcrew.app

If Substack is where the ideas are laid out, the forum is where they’re lived.

Final note

This Substack isn’t a collection of tips.

It’s a long-form argument for a particular way of thinking about athletic development - shaped by decades of applied work, real athletes, and a strong bias toward health and longevity.

Start with the pieces above. The rest will follow naturally.

Let’s walk this long-term athletic journey together 🙏