At MYRA, we believe that sport’s deepest value lies not in the moments that make headlines, but in the long journey that shapes a life. The first trophy. The first coach who believed in you. The first experience of thinking: it is worth continuing. Felix puts words to that. And he asks the Olympic Movement directly whether the metrics it now uses to measure relevance capture the things that first made sport matter.

We share this letter because it speaks to something we keep coming back to in our work: the difference between what can be measured and what is valuable. Between reach and meaning. Between producing champions and igniting the fire that keeps people moving, training and exercising throughout their lives.

Dear Olympic Movement

by Felix Gottwald

During the final week of school before the summer break, I had the privilege of showing children at a primary school my first small trophy. Not my Olympic medals. Not Olympic gold. But the first small trophy of my sporting journey.

As I looked into their shining eyes, I realised that this small trophy may have shaped my life more profoundly than any Olympic medal. Not because it showed me what I had already achieved. But because it gave direction to something I had sensed. The sense that movement is worthwhile. That practice is worthwhile. That it is worth taking the first step. And staying the course. Even when defeats outnumber victories.

That very same day, I received the news that Nordic combined would be removed from the Olympic programme. I have been listening to this decision ever since. And the longer I listen, the less I hear a decision about a sport. I hear an invitation. An invitation to reflect together and look more closely. Almost as if the Olympic Movement were carefully holding up a mirror to itself. Not to find answers. But to encounter itself again. And to ask itself three questions:

The Olympic Games last a few days. Olympiads tell stories. Of perseverance. Of dedication. Of failure. Of getting back up. Of the joy of practice.

For more than 100 years, Nordic combined has also told the story of a unique balancing act: bringing together two fundamentally different disciplines. Explosive power and endurance. Defying gravity for fractions of a second and translating horsepower into speed on the course. Courage and trust. Letting go and staying the course. Not one or the other. Both.

And yet, for everyone, a sporting journey begins on a much smaller scale. With a first small trophy. With someone who believes in you. With the experience: It is worth continuing.

Perhaps this is where the greatest strength of the Olympic Movement lies. Not in producing Olympic champions. But in encouraging people to better master their lives through sport and movement.

Now, after more than 100 years, a sport is being removed from the Olympic program. Among the criteria underlying this decision are measurable factors: TV audiences, ticket sales, digital presence, media reach and international participation.
But are we also measuring what truly matters?
Not everything that can be measured is valuable.
And not everything that is valuable can be measured.
Does “reach” serve the Olympic ideal?
Or has the Olympic ideal long since begun to serve reach itself?

Those who inspire people to devote themselves to a long journey also take responsibility for the trust with which they set out on that journey. Every movement evolves. Perhaps the legacy of the Olympic Movement will not be measured by which sports were part of its program. Not by records. Not by reach. Not by headlines. But by the fire it has ignited in people’s hearts. By the hope it has nurtured. And by how many people have found the courage to follow their first small trophy. Not as a trophy. But as a beginning.

For the love of Nordic combined.
For the love of movement.
And because I believe in this movement.

Felix Gottwald, Ramsau am Dachstein, 12. August 2026

An article written by Aart Goossens

In the winter of 1977, a Finnish professor named Seppo Säynäjäkangas stood at a cross-country ski track in Oulu, watching athletes train in the frozen Nordic air. He carried with him a prototype for a portable device that could measure heart rate. In the past, monitoring heart rate during exercise required trailing wires connected to bulky equipment, confining athletes to laboratories. Now, for the first time, an athlete could ski outside, whilst tracking their heart rate beat by beat.

This device was the Polar Sport Tester PE 2000 and it would go on to revolutionize endurance training. Its significance extended far beyond convenience: It was the first portable window into the body’s hidden interior. The - so far - invisible work of the cardiovascular system, previously accessible only through subjective sensations of effort, had been translated into numbers. Coaches and athletes could now see, read, quantify, analyze and compare what was happening inside. Or could they?

Nearly five decades later, we find ourselves swimming (or running, or skiing) in an ocean of data that would have seemed miraculous to those Finnish pioneers. Power meters translate mechanical power into Watt. GPS devices track every meter traveled and every change in elevation. Lactate meters have shrunk from laboratory installations to handheld devices that deliver results instantly. Watches monitor sleep stages, heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and skin temperature. Motion capture systems dissect technique frame by frame. Algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence promise to synthesize these streams into actionable insights, predicting performance peaks and injury risks before they manifest.

Each new gadget, device or digital training platform has arrived with the implicit promise that we are “closing the gap”, that complete understanding of the athlete is just one more sensor, one more algorithm, or one more data stream away. Power, position, recovery, readiness: what was once hidden all of a sudden appears visible, and increasingly legible. But what exactly are we seeing when we look at this data? And how confident should we be that these measurements reflect the reality we care about?

Prisoners of measurement

To understand the nature of the data we collect, we shall take a detour: a dialogue written by a Greek philosopher nearly two and a half millennia ago.

In Book VII of The Republic, Plato asks us to imagine prisoners who have been chained inside a cave since childhood. They sit facing a blank wall, unable to turn their heads. Behind them a fire burns, and between the fire and the prisoners, a walkway runs along which people carry objects: Statues of animals, figures of humans, vessels of various shapes. The fire casts shadows of these objects onto the wall the prisoners face.

Having never seen anything else, the prisoners took those shadows to be reality itself. They gave the shadows names, they studied their movements, memorized their patterns, and developed sophisticated theories about their behavior. When a shadow of a horse appeared, they did not think “shadow of a horse,” they thought “horse.” For them the representation had become the thing represented.

This allegory (i.e., a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning) is used by Plato to explore the nature of knowledge and the difficulty of perceiving true reality. But the allegory also provides an analogy to the data “analysis paralysis” of modern coaches and athletes: Every heart rate reading, every power output, every lactate measurement, every sleep score, every subjective rating of perceived exertion: They are shadows on the cave wall. They do not directly represent the athlete’s actual physiological state, psychological readiness, or adaptive capacity. They are representations, projections and translations of an underlying reality that we can approach but never directly and truthfully capture as a whole.

The athlete’s true state (the “walkway with objects” in Plato’s allegory) remains beyond the reach of direct observation or measurement. We can infer it or estimate it by triangulating toward it using multiple data points. But we can never see it as it actually is.

This is not a failure of our instruments or a limitation we can engineer away. It is a fundamental condition of measurement itself. Every act of measurement involves translation: From the phenomenon to the sensor, from the sensor to the signal, from the signal to the display, from the display to the interpretation. At each step, information is lost, but at the end, there’s the potential to learn something. But the shadow will never be 100% identical to the object casting it.

Not all shadows are alike

Data can be classified in many ways, but two distinctions matter most here. The first is familiar: quantitative data (numbers: heart rate, power, pace, lactate, sleep hours) versus qualitative data (observations: how an athlete moves, speaks, looks at breakfast, or the coach’s sense that something feels “off” despite good numbers). The second is less commonly discussed but equally important: explicit knowledge, which has been recorded and can be shared, versus tacit knowledge, which resides in experience and intuition.

The appeal of quantitative, explicit data is obvious: it feels objective. A heart rate of 165 beats per minute during a threshold workout seems definite. But its meaning depends on contextual factors such as ambient temperature, hydration status, caffeine intake, how the athlete slept and feels, etc. The number is precise. What it tells us is far less certain.

Meanwhile, tacit knowledge, the most elusive category, may also be the most undervalued. It is the coach’s gut feeling that an athlete needs an extra rest day despite good training values, or the athlete’s own sense of not being ready when every metric says otherwise. The philosopher Michael Polanyi put it simply: “We know more than we can tell.” This knowledge is real, often accurate, and profoundly important, but it exists outside the reach of any sensor or spreadsheet. If we always know more than we can tell, what does that say about the gap we are trying to close?

These are all different ways of projecting the athlete’s real state into forms we can perceive, read and express. The wise coach learns to read them all, understanding that none holds an exclusive claim to truth.

More data, more shadows

The story of sport science can be read as a story of proliferating data: each technological advancement promising deeper insight into athletic performance. Each innovation revealing something previously hidden. And each, in time, revealing its own limitations.

With each technological wave, apparently more insight has been gained. Training has become more precise, more individualized, more responsive to the athlete’s state. But - to go back to Plato’s allegory - the shadows have not only multiplied but also gained multiple dimensions. The cave wall has grown crowded with projections that sometimes reinforce each other, sometimes contradict, and sometimes create the illusion of certainty where it does not exist.

And still, outside of the shadows lies the darkness: “data” we fail to collect, variables we don’t or can’t measure, dimensions of the athlete’s experience that no sensor yet captures. The psychological, the nutritional, the relational, the contextual: Vast regions of reality that influence performance but often still remain outside our measurement systems.

And beyond even these known gaps lie the “unknown unknowns”. The history of sport science is littered with variables that were once invisible and are now central. What will we measure in twenty years that we cannot imagine today?

This is perhaps the most important insight: what we do not know is, by definition, hidden from view, and it is always larger than we think. The darkness beyond the cave wall recedes as technology advances, but it never completely disappears.

Living with shadows

As coaches, we always work with “shadows”, indirect signs like times, heart rate, GPS, mood scores, or our own observations, none of which capture the full reality of the athlete. This isn’t a problem as long as we remember what these shadows are: useful approximations that reveal patterns, trends, and early warning signs, but never the whole truth. Using data wisely means knowing what the metric actually measures, combining numbers with dialogue and context, and staying aware that any single value can mislead. In the end, the athlete, and not the data point, must remain the centre of every decision.

In the articles that follow, we will explore how those shadows can deceive us, and how to interpret them with greater wisdom.

References

1. Plato. (c. 380 BCE). *The Republic*, Book VII. (G.M.A. Grube, Trans., Rev. C.D.C. Reeve). Hackett Publishing.

2. Polanyi, M. (1966). *The Tacit Dimension*. University of Chicago Press.

In a recent episode of the Skirious Problems podcast, cross-country skiers Mika Vermeulen and James Clugnet sat down with our Prof. Dr. Øyvind Sandbakk for a wide-ranging conversation about Norwegian endurance sport. It all started with a big question:

Does the frequently quoted “Norwegian method” actually exist?

Around the world, Norwegian endurance sport is often held up as a model to emulate. The Norwegian approach to training has become almost a brand in itself — often tied around double threshold days, lactate measurements and a high training volume.

But according to Øyvind, the answer is surprisingly simple:

“If you talk about training methods, there’s NO Norwegian method. It’s basic training science applied to the given sport, then individualized to that athlete and the requirements of that specific athlete.”

So if there is no Norwegian method, what explains Norway’s remarkable success across endurance sports?

The answer may have much less to do with a secret training recipe — and much more to do with the environment in which training takes place.

A method is more than a training session

One of the problems with the idea of a “Norwegian method” is that it encourages us to look for something that can be copied.

What session do they do?
How much do they train?
How often do they go to altitude?
How do they structure their intervals?

But a training session or even a training week does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a structured sporting system, a culture, an infrastructure and a network of people who influence how athletes train, develop and learn.

Norway has some unusual advantages in this regard.

As Øyvind explains, Norwegian society makes it relatively easy for families to be involved in sport. Working hours often allow parents to be home in the afternoon. Children can participate in sports clubs, while parents don’t simply drop them off and leave. They become part of the club themselves — volunteering, contributing and learning alongside their children.

“It’s not just a club for the kids. You don’t just send your kids to the club. It’s a family business. You’re part of the club as a family.”

That creates a high level of sporting competence throughout the system. Parents learn about training. Coaches develop within the clubs. Athletes grow up surrounded by people who understand sport.

There is also a shared language on the meaning of training zones and intensity. There is a common terminology that makes it easier for athletes, parents and coaches to communicate about training. It makes knowledge transferable.

The infrastructure advantage

Norway also has an extraordinary sporting infrastructure. Especially for cross-country skiing, the infrastructure is striking: thousands of kilometres of trails can be groomed and made available to the population — often free of charge. This facilitates access. Access creates participation, and participation creates opportunity.

A child doesn’t need to be identified as a future Olympic athlete before they can start training. They can simply participate.

These privileges are easy to overlook because they are so normal in Norway.

“Sometimes even Norwegians are quite good at mistaking this privileged way of living with superior sporting philosophy.”

Norway’s sporting success cannot simply be separated from Norway’s broader social and economic conditions.

But Norway was systematizing training before it was wealthy

This does not mean that Norway’s sporting success is simply a product of wealth.

One of the fascinating points Øyvind makes is that systematic approaches to training existed in Norway long before the country’s modern sporting wealth became what it is today. Training diaries were already being kept in the late 1950s. Athletes and coaches began systematically documenting training, testing athletes and looking back at what successful performers had actually done.

Eventually, this developed into a broader learning culture. When results were stalling in the early 2000s, researchers and practitioners went back through decades of training history, from the 1960s onwards, asking themselves “What did successful athletes actually do?”, “How did training change as the sport evolved?” and “Can understanding the past help us anticipate what athletes will need in the future?”

This is very different from developing a perfect “method” or recipe. It is about developing a system for learning about training.

From training diaries to a learning culture

The important development was to develop a culture in which training would be observed, documented, discussed, tested and improved.

Training diaries created a historical record. Testing created feedback. Coaches and researchers could compare training with performance. Clubs created environments in which knowledge could spread. Sports schools provided opportunities for young athletes to train more frequently with competent coaches. National structures such as Olympiatoppen created meeting places where knowledge could be shared not only within sports, but across sports.

Knowledge can move across roles, institutions, sports and time. Over time, this creates a flywheel of continuous learning.

So, is there a Norwegian method?

If by “Norwegian method” we mean a specific training formula that explains Norwegian success, probably not.

There is no magic combination of intervals, lactate values and training volume that suddenly makes a (Norwegian) athlete more successful than others.

Instead, there is a combination of:

• broad participation and strong club structures

• educated coaches and parents

• excellent sporting infrastructure

• opportunities to train frequently

• a shared language around training

• systematic testing and documentation

• knowledge sharing within and across sports

• and a long-standing culture of learning from training data and experience

Together, these things create an environment in which high training quality can emerge, spread and continuously improve over a long time.

Many of these elements are topics we have explored in depth in previous MYRA articles — from athlete development, training environments and the role of sporting systems to fundamental training principles such as training continuity, testing, intensity control and training quality.

What can other countries actually copy?

A country cannot simply copy Norway’s geography, wealth, working culture, public infrastructure or thousands of kilometres of ski trails.

But countries and organisations can ask which parts of the system are actually transferable:

• Can we create stronger clubs?

• Can we educate parents?

• Can we develop a shared language around training?

• Can we connect coaches and researchers?

• Can we systematically document what athletes do?

• Can we create better feedback loops between testing, training and performance?

• Can we make knowledge easier to share across sports and generations?

Perhaps the greatest Norwegian advantage is not that they have found the perfect way to train. It is that they have built an environment that makes it easier to learn what good training looks like.

An article written by Øyvind Sandbakk

At this year’s European College of Sport Science (ECSS) Congress in Lausanne, I was invited to present work on one of the most discussed topics in female athlete development: how menstrual-cycle hormones and hormonal contraceptives should inform endurance training.

Female sex hormones are biologically active. They can influence thermoregulation, ventilation, substrate metabolism, mood, the severity of menstrual cycle symptoms, sleep, and recovery. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether endurance training should be systematically adjusted across the menstrual cycle.

In recent years, a variety of simplified cycle-based recommendations have been presented: train hard in one phase, back off in another, build strength here, expect poor performance there. These templates are easy to communicate. At presence, however, there is no evidence to suggest that taking the phase of the menstrual cycle into account as a universal programming rule leads to better performance. This does not, however, mean that the issue should be ignored.

The more useful question is: “What does this athlete need today to preserve training quality, health, and long-term development?”

Further reading:

Hormones matter but group-level performance effects are small

Let us start with the nuance. Hormones matter. Female athletes operate across changing hormonal environments associated with the menstrual cycle and hormonal contraceptive use. Higher luteal progesterone may elevate core temperature and increase potential heat strain, while estrogen has been linked to changes in lipid oxidation and glycogen sparing. However, the current evidence suggests that these effects do not translate into large, consistent changes in endurance performance at the group level.

McNulty and colleagues (2020) found that performance may be trivially reduced in the early follicular phase compared with other phases, but the pooled effect was very small, between-study variability was large, and evidence quality was low. Their conclusion was not that menstrual-cycle phase should be ignored, but that guidance should be individualized rather than generalized.

This is reinforced by methodological critiques showing that many studies have relied on small samples, insufficient menstrual-cycle verification, heterogeneous outcomes, and limited control of confounders such as training status, nutrition, time of day, and prior exercise (Janse de Jonge et al., 2019; Elliott-Sale et al., 2021). A systems physiology perspective also reminds us that hormones do not act as isolated switches; performance emerges from interacting physiological, psychological, and contextual systems (D’Souza et al., 2023).

So, the debate has moved forward. The question is no longer whether hormones can influence physiology. They can. The question is whether menstrual-cycle phase produces reliable enough changes in performance or training response to justify standardized training templates.

At present, the answer appears to be no. Even within an individual, the menstrual cycle phases from one cycle to another can be very different.

What we learned from endurance athletes

The Female Endurance Athlete (FENDURA) project has examined these questions directly in trained and highly trained endurance athletes. In one study, Taylor and colleagues tested athletes across verified early follicular, ovulatory, and mid-luteal phases, using calendar counting, ovulation testing, and hormonal verification. At the group level, menstrual-cycle phase and serum estrogen or progesterone concentrations did not influence key performance-determining variables, including peak oxygen uptake, oxygen uptake at 4 mmol·L⁻¹ blood lactate, time to exhaustion, running economy, or 30-second mean power output. This led to the conclusion that none of the measured performance-determining variables were influenced by menstrual-cycle phase or serum estrogen/progesterone concentrations.

A follow-up FENDURA study examined actual training sessions: low-intensity continuous training and high-intensity interval training across verified menstrual-cycle phases. Some physiological and perceptual variables differed statistically, but were overall minor physiological and perceptual differences, with the overall demands of LIT and HIT being similar across menstrual-cycle phases at the group level.

Symptoms may matter more than the phase label

One of the most important practical messages is that perceived impairment of performance around the menstrual cycle is often driven by symptoms, not simply by hormonal phase.

In competitive endurance athletes, self-reported fitness and performance are often perceived as worse right before and during bleeding, when symptoms are most prevalent, while the post-bleeding phase is often perceived more favorably (Solli et al., 2020).

This means that the menstrual cycle phase often does not reflect the lived reality of perceived symptoms on a given training day.

For one athlete, early follicular training may be completely unaffected. For another, pain, heavy bleeding, poor sleep, or low readiness may compromise the quality of a key session. The same phase label can therefore mean very different things in practice and can even vary within an individual from one cycle to another.

Hormonal contraceptives add complexity, not simple answers

Hormonal contraceptives add another layer of complexity. Different formulations, dosages, delivery methods, bleeding profiles, reasons for use, and side effects can all influence how an athlete feels and performs.

The best available meta-analysis indicates that oral contraceptive use may be associated with slightly inferior average exercise performance compared with naturally menstruating women, but any group-level effect is likely trivial, variable, and insufficient for general performance guidance (Elliott-Sale et al., 2020).

This does not mean hormonal contraceptive use is irrelevant. In Norwegian cross-country skiers and biathletes, Engseth and colleagues documented meaningful self-perceived experiences with hormonal contraceptive use in an elite endurance population; 68% used hormonal contraception, 64% of those used progestin-only methods, 60% reported using hormonal contraception for reasons other than birth control, menstrual symptoms being the most common reason, and most users reported a solely positive or no effect on training and performance.

Mastering the training process should have the highest priority

The strongest takeaway from the currently available evidence is that female-specific health information should be integrated into the broader training process and not used as a stand-alone programming rule.

Endurance adaptation depends on repeated high-quality training stimuli, supported by recovery, nutrition, sleep, health, motivation, and communication over time. The training session is the signal, while the rest of the day helps determine how the athlete adapts to that signal.

Optimizing training quality is key. Every session should have an intention, and female-specific information should help the athlete and coach decide whether that intention can be executed well today since menstrual symptoms may have an effect on recovery, sleep, motivation or perceived fitness.

If readiness is good, the plan may remain unchanged regardless of menstrual-cycle phase. If symptoms compromise execution, the coach may adjust the warm-up, intensity, duration, recovery, or timing of the key session. If menstrual dysfunction, severe symptoms, disordered eating risk, bone stress injury, or persistent fatigue are present, the appropriate decision may be medical or nutritional referral rather than training modification alone.

Further reading:

Tracking should create insight not anxiety

Systematic tracking of menstrual cycle timing, symptoms alongside training and race performance can help athletes and coaches move from general assumptions to individual patterns. But tracking should not be used to impose rigid templates.

In the longitudinal FENDURA tracking study, athletes tracked menstrual-cycle or hormonal-contraceptive information alongside symptoms, training, daily fitness, and recovery measures over one year. This was a prospective design with highly trained cross-country skiers and biathletes, including daily tracking of training sessions, fitness and recovery markers, bleeding days, and cycle-related symptoms.

The results are practically meaningful. Nearly all athletes perceived systematic tracking as neutral or positive; only two athletes, or 3%, indicated a negative influence; and 34% reported discovering cycle-related patterns. At 12 months, 31.5% reported taking their cycle more into account in training and competition planning. In addition, 55% reported that athlete–coach communication around menstrual-cycle or hormonal-contraceptive topics had become easier.

Tracking should help answer questions such as:

• Do symptoms consistently affect sleep, readiness, mood or session quality?

• Are certain patterns repeated across months, or was this just one bad day?

• Does the athlete need a training adjustment, a recovery adjustment, or a health follow-up?

• Is the athlete comfortable sharing this information, and under what boundaries?

A practical framework for coaches and athletes

Following an established trust and good communication between athlete and coach as basis, a pragmatic approach can be built around five steps:

1. Establish hormonal and health context

Record pubertal stage where relevant, menstrual history, cycle regularity, bleeding characteristics, symptom burden, hormonal contraceptive type, reasons for use, and perceived effects.

2. Monitor what affects training quality

Track sleep, readiness, mood, soreness, perceived recovery, cycle-related symptoms, training load, session RPE, and performance outputs.

3. Look for patterns over time

One difficult training day does not prove a hormonal effect. Meaningful decisions require repeated observations across weeks and months.

4. Adjust based on the athlete, not the template

Maintain the plan when readiness is good. Modify the session when symptoms compromise execution. Refer for medical or nutritional assessment when warning signs are present.

5. Protect autonomy and trust

The athlete must understand what is tracked, why it is tracked, who sees it, and how it will be used.

Special attention: young and developing athletes

Adolescent and developing athletes deserve particular care. Puberty, maturation, menstrual function, body composition, psychosocial stressors, sport culture, and training demands interact in complex ways. Recent evidence from Swedish and Norwegian female athletes indicates low perceived knowledge and high knowledge needs across biopsychosocial topics such as menstruation, sex hormones, body composition, nutrition, and recovery. This mismatch deserves more attention also from a coaching/education perspective!

Menstrual function is an important health marker, particularly in relation to low energy availability and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport. The IOC consensus statement describes REDs as a syndrome caused by problematic low energy availability, with potential consequences for reproductive function, bone health, immunity, glycogen synthesis, cardiovascular and hematological health, wellbeing, injury risk, and performance.

For young athletes, the goal is not to make them anxious about their bodies. The goal is to build literacy, confidence, and support systems early — so that health becomes a foundation for sustainable performance.

Further reading:

The bottom line

The evidence points toward a balanced position: female endurance training should be neither hormone-ignorant nor hormone-deterministic.

Menstrual-cycle phase and hormonal contraceptive use can influence symptoms, perceptions, and occasionally physiological responses. But they do not consistently alter endurance performance or training responses at the group level in ways that justify rigid cycle-based periodization.

The priority is to master the training process: purposeful planning, high-quality session execution, appropriate load management, adequate recovery, energy availability, sleep, communication, and long-term consistency.

Female-specific knowledge is essential. But its best use is to support individualization — not to replace coaching judgment with calendar rules.

Key references

• McNulty et al. (2020). Sports Medicine, 50, 1813–1827.

• Janse de Jonge et al. (2019). Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 51, 2610–2617.

• Elliott-Sale et al. (2020). Sports Medicine, 50, 1785–1812.

• Elliott-Sale et al. (2021). Sports Medicine, 51, 843–861.

• D’Souza et al. (2023). Journal of Applied Physiology, 135, 1284–1299.

• Taylor et al. (2024). Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 56, 1595–1605.

• Taylor et al. (2026). European Journal of Sport Science, 26, e70078.

• Solli et al. (2020). International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 15, 1324–1333.

• Engseth et al. (2022). Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 4, 873222.

• Bourdon et al. (2017). International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 12, S2-161–S2-170.

• Saw et al. (2016). British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50, 281–291.

• Mountjoy et al. (2023). British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57, 1073–1098.

• Radovan et al. (2025). Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 7, 1596418.

An article written by Øyvind Sandbakk

At this year’s European College of Sport Science (ECSS) Congress in Lausanne, I gave a presentation on how our understanding of endurance training is evolving. For many years, coaches, athletes, and scientists have asked questions like:

These are still important questions. But I believe the next step is not simply to ask how much training we do in each zone. We also need to ask a more practical and more demanding question:

This is where the concept of training quality becomes essential.

A high-quality session is one that achieves its intended physiological purpose. A high-quality training process is one that helps the athlete adapt, recover, stay healthy, and ensures continuity.

Further reading:

The physiology has not changed — but our interpretation has become more advanced

The classical determinants of endurance performance remain highly relevant. As described by Joyner and Coyle (2008), endurance performance is strongly shaped by three interacting factors:

1. Maximal oxygen uptake (VO₂max) — the aerobic “ceiling”

2. The fraction of VO₂max that can be sustained — often reflected by lactate threshold or critical power/speed

3. Exercise economy — how efficiently the athlete converts metabolic energy into movement

These variables are still central. VO₂max determines the upper limit of aerobic energy turnover. Threshold or critical power tells us how much of that capacity can be used for prolonged periods. Economy tells us how much speed or power the athlete gets for a given physiological cost.

But endurance performance is not only about what we can measure in laboratory conditions. Increasingly, science is also catching up on how athletes respond dynamically during exercise and how well they maintain performance under fatigue (mental and physical).

This is where concepts such as oxygen uptake kinetics and durability become relevant. Oxygen uptake kinetics describe how quickly the aerobic system responds to meet the oxygen/energy demands when exercise intensity changes. Faster kinetics increases oxygen uptake more rapidly and reduces the oxygen deficit when work begins or when pace changes. During prolonged high-intensity work, however, oxygen uptake may continue to rise despite a constant workload (the slow component of oxygen uptake), which causes a gradual increase of the energy required to sustain the same pace (Burnley & Jones, 2007).

Durability, or physiological resilience, describes how well an athlete maintains performance and physiological function during prolonged or repeated exercise. Maunder and colleagues (2021) highlighted that two athletes may look similar in a laboratory test when fresh, yet perform very differently late in a race. Factors such as substrate availability, muscle damage, neuromuscular fatigue, technique, environmental stress, and mental load all influence whether performance can be sustained.

For practitioners, this means that the goal is not only to improve the athlete’s “best-case/lab” physiology. The goal is to develop an athlete who can access his/her physiology repeatedly, efficiently, and under real-world constraints.

Further reading:

Optimalization of training distribution is important — but it is not the whole answer

Over the past 10–15 years, much attention has been given to training intensity distribution. Models such as polarized and pyramidal training have helped researchers and practitioners describe how endurance athletes typically organize their work (Seiler, 2010; Stöggl & Sperlich, 2014).

Across endurance sports, a common pattern is clear: successful athletes usually perform a large proportion of their total training at low intensity. In world-class distance runners, for example, low-intensity training typically accounts for the majority of training time, often around 80–90% (Haugen et al., 2022).

This makes sense physiologically and practically. Low-intensity training allows athletes to accumulate volume, stimulate aerobic adaptations, develop technical efficiency, and recover well enough to complete key sessions with purpose.

However, intensity-distribution models can also become misleading if treated as strict recipes. The interpretation depends heavily on how intensity is classified: how intensity zones are defined, measured (heart rate, pace, power, blood lactate, muscular strain, mental strain or perceived exertion), or classified (session goal), can all tell slightly different stories (Rosenblat et al., 2019).

In order to achieve training quality, the key question therefore is not simply: Is this polarized or pyramidal?

A better question is:

That is a training-quality question.

Further reading:

Double-threshold and lactate-guided training: principles before methods

Few topics in endurance sport have attracted as much attention recently as “the Norwegian method” of endurance training, and in particular the concept of lactate-guided training and double-threshold session models. These methods are often discussed through the visible details: lactate values, session models such as specific interval formats or double-session days, and large training volumes. But if we only copy the surface structure, we risk missing the meaningful principle behind.

The main idea is not that a certain lactate number is magic. The main idea is alignment between intended and actual metabolic stress.

Lactate-guided threshold training can help athletes accumulate substantial work at a controlled intensity — hard enough to stimulate adaptation, but not so hard that the session becomes too costly. Casado and colleagues (2023) discussed this approach as a possible next step in distance-running training because it allows more precise control of internal load within a high-volume, low-intensity framework.

For elite athletes, this may include frequent lactate testing and carefully controlled threshold intervals. For developing athletes or teams without access to such tools, the same principle can still apply:

• Is the session meant to be easy, controlled, threshold-based, or high-intensity?

• Is the athlete actually executing that purpose?

• Is the cost of the session appropriate relative to the upcoming sessions?

• Does the athlete leave the session able to continue the training process?

This is where coaches matter. Data can help calibrate decisions, but data cannot replace context, communication, or experience.

Further reading:

Training quality operates at two levels

When we talk about training quality, it is useful to distinguish between session quality and process quality.

Session quality: did we execute the purpose?

At the session level, quality is about precision and intent. A low-intensity session is high quality if it is truly low-intensity and supports aerobic development, technical rhythm, and recovery capacity. A threshold session is high quality if it stays within the intended metabolic range/does not “cost too much”. A high-intensity session is high quality if the athlete can produce the target stimulus without unnecessary breakdown in technique, motivation, or recovery.

Important elements include:

• Appropriate intensity control

• Technical proficiency

• Mental focus

• Fueling and readiness

• Clear communication between athlete and coach

The training session provides a physiological signal. But the signal only matters if it is strong enough and compounds over time.

Process quality: can we repeat and adapt?

At the process level, quality is about organizing training over time. This includes periodization, recovery, progression, monitoring, and continuous evaluation. A single impressive session is not very valuable if it compromises the next week of training. Sustainable development depends on accumulating many appropriate stimuli, not maximizing every workout.

This is one reason elite coaches often appear more conservative than laboratory protocols. In real training environments, the goal is rarely to push the athlete to their absolute limit. The goal is to create enough stress to adapt — while preserving the ability to train well again.

That distinction is central to long-term performance.

Monitoring should support judgment, not replace it

Modern endurance training gives us more information than ever: heart rate, power, pace, HRV, blood lactate, GPS, sleep data, wellness questionnaires, and perceived exertion.

These tools can be extremely valuable. But their value lies in interpretation and collection, not only in collection.

Buchheit (2014) emphasized that heart-rate-based measures can provide insight into training status, but they must be interpreted carefully and contextually. Subjective measures such as perceived exertion, motivation, mood, soreness, and wellness can also be highly informative, sometimes detecting changes in fatigue or readiness before objective metrics do (Nuuttila et al., 2024).

The practical message is simple:

Use data to calibrate the athlete–coach conversation. Do not use it to silence or judge the athlete.

A measurement (e.g., lactate value), score (e.g., recovery score) or observation (e.g., heart-rate response) should be a conversation starter, and therefore lead to better questions:
How did this feel? Was this the intended stress? What does it mean in this phase? What should we adjust tomorrow?

When objective data, subjective feedback, and coaching experience are combined, monitoring becomes a decision-support system rather than a control system.

Further reading:

Sport-specific constraints matter

General physiological principles apply across endurance sports, but implementation must be sport-specific. Running involves repetitive impact forces and high mechanical loading. This limits how much total volume many athletes can tolerate. Cycling allows greater training volume with lower impact stress, but has different muscular and positional demands. Speed skating involves prolonged muscle contractions and restricted blood flow, which may require strategic use of cross-training to develop aerobic capacity while managing sport-specific load (Sandbakk et al., 2021).

This means that “copy-paste” of training or intensity distributions from one athlete to another, or from one sport to another is not optimal. The same physiological principle may require different practical solutions depending on the athlete, sport, age, injury history, training background, body composition, mental state and performance demands.

The art of coaching lies in translating general principles into individual action.

Practical takeaways: questions for coaches and athletes

If we want to move from training distribution to training quality, we can start with better questions:

1. What is the purpose of today’s session?
   Aerobic development, threshold control, race-specific intensity, technical efficiency, recovery, or something else?

2. Does the execution match the intention?
   Are intensity, technique, and mental focus aligned with the session goal?

3. Is the cost appropriate?
   Did the session create the desired stimulus without compromising the next key training opportunity?

4. What does the athlete report?
   Does subjective feedback support or challenge what the data suggest?

5. Is the process sustainable?
   Are we building consistency, health, motivation, and progression over time?

These questions are simple, but they shift attention from doing more to doing better.

The future: integrated, athlete-centered endurance development

The future of endurance training will not be decided by one model, one intensity zone, one lactate value, or one monitoring tool. It will depend on how well we integrate physiology, coaching expertise, athlete feedback, technology, and sport-specific demands into sustainable systems.

The classical determinants of performance still matter. VO₂max, threshold or critical power, and economy remain central, while deeper understanding through new concepts will help us understand how performance unfolds dynamically and under fatigue. Training intensity distribution helps us describe the structure. Monitoring tools help us refine decisions.

But training quality is what connects it all.

The work we prescribe should become the stimulus we intended — and that stimulus should be repeated, absorbed, and transformed into performance.

That is the responsibility of coaches and it is the opportunity for athletes: not simply to train harder, but to train with greater purpose, precision, and sustainability.

References

Buchheit M. Monitoring training status with HR measures: Do all roads lead to Rome? Front Physiol. 2014;5:73.

Burnley M, Jones AM. Oxygen uptake kinetics as a determinant of sports performance. Eur J Sport Sci. 2007;7:63–79.

Casado A, Foster C, Bakken M, Tjelta LI. Does lactate-guided threshold interval training represent the next step in endurance training? Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2023;20:3782.

Haugen T, Sandbakk Ø, Seiler S, Tønnessen E. The training characteristics of world-class distance runners. Sports Med Open. 2022;8:46.

Haugen T, Bucher Sandbakk S, Tønnessen E, Sandbakk Ø. Training quality—What is it and how can we improve it? Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2023;18:557–560.

Joyner MJ, Coyle EF. Endurance exercise performance: The physiology of champions. J Physiol. 2008;586:35–44.

Maunder E, Seiler S, Mildenhall MJ, Kilding AE, Plews DJ. The importance of durability in endurance athletes. Sports Med. 2021;51:1619–1628.

Nuuttila O-P, Uusitalo A, Kokkonen V-P, et al. Monitoring fatigue during intensified training. Eur J Sport Sci. 2024;24:857–869.

Rosenblat MA, Perrotta AS, Vicenzino B. Polarized vs threshold training intensity distribution. J Strength Cond Res. 2019;33:3491–3500.

Sandbakk Ø, Haugen T, Ettema G. The influence of exercise modality on training load. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2021;16:605–608.

An article written by Trond Nystad, Sophie Herzog and Øyvind Sandbakk

“You’re too heavy. You’re weak. You’re lazy. Your technique is terrible. You train too slowly.” These are real comments directed at athletes we have worked with through our journey with Myra, delivered by physiologists, coaches, and self-proclaimed experts who offer judgement without solutions.

The old principle still holds: If you have nothing constructive to say, say nothing!

Athletes are not machines. They are human beings with feelings, ambitions, and imperfections, and they deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Every day, athletes share their struggles and insecurities with us, and often, those struggles trace back to a harsh, blunt opinion delivered by an “expert” with no plan for improvement.

As coaches and experts, we hold a powerful mandate: to create an environment where athletes can grow and develop, both as competitors and as people. To do that, our communication must be constructive and offer help – no matter the setting.

Building the foundation

Constructive communication is a necessity for building psychological safety. It starts with small, intentional actions that can build confidence over time. Examples could be:

• Regular Check-ins: Don’t just talk to your athletes when something needs fixing. Check in regularly on how they are doing. Be aware that when athletes are struggling they might need more attention and support.

• Active Listening: Give athletes the space to voice their struggles, fears, and insecurities without immediate judgment.

• Normalizing Feelings: When things aren’t going well, normalize those struggles. Let them know that setbacks, fatigue, and self-doubt are a natural part of the athletic and human journey, reinforcing that they are not alone.

Balancing performance and the human element

The true test of a supportive environment happens when we look at performance. For instance, is it acceptable for an athlete to leave a physical test feeling confused, humiliated, and worthless? Our answer is an unequivocal no. If test data cannot be used constructively, the test should not be done.

When analyzing a race or a test, performance communication should be constructive, honest and a collaborative partnership: The coach as the guide in the role to provide expertise, context and a collaborative path forward. The athlete as the ultimate expert, since only they know what their body feels like. By involving the athlete in the analysis, the dynamic shifts from a top-down interrogation to a shared problem-solving mission.

Six questions before your next performance review

Whether you look at a physiological test or a race debrief, these six questions can be asked to ensure communication remains constructive:

1. Why are we testing or analyzing this test/race? (Purpose)

2. How can these results actually help this athlete improve?

3. Are the results valid, relevant and paired with a concrete action plan for improvement?

4. How can we use these results to motivate a positive change in behavior or training?

5. Does the athlete leave feeling motivated, seen, and heard?

6. Is your communication style offering real help or just delivering a verdict?

Reaching the goal of “as many as possible, for as long as possible, with as much success as possible” requires coaches who treat athletes as human beings. Be the coach who offers a helping hand, not just harsh critique.

Did you miss the other articles?

• Part 1: “Why we went: The Storm, the Family, the Lessons”. You can read it here.

• Part 2: “The Most for the Longest: In Norway, Winners Play The Long Game”. You can read it here.

• Part 3: “Intensity Control: The Norwegian Discipline of Knowing When to Push, When to Pause, and How Adults Set the Tone”. You can read it here.

• Part 4: “It Has to Come from Within: How Norwegian Parents Protect a Child’s Love of Sport”. You can read it here.

Near the end of our year in Norway, Tricia invited a group of friends to meet us for a hike to one of the cabins that serves dinner in Bymarka, the forest outside Trondheim. It was cold and raining. She told one of the mothers that she was touched they had still come. The mother answered simply, “Well, this year you all just kept showing up, so we needed to show up for you, too.”

That sentence has stayed with us because it captures what our year in Norway actually gave us.

We arrived in Trondheim with the mindset of tourists, prepared for a Scandinavian utopia with all the answers. We expected to live on the fringes as spectators and to extract ourselves easily when it was time to leave. We were unprepared for how hard it would be to leave behind a community that made us feel at home and taught us lessons that would undoubtedly change how we approach not just sport, but life.

What made Norway so compelling was the way Norwegians fully embraced outdoor living and exposed as many people as possible to movement and sport. Norway is a small country where consistency and routines are highly valued, making it easier to embed a sports culture and truly practice what they preach. Some of it seems impossible to translate to American sports culture, but many pieces seem so simple that surely we could replicate them when we returned home: practices scheduled at times that make family life possible; parents volunteering as a matter of course; clubs finding ways to celebrate participation without pretending competition does not matter; a system that widens the base instead of obsessing over the tip of the pyramid. Other parts are harder to transfer: public transportation; sports fields in excellent condition, even in the smallest towns; schools that treat outdoor time as routine rather than exception.

We fell in love with so many parts of Norwegian life and culture. We were endlessly enchanted by how seamlessly it all seemed to work. That does not, however, mean Norway is perfect. Some of what makes the model work is structural: work culture, family policy, density, public investment, and civic trust. We should be honest about that. But it would also be a mistake to assume nothing portable exists.

The questions we keep returning to as we settle back into American life and culture are:

Those questions sit very close to why Adam co-founded MYRA.

Norway did not make us want to sell a Scandinavian fantasy. It clarified the problem we had already been feeling for years. Too many athletes, parents, and coaches are struggling not because they do not care enough, but because the system around them asks the wrong questions. The good news is we feel confident that there is a way for systems to learn the right answers.

That is the work we want MYRA to do.

At its best, MYRA is not about importing Norway wholesale. It is about translation. It is about taking the best evidence, the best coaching ideas, and the best developmental principles we have seen — in Norway and elsewhere — and helping families, athletes, coaches, schools, and clubs use them in real life. It is about making athlete development more human-centered and more rigorous at the same time. It is about helping people build systems that are calm enough for children to thrive and smart enough for excellence to emerge.

That is why our year in Norway mattered so much.

It gave us clearer language for things we had only partly understood before. Freedom builds capability. Parenting can be a team sport. The best talent pipeline is a wide one. A culture that protects intrinsic motivation may ultimately produce stronger competitors. Great performance systems are often disguised as kind ones.

It also gave us hope.

American youth sports are not doomed to be overheated, fragmented, and status-driven. Many families, coaches, and communities already feel the mismatch between what they are doing and what they actually want for children. They are hungry for something healthier and smarter. They do not need a lecture about how bad everything is. They need better models, better questions, and practical help redesigning the environments they touch.

That is one of the reasons we wanted to write this series.

We do not think the answer is to romanticize Norway. We think the answer is to learn from it honestly. Keep what is structural in perspective. Borrow what is wise. Adapt what is possible. Resist what is corrosive in our own culture. Build the kind of communities where children can become capable, where belonging is not reserved for the gifted, where health is not treated as softness, and where excellence has room to arrive on its own timeline.

It has become evident that the healthiest culture creates the strongest competitors in the end. But culture does not change because someone announces a new philosophy. It changes because people keep showing up, consistently modeling a better path until others begin to trust it and follow.

Our year abroad changed how we think about parenting, youth sports, and performance itself. It also clarified the kind of work we want to be part of next. If MYRA can help a few more families, coaches, and communities ask better questions — and build better systems from those questions — then some of the best things we found in Norway may travel farther than we ever could have predicted.

The MYRA team would like to thank Adam and Tricia Groff for sharing their insights and for their work on these articles.

This series began as a reflection on their family’s year in Norway, but our hope is that it contributes to a broader conversation about how we develop athletes, support families, and build healthier performance cultures.

If something in these essays resonated with you, challenged you, or sparked a question, we would genuinely love to hear from you. Your feedback helps us think more clearly and continue improving our work.

If you enjoy reading our content, please consider sharing it with a friend, colleague, coach, parent, or athlete who might find it valuable. And if you would like to support the continued creation of thoughtful, evidence-informed content like this, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Finally, if you are curious about MYRA, our work, or how we help athletes, coaches, teams, and organizations build more sustainable performance systems, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

— The MYRA Team

In this series, MYRA co-founder Adam Groff and his wife Tricia reflect on what living in Trondheim with their four children taught them about sport, parenting, community, and performance culture.

Did you miss the other articles?

• Part 1: “Why we went: The Storm, the Family, the Lessons”.You can read it here.

• Part 2: “The Most for the Longest: In Norway, Winners Play The Long Game”. You can read it here.

• Part 3: “Intensity Control: The Norwegian Discipline of Knowing When to Push, When to Pause, and How Adults Set the Tone”. You can read it here.

One of the most important sentences we heard in Norway was simple: “It has to come from within.”

We heard versions of it all year, often most emphatically from parents who had themselves been elite athletes. The point was not that adults do not matter (of course they do). Parents drive carpools, wash clothes, wax skis, pay fees, stand in the rain, and shape the atmosphere around a child. But if a child is going to stay in sport through adolescence, love movement for life, or eventually become truly excellent, the desire cannot be borrowed from adults. It has to become the child’s.

That belief changes adult behavior.

If you truly believe motivation must come from within, you become more careful about crowding it out. You are slower to push. Slower to label a child as exceptional too early. Slower to turn a child’s sport into your own project. Your role shifts from engineering outcomes to protecting conditions: joy, ownership, trust, challenge, belonging, and freedom.

One of Norway’s clearest lessons for us was that freedom builds both capability and enjoyment. Children there are trusted with real responsibility early in life, and parents tolerate the risk that comes with that. Kids walk to school, ride buses across town, and bike to training. They solve small problems without adults rushing in to fix them. Over time, that trust becomes competence.

We saw it in our own family. After forgetting his shoes on a bus, our most cautious child decided to wait for the return route, get back on, retrieve them, and make his way home. We were worried because he was late. He arrived beaming. Our older daughter skied 10 kilometers to the start of UngdomsBirken, the youth Birkebiener ski race, on her own because that was simply what the day required. Our youngest son spent a chaotic ski celebration day with hundreds of children and only scattered adult supervision (and loved every minute of it). In Norway, these were ordinary experiences. In the United States, many parents would experience the same situations mainly as risk.

Independent children become more confident and more adaptable. What we describe through MYRA as athlete ownership was visible everywhere in Norway. Children were not just being told what to do. They were gradually becoming participants in their own development and training. They carried gear, learned routes, made small decisions, and took on just enough responsibility to grow into competence. By the time they were in their late teenage years, they were helping to write their own training plans.

That helps explain something else we noticed: the energy around sport often felt internal rather than adult-manufactured. It had the kind of absorbed attention that cannot be forced from the outside. A culture can help create those conditions, it cannot fake them. Norwegian parents seemed to understand that.

This restraint is not accidental. It is reinforced by the structure of Norwegian youth sport itself. Through Norway’s Children’s Rights in Sport, the system is designed around the needs of the child rather than the ambitions of adults. Joy, friendship, safety, developmentally appropriate training, broad access, multiple-sport participation, and a real voice for the child are treated as core features, not sentimental extras. Competition is available, but childhood is not organized around early sorting.

That matters because motivation is fragile.

When early success becomes identity, children can start performing for the label rather than for the work itself. They become more vulnerable to comparison, more brittle in the face of setbacks, and more dependent on external validation. Norway’s system seems to recognize how delicate a child’s relationship with sport can be, and how quickly it can shift when adults overmanage it.

Even when a child was obviously talented, many parents resisted turning that into a story too early. This was especially striking when the parents themselves had impressive athletic histories. In other settings, that kind of background can generate a small industry around a child: special praise, special lanes, special anxiety. In Norway, we often saw the opposite: less spotlight, less urgency, less adult need to announce that something special was happening.

That restraint protects motivation. And not only for lifelong health or family well-being. It matters for elite performance too.

The repetition, the disappointment, the cold mornings, the boring drills, the years of staying with something. These are things that cannot be endured on borrowed ambition. If the desire is not internal, it eventually collapses. An athlete may keep going for a while on praise, pressure, habit, or fear of disappointing adults. But that is not the same thing as love of the work, and it is rarely durable.

So when Norwegian parents say, “It has to come from within,” they are not being laissez-faire. They are reminding themselves to be restrained. Adults can support, structure, and protect, but adults cannot manufacture a child’s love of sport.

At best, we can widen the base and lower the noise. We can resist turning every season into a referendum on status. We can help children feel capable, connected, and free enough to want to come back tomorrow.

The longer we lived in Norway, the more that sentence felt less like a philosophy and more like a warning: adults can ruin something they can never create themselves.

Continue reading:

Part 5 is about the lessons the Groff’s want to carry back to the United States, and why those lessons clarified what MYRA is trying to build.

Did you miss the other articles?

• Part 1: “Why we went: The Storm, the Family, the Lessons”. You can read it here.

• Part 2: “The Most for the Longest: In Norway, Winners Play The Long Game”. You can read it here.

One of the first phrases we came to love in Norway was the familiar Scandinavian line: there is no bad weather, only bad clothing. We had heard it before, but living in Trondheim taught us that it was not really about clothing. It was about mindset.

Pouring cold rain? Put on the right layers and go to practice. Dark, icy bike paths? Use the lights and studded tires and keep moving. A field turning into a mud pit during the first ski session of the year? Put high-visibility vests on the kids and let them run around. The Norwegians around us did not seem especially interested in complaining, or even commenting on what many people might consider to be awful weather (for example, it was just a few degrees above freezing and rained every day in October in Trondheim). They preferred to prepare.

But over time we learned that this stoicism had an important limit. Norway was not teaching children to push mindlessly. It was teaching them to regulate effort with unusual discipline.

That is what we came to think of as intensity control.

On the surface, intensity control is technical. Older juniors and senior athletes in Norway train with remarkable precision during their “on” time. Threshold and high-intensity sessions are approached carefully, with a shared language around effort and purpose. Athletes and coaches pay attention to heart rate, lactate, pace, and perceived exertion. Hard sessions are hard enough to matter. Easy sessions are easy enough to support recovery. The point is not to show how tough you are. The point is to do the intended work at the intended cost.

This sounds straightforward, but it is a major cultural difference from environments where athletes learn to equate seriousness with red-lining. What impressed us in Norway was not just the tools. It was the restraint. Hard training was deliberate rather than chaotic. Even younger athletes absorbed that atmosphere and understood the purpose of a workout. Our oldest daughter noticed almost immediately that at ski practice and soccer, girls could chat and laugh, then become fully attentive the moment a coach started talking. They did drills, strength circuits and repeated efforts, with an understanding of the workload intended, and focused their effort to hit the objective.

That was the first meaning of intensity control: physiological precision.

The second meaning was behavioral.

One of the clearest differences we noticed between Norway and many American sports environments was how calmly people backed off when a body or a day was telling them no. If a child was feeling worn down, parents often kept them home. If a race meant standing around in bitter cold while someone was getting over an illness, plans changed. There was very little guilt around this. It was not treated as laziness or lack of commitment. It was treated as common sense.

This mattered more than we initially appreciated. Serious training is not shaped by workout load alone. It is shaped by total life stress - illness, poor sleep, emotional strain, school, travel, weather, recovery, and family rhythms. The more we watched Norwegian families, the more we saw adults protecting children from the kind of accumulated overload that can quietly derail both enjoyment and performance. Before we had the phrase “allostatic load” from our MYRA vocabulary, we were seeing its logic in real life: the body keeps score, even when the stressor is not in a training session.

The third meaning of intensity control was cultural.

Adults regulated themselves.

Parents were steady - neither overly happy about a victory or over analyzing a defeat . Coaches gave instructions and expected children to try, but the overall emotional temperature was lower. There was less spectator frenzy. In the US, during soccer games we were accustomed to parents yelling instructions at athletes from the sidelines or complaining to the referees. To fit in with the Norwegian parents, we quickly learned to keep comments to ourselves then clap and cheer after a goal with just the right amount of enthusiasm. We also saw less appetite for heroic stories about pushing through illness or fatigue. In many American environments, adults unintentionally amplify intensity even when children are not asking for it. In Norway, adults more often seemed to contain it.

That does not mean the Norwegians are passive. Quite the opposite. They show up in hard weather. They tolerate discomfort. They ask a lot of children in the practical sense. But the discomfort has purpose. It is not random or ego-driven. It is not something to be escalated just because escalation feels impressive.

A rainy soccer practice with a smiling child in a yellow rain jacket became, for us, the perfect image of this philosophy. The point was not to dramatize hardship. The point was simply to keep going in a well-regulated way. Good gear. Clear expectations. No fuss. And if the child were truly sick or depleted, there would have been no prize for pretending otherwise.

That combination - stoicism plus restraint - may be one of the most underappreciated strengths of the Norwegian model. It helps explain how athletes can train hard for years without every week feeling like an emergency. It helps explain why so much low-intensity volume stays truly low intensity. It helps explain why recovery is taken seriously. And it helps explain why the culture feels demanding without being overheated.

Watching this clarified something for us that has since become central to the way we think through MYRA: training quality is not just about how much work gets done. It is about whether the work fits the moment, the athlete, and the full cost the body is already carrying.

Intensity control, in other words, is not the opposite of ambition. It is one of the clearest signs of it.

The healthiest systems are not the ones that always turn the dial up. They are the ones wise enough to know when not to.

Continue reading:

Part 4 is about one of the most important responsibilities of parents and coaches: protecting a child’s intrinsic motivation before adult ambition crowds it out.

Part 5 is about the lessons the Groff’s want to carry back to the United States, and why those lessons clarified what MYRA is trying to build.

Did you miss the first article?

• Part 1: “Why we went: The Storm, the Family, the Lessons”. You can read it here.

At one of our first ski parent meetings in Trondheim, a phrase appeared on the screen that seemed to explain almost everything we were about to see and that we would repeat in so many conversations:

Flest mulig, lengst mulig. As many as possible, for as long as possible.

At first, that kind of motto can sound like a participation-trophy slogan, a nice sentiment adults use when they do not want to have hard conversations about excellence. In practice, we came to see it as exactly the opposite. It may be the most sophisticated performance philosophy we encountered in Norway.

The genius of the phrase is that it refuses to organize childhood around early proof. The goal is not to create stars at age ten. The goal is to keep children active long enough to become strong, healthy, capable adults - and maybe exceptional athletes later. That is a very different question from the one many youth sports systems end up asking by default. Instead of, “Who is the best right now?” the Norwegian question seems to be, “How do we keep the base wide enough, joyful enough, and healthy enough that real development can happen?”

We saw that philosophy everywhere.

Our children moved naturally between sports. Soccer in one season, skiing in another, biathlon and orienteering when the opportunity appeared. School ski days were normal. Orienteering was not a niche activity for eccentric specialists; it was just part of life. Kids did not seem forced to choose a single identity early. They were active children first, athletes in specific sports second. That distinction matters. It preserves curiosity. It builds broader movement skills. And it protects children from being trapped too early inside an adult narrative about who they are supposed to become.

And importantly, the balance between fun and training never felt like a tradeoff. It was built into the system. Clubs like Byåsen IL talked explicitly about stages—learning to train, training to train, and only much later training to win. The endpoint wasn’t just podiums; it was an active outdoor life. That framing shifts everything. It gives meaning to the early years beyond performance.

One of the most surprising parts for us, coming from the United States, was how little interest there seemed to be in child prodigies.

There were clearly talented children everywhere. Some were faster, smoother, stronger, or more coordinated than their peers. Some had parents who had been elite athletes themselves. Yet those parents rarely seemed interested in spotlighting their children. They did not publicly narrate them as the future. They did not appear to be rushing them into special lanes. They did not behave as if being the best eleven-year-old in the room meant very much. This was jarring at first, because in many places early excellence becomes identity. The gifted child is labeled. Adults reinforce the label. Pressure follows.

In Norway, there seemed to be a cultural resistance to that whole dynamic.

Instead, the system celebrates participation intentionally. Young athletes receive medals, ceremonies, team gear, and recognition. Races often end with applause, social gatherings, and simple food. In ski races for younger children, results are de-emphasized and the podium can include everyone. In younger soccer age groups, teams are balanced for equality rather than stacked for easy wins. Clubs do not seem embarrassed by inclusion. They build it on purpose.

At first glance, this too can look soft. It is not soft. It is strategic.

When children feel included, capable, and connected, they stay. When they stay, they practice more. They mature physically and emotionally. They develop relationships with movement, effort, and competition that can last. That is long-term performance development. The best talent pipeline is a wide one. The best youth program is one where children do not want to quit. Because what we often call “dropout” in youth sports is not about kids losing interest in movement. It is about kids losing their place in the system. When sport becomes too serious too early, when identity gets tied to results, when some children are sorted out as “not good enough,” they leave.

You could see this even in the structure of a typical week. The number of formal training sessions was often lower than what we see in competitive U.S. programs, but the total engagement with movement was higher. Practices were filled with games—so many games. Tag variations, relays, obstacle courses, playful races. Technique was present, but rarely the focus.

Even competitions reflected this lower barrier to entry. Many events offer a “trim” option. Shorter less formal races where athletes can simply try things without the pressure of full competition. It allows more athletes to participate, and to experience racing as something accessible rather than intimidating.

And perhaps most striking: sports were almost never canceled for weather. Rain, snow, cold—it didn’t matter. Kids showed up. They trained. It wasn’t framed as toughness so much as normalcy. Over time, it becomes excellent training for life: you show up, you adapt, you keep going.

The more time we spent in Norway, and the more we later thought about athlete development through MYRA, the more this stopped looking like culture alone and started looking like a strategy supported by evidence. Early winners are not always future winners. In fact, many of the children who dominate young age groups do not become the best adults. Later bloomers need time. Girls need systems that help them stay active through puberty. Children need room to enjoy sport before they are asked to organize their whole identity around it. Norway’s way of doing things seemed to understand all of that intuitively, long before we could name the science behind it.

There was also something refreshing about how ordinary all of this felt. The system was not glamorous. It was not built on private specialists or constant status sorting. Team gear was passed down through Facebook groups. Parents brought simple food to share at the evening meal, kveldsmat, after training. Coaches expected effort, but the whole atmosphere around childhood felt less extractive. The point was not to wring every last drop of performance from children as early as possible. The point was to create a setting in which improvement could happen without children burning out, getting excluded, or learning to associate sports only with pressure.

That changed us as parents.

Before Norway, we would have said we valued long-term development. After Norway, we realized how often systems claim to value development while behaving as if short-term status is the real prize. The Norwegian model is not anti-competition. The kids race a lot. They care. They want to improve. But the structure around them is noticeably less eager to sort, label, and predict.

One practical example that stayed with us was how often competitions ended not with an obsession over placement but with children smiling, eating, changing boots, playing together, and planning what came next. The event mattered, but it did not become an identity test. The child who was not the fastest still belonged fully. That seems like a small thing until you realize how many promising young athletes leave sports not because they hate movement, but because they stop feeling they have a place in the culture around it.

If we had to summarize the Norwegian philosophy, it would be this: Inclusive development is not the opposite of excellence. Development is how excellence emerges and becomes durable.

As many as possible, for as long as possible. The longer we lived in Trondheim, the more that sounded less like a slogan and more like a thesis.

Continue reading:

In Part 3, we talk about intensity control, and the Norwegian discipline of knowing when to push, when to Pause, and how adults set the tone.

Part 4 is about one of the most important responsibilities of parents and coaches: protecting a child’s intrinsic motivation before adult ambition crowds it out.

Part 5 is about the lessons the Groff’s want to carry back to the United States, and why those lessons clarified what MYRA is trying to build.

Years before we had children, we went to Norway on our honeymoon. It was early summer, our first real vacation after the long tunnel of medical training, and we decided to do a hut-to-hut trip in the mountains. On the first day the weather was brutal - snow on the ground, freezing rain, relentless wind, poor visibility. Within a few hours we were close to turning back.

Then we saw them.

A family with small children was hiking cheerfully through the same storm. The kids stopped for snacks, the parents looked completely calm, and the whole group kept moving as if this were the most natural thing in the world. That moment stayed with us. Over the next several days we adapted to the weather, settled into outdoor life, and discovered a kind of resilience that came from the comfort of knowing others (i.e. small Norwegian children) could tackle the terrain and weather. More importantly, a spark was lit. We began to imagine what it would be like to raise a family in a place where adventure, toughness, and togetherness seemed woven into everyday life.

Thirteen years and four children later, we made that dream real. We moved to Trondheim for a year. The main reason was to give our children the experience of living in another country.

We also came partly because of sports. We were curious about a country that keeps producing extraordinary athletes without seeming to burn through children in the process. We were curious about a place where sport felt like a language, where movement seemed more celebrated than a chore, and where youth sports looked professional without feeling intense. But we also came because we suspected that what looked like a “sports system” from afar might actually be something bigger up close.

That suspicion turned out to be right almost immediately.

Before we had fully unpacked, neighborhood children were knocking on the door to introduce themselves. Our house sat in a cluster of homes with common green space, soccer fields, and trails close enough that our children could walk or bike to much of what mattered. Kids moved around the neighborhood without hovering adults trailing behind them. Families trusted the environment, and just as importantly, they trusted children to grow into it. The first thing we noticed in Norway was children’s freedom.

That trust matters.

Kids walked to school alone. They biked across town. They learned the bus system early. If you lived more than four kilometers from school, you got a free bus pass. Our kids were suddenly navigating a city in ways that would have felt unusual in many American communities. The built environment was part of the story - lighted paths, safe crossings, traffic that actually yielded - but the deeper story was cultural. Adults were not organizing every step of a child’s day. They were making room for capability to develop.

The same thing was true in family life. One of the most memorable experiences of our first months was the first-day of school parent’s meeting at our youngest son’s school. We expected the usual announcements about schedules and logistics. Instead, the room calmly made collective decisions about the social life of the whole class: birthday parties should include everyone, children should only use the backpack given by the school, video games (or not) should be mutually decided before playdates, and rotating friend groups should make sure no child gets quietly left out. Many American parents say they want community, but we often default to private strategies and family-level competition. In Norway, parenting felt collective. The message was clear: every child belongs to all of us.

That same mindset showed up in sports. We joined our first dugnad - volunteer work - by running the kitchen at one of our son’s soccer tournaments for five hours. It was cold and wet, and nobody treated the volunteer work as optional in the emotional sense, even though the word itself implies volunteering. Families brewed coffee, mixed waffle batter, cut cakes, restocked the kiosks, and made the whole day work. The tournament kiosk sold cakes, fruit, sweet breads, and coffee, not the usual pile of chips and neon snacks. It was fun, local, and communal. We were not just watching youth sports. We were watching a community rehearse its values.

That changed the way we thought about performance.

What we found in Norway was not a culture obsessed with producing early stars. It was a culture that seemed unusually good at building the conditions in which many children can thrive. Community, trust, outdoor competence, and shared expectations were not side dishes to sports performance. They were part of the foundation. The question was not simply, “How do we make this child better right now?” It was, “What kind of environment helps children grow into capable, healthy, motivated people over time?” Those are the same questions that would later shape the work we care about through MYRA.

By the end of our first months in Trondheim, we had started to suspect that great performance systems are often disguised as kind ones. They look calmer than expected. Less frantic. Less impressed with early status. More committed to retention, belonging, and daily habits than to dramatic declarations about greatness. At first glance that can look soft. It is not soft at all. It is demanding in a different way. It asks adults to cooperate. It asks communities to show up. It asks children to become capable.

In the essays that follow, we want to make that case more concretely. We want to write about the Byåsen IL motto - “Flest mulig, lengst mulig,” or “as many as possible, for as long as possible” - and why we now think it may be one of the smartest performance ideas in sport. We want to write about intensity control, which in Norway means much more than heart-rate zones or lactate numbers. We want to write about the sentence we heard over and over from parents, including some who had been world class themselves: “it has to come from within.” And finally, we want to write about what we hope to bring home - not by pretending the United States can become Norway, but by asking what parts of this model are transferable, what parts are structural, and what kinds of communities we might choose to build.

We thought we were moving to Norway to learn about sports. What we actually learned was that sport makes the most sense when you understand the culture around it.

In Part 2, we examine why Norway’s emphasis on belonging, participation, and long-term retention may actually be one of the foundations of its sporting success.

In Part 3, we talk about intensity control, and the Norwegian discipline of knowing when to push, when to Pause, and how adults set the tone.

Part 4 is about one of the most important responsibilities of parents and coaches: protecting a child's intrinsic motivation before adult ambition crowds it out.

Part 5 is about the lessons the Groff’s want to carry back to the United States, and why those lessons clarified what MYRA is trying to build.

An article written by Øyvind Sandbakk, with edits by Sophie Herzog and Trond Nystad

Imagine an international sporting event where performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) aren't just permitted, but celebrated. This is the vision of the “Enhanced Games”, scheduled to debut in Las Vegas this May. By allowing athletes to use PEDs under medical supervision, the event aims to reframe chemical enhancement as a triumph of science and personal freedom. It’s a dangerous attempt to push the “upper limits” of human capability while simultaneously carving out a new, highly lucrative business model for the company behind.

Dr. Aron D’Souza, who leads the Enhanced Games, argues that the current anti-doping regime is riddled with hypocrisy and injustice, pointing out that while the Olympics ban substances like steroids, they are sponsored by companies such as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. These are brands, he claims, that have caused more harm to public health than PEDs. For example, D’Souza argues that many elite athletes already use advanced medical interventions, often in secret, while publicly adhering to anti-doping rules. He believes this double standard undermines transparency and fairness in sport. His initiative aims to destigmatize PEDs and promote what he calls “performance medicine”, which he sees as a gateway to longevity and innovation in human health. He promises a more honest, technologically advanced model of elite sport. But behind this rhetoric of freedom and progress lies a deep ethical conflict, one that mirrors the political currents of our time.

A Trumpified Vision of Sport?

The Enhanced Games are backed by Donald Trump Jr. and echo a sporting version of Trump-style populism: a rebellion against the established sports system, claiming to be the voice of the people and to liberate the individual from bureaucratic and moral constraints. Much like Trump’s slogans centered on freedom and sovereignty, the Enhanced Games use the language of choice and transparency to challenge the very core of sporting ethics.

Yet freedom without responsibility is not progress but regression. History has shown us the dangers of prioritizing performance over health and ethics. East Germany’s state-run doping program in the 1970s and 80s led to severe health consequences and psychological traumas: A system where young athletes were sacrificed for medals. The Enhanced Games risk becoming a modern version of this, only with commercial actors instead of state institutions.

At the same time, we are seeing a broader societal trend where biotechnology and “enhancement” are becoming part of a personal freedom and longevity movement. For example, people are increasingly using drugs to boost concentration or lose weight, wearable tech to monitor health, and gene editing tools to prevent disease or improve physical traits. This wave, often called transhumanism, challenges traditional boundaries of the human body and performance. That is why it’s more important than ever that sport stays grounded in principles of responsibility, health, and ethical reflection. Sport should not just follow trends, it should help to set standards for what responsible human development looks like.

Science Without Ethics

The Enhanced Games claim to be science-based, but overlook the fact that science without ethical boundaries can be dangerous. There is no guarantee that medical supervision can prevent long-term harm from substances like steroids, growth hormone, and EPO. Many of these drugs are banned precisely because they carry serious short- and long-term risks, from heart failure to infertility and psychiatric disorders.

Framing this as a “personal choice” is problematic. How can one make an informed decision when the consequences are unclear and often not communicated, and the pressure to perform (or even set records) is immense? This definition of freedom is an illusion, driven by commercial interests and an ideology that prioritizes short-term commercial success and fame over long-term health and the reputation of what we understand as clean sport.

Women’s Sport Under Pressure

Particularly concerning are the implications for women’s sport. In a system without regulation, female athletes who wish to compete at the highest level may feel compelled to take testosterone in male-level doses, leading to irreversible physical changes and marginalizing those who choose to compete without medical enhancement. This threatens not only athletes’ health but also the principles of fair competition and gender equality in sport.

What Kind of Society Do We Want Sport to Reflect?

Sport has always been more than physical achievement. It reflects the values we wish to promote as a society: discipline, fairness, respect for the body, and community. The Enhanced Games represent a new form of extreme individualism, where the body becomes a project and performance a product, disconnected from health, well-being and ethical values. It’s a development that aligns with an era marked by technological optimism, commercialization, and political polarization, but risks losing what gives sport its deeper meaning. When performance becomes just another product of technology, we risk turning athletes into machines and competitions into showcases of science rather than human spirit. That’s why it’s crucial to protect the values that make sport meaningful.

The Way Forward

Yes, elite sport faces challenges: powerful commercial interests pull in different directions, sponsors from industries like alcohol, betting, and junk food dominate, and cheating occurs. But the solution is not to abandon ethics. We need stronger anti-doping efforts, better education for athletes, and conscious choices of sponsors and representatives that promote health, not manipulation and abuse. Technological innovation should focus on training, nutrition, and recovery, not on unnaturally enhancing the body with drugs.

The first Enhanced Games are scheduled for May 21–24, 2026, in Las Vegas. New records will likely be set. But the real question is: what are the consequences? If doping becomes the norm, we risk losing the soul of sport, and with it, a vital part of our shared culture.

This blog post is based on, and partly translated from, a Norwegian debate article published in the newspaper Nettavisen, which can be read here: Doping, Idrett | Verdensmester Fred Kerley velger doping-idrett: Dette kan bli farlig

An article written by Sophie Herzog

In Part 1, we explored how allostatic load emerges from the accumulation of physical and non-physical stressors, and how it can impact performance and health.

The next step is to understand how this load can be managed. What determines how much stress an athlete can tolerate? And how can performance environments better support adaptation rather than unintentionally overwhelm the system?

The Mystery of Maximal Sustainable Energy Expenditure

Professional endurance athletes are known to train many hours, which is often positively correlated with performance. High training volumes consequently lead to high energy expenditures. It has been speculated that the maximal sustainable energy expenditure is approximately 2.5 x the basal metabolic rate^[i], a constraint imposed by our ability to transform energy^[ii]. However, case studies of elite performers^[iii],[iv], recently documented approaching the ‘upper limits’ of human capability, revealing workloads and carbohydrate intakes that exceed what research deemed possible and optimal.

In a complex system like the human body, we rely on the adaptability of our allostatic systems to make sure that we stay in “balance” even under extreme circumstances. Adequate energy intakes might allow these athletes to become resilient to the higher demands (i.e., workloads), most likely through a combination of 1) metabolic compensation (efficiency-induced resilience)^[1], allocating energy to fuel adaptive processes, and 2) by increasing the total energy budget. At the moment, this is still pretty much a blackbox and might even vary depending on the individual case.

In any case, the ability to sustain a much higher workload has certainly contributed to significant performance improvements in recent years. Nevertheless, we have yet to gain a comprehensible understanding of the “costs” of constantly altered regulatory set-points, and potential consequences of energy being allocated away from health- and longevity-promoting functions such as maintenance and repair, growth, reproduction or cognition.

Impact of Nutrition and Hydration

Adequate and high quality nutrition and hydration are essential not just to sustain high workloads but also to manage stress effectively. A balanced diet that provides the necessary macro- and micronutrients supports the body’s energy balance and recovery.

High training volumes lead to high energy expenditure, necessitating high energy intake. A better understanding of nutritional strategies, such as optimizing carbohydrate intake (daily, during training and competition), has played a significant role in enhancing performance and increasing load tolerance in recent years^[v]. However, it is important to recognize that simply consuming more and more carbohydrates does not enable athletes to train infinitely more. There will come a point when “more” doesn’t give you any additional performance benefit, as other factors like digestion, absorption or the feeling of fullness might become a constraint. It is also important to note that carbohydrates are not a cure-all for stress stemming from outside of training.

Furthermore, is also crucial to remember that nutrient intake is not the same as nutrient uptake. The body needs time to process food, and the more you train, the less time there is for digestion and absoprtion. However, adaptations to long-term exercise can make our bodies more biochemically efficient. This means, we can probably absorb more of the nutrients we take in and use fuel more efficiently, such as utilizing more fat at lower intensities while maintaining the ability to oxidize carbs at a high rate when needed.

Adequate hydration is equally important for maintaining optimal physiological functions. Additionally, small molecules like antioxidants^[vi] and adaptogens^[vii] can help mitigate oxidative stress and may enhance the body’s resilience to stress, although high dosage may prevent performance- and health-promoting adaptations^[viii].

Given the variability in daily energy expenditure and the challenge of estimating it precisely, it is vital to also listen to the body’s signals of energy deficiency (or surplus) and not wasting energy to fight against your “natural self”. Being aware of your natural physique, the type of athlete you are and your nutritional habits, can help you understand your tendencies and guide your combined approach to training and nutrition. Hereby, athletes can also benefit from working with nutritionists to create individualized plans that cater to their specific needs, considering their training demands, natural physique, past and current eating behaviors and overall lifestyle. Certainly, however, adequate nutritional input and high quality foods can be a game changer and enhance the capacity to handle more stress (mental and physical) and are therefore an important factor in performance improvement and sustainability.

The Role of Technology in Monitoring Allostatic Load

Advances in wearable technology have revolutionized the way athletes monitor their physiological states. Devices that measure resting heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing rates and sleep duration/”quality” enable athletes and coaches to make more informed decisions about training and recovery. Moreover, the integration of big data and machine learning increasingly allows to get predictive analytics, potentially helping to identify early signs of allostatic overload or underperformance, enabling proactive stress management and preventing long-term detrimental effects.

However, we are still lacking direct measurements that indicate overall stress load. While a lot of wearable devices use algorithms to predict “stress levels” using a variety of data inputs, these are not direct measurements. You can’t prick your finger or spit into a tube and get a holistic assessment of your stress levels. But even if we could, for instance, measure biomarkers like hormones in real-time, they are most likely only facilitators and not the reason of chronic effects.

Perhaps in the (near) future we will be able to measure stress-induced (e.g., neurotransmitter-related) brain changes, gain real-time insight on neurogenesis or neurodegeneration, or measure cellular energy fluxes which will provide a more direct understanding? Methodologies like electroencephalography (EEG) have already been used to suggest that exhaustive exercise temporarily reduces brain network efficiency and using EEG for resting state network assessments could be one way to facilitate the evaluation of readiness and efficiency of the central nervous system in different training situations.^[ix] However, it remains speculation whether these assessments are on the same temporal scale than our thoughts, perceptions and feelings or whether we can only ever measure “delayed allostatic load”.

Cultural Factors and Gender Differences

Cultural and gender differences can also significantly influence how athletes experience and manage stress. Some athletes might naturally have more relaxed dispositions, which can buffer the impact of stress, while others have to be very conscious that the energy they spend on mental stress doesn’t cause physical shutdowns.

Additionally, hormonal variations can influence stress responses and recovery, with women potentially experiencing different stress impacts (and energy modulations) due to menstrual cycles. Social expectations and pressures can also vary widely across cultures, affecting how athletes perceive and cope with stress. With the current use of smartphones and social media, it is also becoming increasingly important that athletes are taught how to properly “switch off” from an early age. Hereby, educational programs that teach athletes about stress management and recovery can be beneficial, helping them to develop strategies to balance their training with other life demands.

Coping Strategies to manage Allostatic Load

Evolutionarily speaking, we’re built to save energy. We naturally gravitate toward things that recharge us and shy away from anything that drains us: it’s our body’s way of keeping the “cost of living” low. To manage stress effectively, we need to tap into that instinct by becoming more aware of where our energy actually goes versus where we want it to go.

The goal is to spend your energy on purpose, focusing on activities that actually help you recover or increase your capacity for stress. In the end, letting go of the need to be perfect doesn’t just lower your stress; it makes you more resilient and a lot healthier in the long run.

Useful strategies to manage allostatic load include:

• Low-stress physical activity: Engaging in activities like walking or hiking in nature, technical/skill sessions, or light gym and plyometric sessions without focusing too much on data or metrics can help to stay active while reducing stress.

• Support Systems and Human connection: Seeking support from a sports psychologist, coaches, friends and family can help manage stress. Good coaches are able to monitor and manage athletes’ stress and recovery. Social connections can help to to distract yourself and remind you that there are also other things in life.

• Mindfulness and Relaxation Techniques: Practicing mindfulness, meditation, and biofeedback techniques can reduce anxiety levels.

• Balanced Lifestyle: High-quality sleep, adequate rest, natural light exposure, good nutrition, and time for friends, joyful activities and relaxation to maintain overall well-being.

• Goal Setting: Setting realistic, achievable goals to maintain motivation and a sense of accomplishment.

• Positive Self-Talk: Encouraging a positive mindset and focusing on strengths and past successes.

Conclusion

Understanding and managing allostatic load is not just a matter of optimizing performance in the short term – it is about safeguarding the system that makes performance possible in the first place.

While physical load is increasingly well quantified, the psychological and social components of stress remain largely unmeasured. Yet, they draw from the same finite energy budget and may ultimately determine how much load an athlete can truly tolerate.

This creates a critical blind spot: we tend to manage what we can measure, while underestimating what we cannot.

Moving forward, performance management must shift from a focus on isolated variables to a more integrated understanding of total load. This requires combining data, context, and human judgement – not replacing one with the other.

At its core, this is not just about pushing limits, but about understanding them. Because sustainable performance is not built on maximising load, but on aligning it with the system’s capacity to adapt.

^[1] Not just metabolic efficiency, also biochemical and mechanical efficiency.

^[i] Thurber C, Dugas LR, Ocobock C, Carlson B, Speakman JR, Pontzer H. Extreme events reveal an alimentary limit on sustained maximal human energy expenditure. Sci Adv. 2019 Jun 5;5(6):eaaw0341. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw0341. PMID: 31183404; PMCID: PMC6551185.

^[ii] Yang X, Heinemann M, Howard J, Huber G, Iyer-Biswas S, Le Treut G, Lynch M, Montooth KL, Needleman DJ, Pigolotti S, et al. , 2021. Physical bioenergetics: energy fluxes, budgets, and constraints in cells. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 118.

^[iii] Dasa MS, Bu OA, Sandbakk Ø, Rønnestad BR, Plasqui G, Gundersen H, Kristoffersen M. Training volume and total energy expenditure of an Olympic and Ironman world champion: approaching the upper limits of human capabilities. J Appl Physiol (1985). 2024 Dec 1;137(6):1535-1540. doi: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00706.2024. Epub 2024 Oct 31. PMID: 39480269.

^[iv] Christensen PM. Aerobic Energy Turnover and Exercise Economy Profile During Race Simulation in a World-Record-Breaking Male Full-Distance Triathlete. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2024 Nov 14;20(1):161-167. doi: 10.1123/ijspp.2024-0221. PMID: 39541954.

^[v] Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM. Position of the academy of nutrition and dietetics, dietitians of Canada, and the American college of sports medicine: nutrition and athletic performance. J Acad Nutr

Diet. 2016;116(3):501–528. doi:10.1016/j.jand.2015.12.006

^[vi] Clemente-Suárez VJ, Bustamante-Sanchez Á, Mielgo-Ayuso J, Martínez-Guardado I, Martín-Rodríguez A, Tornero-Aguilera JF. Antioxidants and Sports Performance. Nutrients. 2023 May 18;15(10):2371. doi: 10.3390/nu15102371. PMID: 37242253; PMCID: PMC10220679.

^[vii] https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/adaptogens-for-athletes/

^[viii] Li S, Fasipe B, Laher I. Potential harms of supplementation with high doses of antioxidants in athletes. J Exerc Sci Fit. 2022 Oct;20(4):269-275. doi: 10.1016/j.jesf.2022.06.001. Epub 2022 Jun 11. PMID: 35812825; PMCID: PMC9241084.

^[ix] Büchel D, Sandbakk Ø, Baumeister J. Exploring intensity-dependent modulations in EEG resting-state network efficiency induced by exercise. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2021 Sep;121(9):2423-2435. doi: 10.1007/s00421-021-04712-6. Epub 2021 May 18. PMID: 34003363; PMCID: PMC8357751.

An article written by Sophie Herzog

In high-performance environments, the pursuit of excellence often comes with costs that are not immediately visible: While training, work, nutrition, and recovery might be carefully managed, less tangible stressors – psychological, social, financial or environmental – can quietly accumulate and impact both health and performance.

This article explores allostatic load as a framework to understand these hidden costs. It highlights how different stressors interact, how they influence energy availability, and why managing total load – not just training load – is critical for sustainable performance.

Allostasis, Allostatic Load and the Stress-Disease Cascade

Performance can be understood as operating within a finite and dynamic energy budget, where all stressors – physical and non-physical – compete for the same resources.

Humans have an innate ability to anticipate, regulate and adapt to stress – a process known as allostasis – which helps maintain stability and energy balance. This adaptive process is highly efficient but also energy-intensive, as the brain consumes significant resources to manage stress responses^[i].

When we push our physiological and psychological limits for too long and stress becomes chronic, the body’s allostatic systems – such as the hypothalamic-pituary-adrenal (HPA) axis, sympathetic nervous system, and various metabolic pathways – are constantly activated. In other words, the temporary allostatic responses of the body, which are essential for survival and also help us to improve performance, shift into persistent allostatic states. Persistent activation of allostatic systems increases energy demand and can disrupt the balance between energy production and utilisation. This disruption can for instance occur through permanent cellular and physiological recalibrations such as hyperglycaemia, increased blood lipids and elevated levels of circulating stress mediators. Over time, these prolonged states of stress and increased energy consumption can lead to a state known as allostatic load. As allostatic load persists over time, the body continues to make significant efforts to cope, but these (mal-)adaptations can result in serious health issues. For example, arteries may stiffen to manage high blood pressure, hormone receptors may become less responsive to prevent overstimulation, and the brain’s structure and wiring may change due to chronic stress.

This cascade of stress-related damage, from initially adaptive (and wanted), allostatic responses to maladaptive states, can eventually cause communication breakdowns within the body’s systems. These breakdowns not only impair (and possibly shut down) performance and recovery, but also pose significant health risks through allostatic overload. This relentless energy demand can overwhelm the body’s systems, leading to detrimental effects such as cognitive decline, hypermetabolism, and potentially accelerated aging, along with an increased risk of chronic disease^[ii].

Figure 1: The allostatic load model explains how stress leads to disease and accelerated aging. Stressors, whether real or perceived, trigger an energy-dependent process that progresses from adaptive allostasis to allostatic load, and eventually to allostatic overload, increasing disease risk. The body’s physiological network, involving constant communication between cells, tissues, and organs, is disrupted by stress, leading to dysfunction and impaired system communication. These changes, illustrated by altered biomarkers, eventually manifest as clinical symptoms. This model is adapted from McEwen’s allostatic load time-course^[iii]. Figure from Bobba-Alves et al.

The Link between Health and Performance

Chronic disease rarely develops suddenly, but early signs of allostatic load – such as declining performance, chronic fatigue, or frequent injuries and illnesses – can emerge even in the most meticulous high-performers. This highlights a fundamental tension: performance optimisation and health preservation are not always aligned.

Interestingly though, despite their relevance, terms like allostasis, allostatic systems and allostatic load are not commonly discussed in sports and exercise physiology, even though they are closely related to how athletes adapt to training.

Expectation versus Reality: The Dual Burden of Physical and Psychological Stress in Athletes

Training stress is a normal part of an athlete’s life. But mental stress such as competition anxiety, media scrutiny, or personal issues can significantly add to an athlete’s overall stress level. The problem is that we don’t have psychological markers (analogous to e.g., physiological thresholds) or scales such as psychological intensity zones to measure the intensity and type of stress or determine how much energy it really costs.

In general, stress can be understood as a mismatch between expectation and reality. The greater the mismatch, the higher the energy cost required to adapt. The theory behind this is the framework of “free energy principle”^([iv]), which states that dynamic physical systems pursue paths of “least surprise”. Thereby, stress can be understood as the brain’s attempt to minimize “free energy,” which is a balance between accuracy - our ability to predict sensations - and complexity - the allostatic resources needed to make these predictions. This applies not only to competition outcomes, but also to daily disruptions, uncertainty, and interpersonal dynamics.

The human mind is a powerful source of unnecessary stress, what we might call “wasteful allostasis.” Overthinking is a prime example of such an “energy leak,” where mental strain can stress the body similarly to continuous high energy expenditures from training. This happens when we start losing our predictive grip on what’s happening around us. For instance, when we’re not performing optimally over a long period or have skewed expectations and ambitions. Our mind, in its attempt to reconcile this disconnect, searches for the smallest evidence to support its internal model, often leading to overthinking and worry. This triggers energy-draining stress responses that don’t contribute to physical adaptation. Instead, they deplete our energy reserves, hinder recovery, and ultimately limit our ability to perform at our best.

When non-training-related stressors take up too much energy, athletes may develop Unexplained Underperformance Syndrome (UUPS), where they start underperforming in training or competition without any clear physical cause. In many cases, underperformance is not the result of excessive training load alone, but of poorly managed total load. This requires expanding athlete monitoring systems beyond physical metrics to include psychological, social, and environmental stressors.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the challenge is not simply managing training load, but understanding and regulating total load across the system. When non-training stressors accumulate unnoticed, they can quietly erode an athlete’s capacity to adapt, often long before clear symptoms appear.

This raises a critical question for performance environments: how much load can a system truly sustain, and what determines that limit?

In Part 2, we will explore what can define these limits, and how nutrition, technology, and decision-making can be used to better manage allostatic load in practice.

^[i] Peters A, McEwen BS, Friston K. Uncertainty and stress: Why it causes diseases and how it is mastered by the brain. Progress in Neurobiology. 2017 Sep;156:164-188. DOI: 10.1016/j.pneurobio.2017.05.004. PMID: 28576664.

^[ii] Bobba-Alves N, Juster RP, Picard M. The energetic cost of allostasis and allostatic load. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2022 Dec;146:105951. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2022.105951. Epub 2022 Oct 8. PMID: 36302295; PMCID: PMC10082134.

^[iii] McEwen BS. Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. N Engl J Med. 1998 Jan 15;338(3):171-9. doi: 10.1056/NEJM199801153380307. PMID: 9428819.

^[iv] Friston, K. The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?. Nat Rev Neurosci 11, 127–138 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787

An article written by Øyvind Sandbakk, Trond Nystad and Sophie Herzog

As coaches, we’ve all seen the difference between athletes who take charge of their own development and those who wait for every instruction. The swimmers who track their own lap times, the young footballers who practice skills on their own, the runners who swap a run for a cross-training session when they feel a small niggle – these athletes often progress for longer and stay engaged in - and motivated through - their own development process. The key factor here is athlete ownership. This means that athletes are curious about training principles and understand why they are doing things, own their goals, have a say in the training plan and feel responsible for their improvement. When athletes have this kind of ownership and understand the “why”, they’re more motivated, able to take smarter decisions and are more resilient. As a consequence, they are also more likely to reach their potential over the long term. So how can we, as coaches, build a sense of ownership in our athletes from a young age through to the elite level?

Why Athlete Ownership Matters

Giving athletes ownership is not an idealistic idea but a practical strategy for developing better long-term performers. When athletes feel invested and in control of their development:

• they practice because they want to learn and improve through practice, not just because they’re told to. This internal motivation carries them through tough training phases or setbacks.

• they develop a stronger sense of independence and build confidence in their ability to understand their body.

• they learn to think for themselves and understand their sport better. They learn from mistakes instead of fearing them, leading to better decision-making in competition and life in general.

• their resilience grows. If things go wrong during a game or race, self-reliant athletes can adapt because they’ve learned how to problem-solve in the moment.

• they have more fun and enjoy the sport and the training.

Across different cultures and sports, the pattern is similar: when athletes feel empowered, they excel. From our experience in Norway, we have seen how the freedom to try multiple sports and make own choices as kids, has led to both high participation rates in sports and outstanding international results.

Building Ownership at Every Stage

Developing athlete ownership is an ongoing process. Here’s how coaches can foster it from childhood to adulthood:

• With Children: Keep sports fun and let kids contribute
  At this stage, the priority is to help kids love the game and start taking small responsibilities. You might let them pick a warm-up activity, or ask which skill they want to practice more. Invite their input with simple questions like, “What was the most fun part of today’s practice?” or “What do you want to get better at?” These little choices and reflections make kids feel heard and in control. The goal isn’t to turn training over to them – it’s to show that their thoughts and choices matter and are being considered. This builds their confidence and enjoyment, which is the foundation of long-term engagement.

• With Teenagers: Promote shared decisions and self-reflection
  As athletes enter their teenage years, they can handle more responsibility in their training. Work with them to set personal and team goals. For example, ask your athletes what they think the team should focus on improving, or let them choose between two training drills based on what they feel they need. Encourage athletes to analyze their own technique and performance: “What do you think you did well today? What would you change next time? How would you implement that into your training structure?” This not only improves their self-awareness and understanding of their performance but also makes them active partners in the coaching and development process. When a strategy fails or a match is lost, involve them in figuring out solutions instead of giving all the answers. By doing this, you’re teaching them how to think critically and handle pressure. Over these years, gradually shift more responsibility over to the athletes. They might start to keep their own training logs, write their own training plans, lead parts of practice, or mentor younger teammates. All these experiences contribute to a sense of responsibility, better understanding and ownership.

• With Adult and Elite Athletes: Be a guide and mentor
  By the time athletes reach higher levels – whether in college, as elite amateurs, or professional sports – they should be equipped to assume responsibility and take the driver’s seat. At this stage, a coach becomes more of a mentor who co-creates training plans and strategies together with the athlete. Discuss the “why” behind each training method and encourage their feedback. Creating this two-way dialogue doesn’t mean you lose authority – it means you trust your athlete’s experience. Many famous coaches talk about “coaching themselves out of a job,” by which they mean that over years they help athletes become so self-sufficient that on game day the athlete can perform at their best with minimal instruction. At the elite level, split-second decisions and personal drive make the difference. Athletes who have grown up thinking for themselves can handle high-pressure moments more effectively because they’ve been practicing autonomy all along.

Individualising the Approach

Every athlete is unique, so fostering ownership will look a little different for each person. Some athletes are naturally inclined to take charge, always asking questions and offering ideas. Others are quieter or less confident and need more encouragement to step forward. As a coach, try to gauge each athlete’s comfort with autonomy and push their boundaries gradually. If a young athlete is shy, start small – maybe let them lead a warm-up stretch. If another is eager, challenge them with bigger responsibilities like demonstrating drills to the group. It’s also okay to adjust along the way: if giving too much freedom too soon leaves an athlete overwhelmed, you can dial back and provide more guidance until they’re ready. What matters is finding the right balance where the athlete is challenged but still supported. Over time, with patient coaching, athletes will grow into the responsibility you give them. A great coach will navigate between being a teacher and a mentor.

Bringing It All Together

Encouraging athlete ownership is about creating a partnership in the training process. The coach provides expertise, guidance, and a supportive structure. The athlete can express his/her own individuality in form of their own ideas, preferences, and engagement level. Together, you plan, execute, review, and adjust. This approach not only helps athletes perform better, but it also makes coaching more rewarding – you’re developing independent, motivated athletes who are invested in their own journey. They’ll still need you, but they’ll need you in a different way: not just as an instructor, but as a mentor who helps them navigate their path.

So, why do some coaches still choose an authoritarian coaching style where the coach is the commander? Likely, the temptation (and sometimes need) for short-term success is so large that one cannot run the risk of children making mistakes. Winning now becomes more important than winning in the future - in sports and in life. Eager parents are often part of the problem as well. Parents expect the coach to give all the answers and write training plans – why would one need a coach if that coach is not “working”? The truth is that writing a training plan for a week is done in minutes, whereas mentoring and discussing training plans which the athletes have written themselves can take hours or days. Mentoring is a time-consuming and valuable approach which takes patience, time and commitment - if embraced, one might have to sacrifice immediate success for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

By giving athletes of all ages control over the steering wheel, we help them become drivers of their own success. It can start with something as small as letting an eight-year-old choose a warm-up drill and end up with a 20-year-old Olympian fine-tuning her own training plan. The sooner we let them take ownership, the more prepared they’ll be for the road ahead. As a coach, there are few things more satisfying than seeing an athlete confidently say, “I’ve got this,” and knowing you helped them reach that point. This collaborative journey – where athletes gradually learn to lead themselves – is at the heart of long-term athletic development (and a great way to prepare young people for the journey called life).

An article written by Øyvind Sandbakk and Trond Nystad

In youth sports, focusing too much on quick wins can backfire. Training children like miniature professionals might produce a few early champions, but it often leads to burnout or kids quitting sports altogether. By contrast, evidence and experience show that a “long game” approach – one that emphasizes participation, skill development, and fun – creates more successful and well-rounded athletes in the long run.

In this article we combine research with our experiences from Norwegian sport. Despite a population of only about 5 million, Norway has dominated recent Winter Olympics, topping the medal tables in 2018, 2022 and 2026. Norwegian sports leaders credit this to a radically different youth sports model: they don’t keep score for kids under 11, they let children try multiple sports, and they make sports affordable and accessible for all. The result? Nearly all Norwegian kids (over 90%) grow up playing organized sports, and the country produces both a broad base of active citizens and a remarkable number of world-class athletes.

A sound development philosophy for young athletes comes down to a few key principles:

• Sport for All: Involve as many kids as possible in sports and keep them playing as long as possible. No early cutting of “less talented” kids – everyone can participate.

• Late Specialization: Allow children to play multiple sports and delay choosing one favorite sport until they are older (mid-teen years or later).

• Fun and Mastery Focus: Make sports enjoyable and skill focused. Emphasize learning and personal improvement over winning at a young age.

• Inclusive Access: Ensure all children can participate, regardless of their background or ability. Keep costs low, provide local opportunities, and create a welcoming environment for every child.

Key Principles of Youth Development

Broad Participation, Not Early Selection:

A fundamental starting point is to give every child the chance to play and develop. This means youth programs should welcome all skill levels and avoid weeding out kids at young ages. Early talent selection – picking a few “elite” 9- or 10-year-olds and sidelining the rest – might seem to fast-track success, but studies and real-world results show it’s usually counterproductive. Many late-blooming athletes, who might be average at 12, can become top competitors by 18 if they’re not pushed out of the sport. By casting a wide net, you keep more children active for longer (great for public health) and also increase the odds of finding those future stars who just need time to grow. Norway’s approach is inclusive: about 93% of Norwegian children play organized sports, partly because there’s no intense pressure or exclusion early on. Youth leagues don’t even publish scores or standings for pre-teen games, so every kid — not just the “best” — gets equal encouragement and play time. The philosophy is “as many as possible, for as long as possible.” This broad base not only produces champions down the road, but also a society where sports and physical activity are lifelong habits.

Late Specialization and Multi-Sport Play:

In many countries, it is common for kids to specialize in one sport early, sometimes as young as 7 or 8, with year-round training. However, research on long-term athlete development shows that early specialization often leads to injuries, burnout, and plateaued performance. Children’s bodies and minds develop better with varied activities, a principle likely also true for adults. The key is to delay intense specialization until mid-adolescence or later. Young athletes should be encouraged to sample different sports through childhood. Playing multiple sports builds a wider range of motor skills and reduces overuse injuries (since different sports use different muscles and movements). It also keeps kids mentally fresh and excited. A change of sport can rekindle enthusiasm and prevent boredom or stress. More importantly, multi-sport youth often end up more successful in the sport they eventually choose, compared to early specialized youths. They bring well-rounded athleticism and a genuine passion when they eventually focus on one sport.

Focus on Enjoyment and Mastery (Fun First):

Joy is not a luxury in youth sports – it is essential. Young athletes thrive when they truly enjoy playing. A development-centered philosophy prioritizes a “fun and mastery” environment rather than a “win-at-all-costs” environment. In practice, this means coaches and parents should create a positive atmosphere where children look forward to practices and games. Training for kids should involve a lot of play-like activities, creativity, and opportunities to learn skills without fear of making mistakes. Instead of pressuring a team of 10-year-olds to win a championship, good coaches focus on teaching them proper technique, teamwork, and love for the game. They praise effort, improvement, and sportsmanship more than outcomes. This intrinsic motivation – when kids play because they love it – is a powerful driver of long-term improvement. Studies in sports psychology show that when the focus is on personal mastery (like improving one’s own best time or learning a new skill), children are more likely to stay committed and work hard, compared to when they feel constant pressure to outperform others. Norway has even enshrined this idea in policy: as noted, they don’t officially keep score or rankings for young kids, freeing children to play for the sake of playing. Coaches often organize fun tournaments or festivals where the excitement comes from participation, not collecting trophies. This “fun first” approach does not mean kids never experience competition or challenge – they do, but in a healthy way. By their mid-teens, when competitions and championships start to matter more, these athletes are not burned out or afraid of failure. Instead, they carry deep confidence and love of sport, which often makes them more competitive and resilient in high-pressure situations.

Inclusive Access and Athlete Welfare:

The final key principle is ensuring sports are accessible and supportive for all kids. Even the best philosophy won’t work if only a small, privileged group can participate. A long-term development model strives to remove barriers to entry. This can involve keeping fees low or offering scholarships so that low-income families can join, providing local facilities so kids don’t have to travel far, and welcoming children of all backgrounds, genders, and abilities. Inclusivity also means creating an environment where each child feels valued and safe. For instance, no child in a development-focused program should worry that one bad game will get them kicked off the team. Norwegian youth sports apply this idea rigorously: local clubs are largely run by volunteers and supported by government funding (including significant lottery funds) to minimize costs, and it’s against the policy to cut kids from teams or exclude them from play because of skill level. They even have a formal Children’s Rights in Sports Policy stating that every child has the right to participate, to have a say in their sport, and to progress at their own preferred pace. This athlete-centered approach extends to caring about kids’ overall well-being: coaches keep an eye on academic balance, social development, and avoid overtraining young athletes. When children feel safe and included, they are more likely to enjoy sports and stick with them, which is exactly the goal. Moreover, an inclusive base naturally produces more top talent from different segments of society, because you’re not just selecting from a narrow group. It’s no coincidence that a country like Norway, which emphasizes equality and inclusion in youth sports, consistently finds champions in unlikely places – all while the majority of participants, whether they become elite or not, reap the lifelong benefits of sports.

Building a Supportive System

Implementing these principles isn’t just about individual goodwill – it requires a supportive sports system from the grassroots to the national level. To foster long-term athlete development, the entire structure of youth sports needs to align with development goals rather than short-term results. Here are a few ways to build a system that supports this philosophy:

Age-Appropriate Competition Rules:

Sports governing bodies can set policies that keep early competition in perspective. For example, as mentioned, Norwegian rules prevent official competition rankings for children before a certain age (typically 11 or 12). Other countries have started to follow suit in some sports, using small-sided games, modified rules, or festival-style events for kids. By limiting formal championships and playoffs in pre-teen years, the system ensures that coaches and parents don’t fixate on winning at the expense of development/learning the necessary skills. A long-term approach might also include not selecting teams or elite travel squads until mid-teens, so that young talent pools remain broad. Only when kids reach a more mature age should intense specialization and high-level competition enter the picture. This kind of policy gives every youngster time to learn and prevents the premature “pressure cooker” environment that drives many away.

Coach Education and Incentives:

Coaches are the key drivers of youth sports culture. A system committed to development must train and encourage coaches to follow best practices. This means offering coaching courses or certifications that emphasize child development, psychology, and effective training methods for different ages. Coaches should learn how to teach skills in fun ways, how to keep kids motivated, and how to balance challenges with encouragement. It’s equally important to redefine success metrics for youth coaches: instead of judging them only on wins and losses, clubs and federations can evaluate coaches on player improvement, enjoyment, and retention rates (do their players come back next season?). Recognizing and rewarding coaches who excel at developing athletes – rather than just those who collect trophies – helps shift the culture. For example, some youth leagues give out awards for sportsmanship or for programs with high participation growth. When coaches know that their job is to “produce better athletes and people, not just winning teams,” they are more likely to adopt long-term nurturing approaches.

Accessible Infrastructure and Funding:

A crucial systemic factor is making sure that all children have access to sports facilities, clubs, and equipment. If a country or community truly values broad participation, it must invest in the grassroots. This could involve public funding for community sports centers, fields, and gyms, as well as subsidies to keep registration fees low. Norway illustrates this well: the government channels a portion of national lottery revenue directly into sports organizations, helping local clubs cover costs so that money is not a major obstacle for families. Additionally, many sports in Norway are organized through multi-sport community clubs, which means a single club in a town might offer soccer, handball, skiing, and athletics all under one umbrella. This makes it easy for kids to try different sports without needing separate expensive memberships. A well-structured system might also partner with schools to integrate sports and physical education, ensuring that sports participation is convenient and widespread. The bottom line is that lofty principles won’t matter if there aren’t places to play or if only a few can afford to join. A supportive system opens the door for every child to enter the game.

Long-Term Planning and Patience:

Sports administrators and parents alike need to embrace patience as a virtue. National sport federations can adopt long-term athlete development models that map out what success looks like at each stage of a young athlete’s journey. These models often stress fundamentals and broad engagement in early stages, skill refinement in mid-stages, and competition in later stages. By publicizing and following such frameworks, organizations set expectations that, for example, “age 8–12 is for learning skills and loving the sport, age 13–16 is for growing and gradually focusing, and only after that do we worry about elite competition”. When everyone understands this timeline, there’s less temptation to accelerate the process. It also helps to gather data and feedback: track how many kids stay in sports from year to year and carefully understand/assess why some drop out. High dropout rates at a certain age might indicate too much pressure or other systemic issues that need addressing. By continuously adjusting the system to keep kids engaged, leaders can ensure the development philosophy isn’t just a slogan but a lived reality.

Putting Principles into Practice

Even with a great system, the day-to-day experience of young athletes depends on coaches, parents, and how programs are run at the ground level. Operationalizing the long-term philosophy means rethinking common practices in coaching and competition. Here are some practical ways that teams and coaches can bring the principles to life:

Make Training Fun and Varied:

Coaches of youth teams should design practices that kids genuinely enjoy. Instead of monotonous drills and laps, practices can include games, challenges, and creative exercises that teach skills in an engaging way. For instance, a basketball coach might use a dribbling relay race or a shooting game rather than just a standard drill, or a hockey coach might set up obstacle courses on the ice. This doesn’t mean there’s no discipline or learning – it means players learn through play, which often leads to deeper skill development than rigid instruction. Keeping things fun is especially important for young kids, but it holds true even for teenagers. A positive, enjoyable training environment is one where athletes are willing to put in the effort because they love being there.

Emphasize Skills and Personal Improvement:

In a long-term development approach, the scoreboard is secondary to skill development. Coaches can set individual or team goals that focus on fundamentals and effort. For example, a youth soccer coach might challenge the team to complete a certain number of passes per game, rather than focusing on the game’s outcome. They might help each player set a personal goal, like improving their weaker foot or learning a new move. Celebrating these kinds of achievements (e.g., “We completed more passes than last week!” or “You mastered that skill you’ve been practicing!”) shows athletes that progress is what matters. Constructive feedback should outweigh criticism of mistakes. If a young gymnast falls during a routine, a supportive coach highlights what was done well and what can be improved for next time, rather than expressing disappointment about a low score. The idea is to build confidence and a growth mindset — young athletes who believe they can improve with practice will stay motivated, whereas those who feel constant pressure to win might start to fear failure and lose interest.

Encourage Multiple Sports:

When coaches truly prioritize the child’s development, they will encourage their players to be well-rounded. Youth coaches can cooperate across sports – for example, a track coach and a football coach in the same town might coordinate schedules to enable a boy or girl to do both. Rather than jealously guarding athletes year-round (the war of talent), good coaches understand that a season off from one sport to play another (or just to rest) is healthy. It can also prevent injuries. For instance, if a young athlete has been playing tennis all year, their coach might suggest taking the winter off from tennis to try basketball or simply recovering. Educating parents is part of this practice: many parents worry that their child will “fall behind” if they don’t specialize early, so coaches should share the evidence that multi-sport athletes often excel in the long run and that rest is essential to avoid overuse injuries. By advocating for the athlete’s overall well-being, coaches show that they care about each child’s long-term success and personal growth, not just the next game.

Foster an Inclusive Team Environment:

A coach’s attitudes and policies can make or break inclusivity. Practically, this means ensuring every child on the team gets opportunities to play and improve. For younger ages, it’s important to give roughly equal playing time to all kids, rather than only the early bloomers. If there are A and B squads, allow movement between them so kids aren’t labeled permanently by age 10. Coaches should also set the tone that every role is important – perhaps rotating team captains or highlighting the contributions of different players (like effort on defense or encouraging teammates) rather than only praising the top scorer. Off the field, team activities that build friendship and respect can help; for example, having older or more skilled players mentor younger or newer ones. Listening to players is key, too. Giving kids a voice – maybe letting them choose a drill or vote on a team nickname – helps them feel ownership. When children see that their coaches care about them all, not just the stars, it creates a supportive atmosphere where everyone is motivated to do their best. This inclusiveness in everyday practice ensures that even those who won’t become pros still have a positive experience and motivation to stay active, which is a victory in itself.

Conclusion

If there’s one takeaway from successful youth sports models around the world, it’s this: the best way to develop champions is to not focus on developing champions – at least not too early. Instead, focus on developing children. When kids are happy, healthy, and passionate about their sport, they turn into the best athletes they can be. The medals, records, and victories are a byproduct of a solid foundation, not the foundation itself. We’ve seen that approach pay off: Norway’s “kids first” system has produced a disproportionate number of successful Olympians and a nation of active citizens. Other countries have begun to take notice and implement similar long-term development strategies, guided by research and examples like the Norwegian model.

For parents, coaches, and sports organizations, adopting this philosophy means resisting the urge to push children into the high-stakes competition too soon. It means remembering that the journey in sports is a marathon, not a sprint. A 12-year-old’s local tournament win means little in the grand scheme – what matters is that the 12-year-old loves playing and wants to improve. By nurturing that love and keeping the door open for all, we ensure that more kids will be playing at 15, 18, or 20 years old, with higher skill levels and stronger motivation. From that larger, happier pool of athletes, the truly exceptional talents can emerge – and they’ll likely be better prepared to succeed at the highest level because they aren’t burned out or broken down.

In the end, a good development philosophy for young athletes creates a win-win scenario. Children get to enjoy the wonder and growth that sports offer, and nations get generations of fitter, more skilled athletes (and citizens). It’s about playing the long game in every sense. If we let kids be kids in sport – let them play broadly, freely, and joyfully – we’ll ultimately have more people who stay in sports and more who reach their full potential. And perhaps more importantly, we’ll help young people become healthier, happier adults. That is, far more than any trophy, the true goal of youth sports.

As the 2026 Olympic Games draw to a close and the 50 km cross-country skiing events take center stage on the final weekend, it’s worth revisiting some of the key performance layers we explored ahead of last year’s World Championships in Trondheim: equipment, peaking, and pacing.

1. Equipment: Not just a tool, but the tool

In Trondheim, we emphasized that unpredictable snow, temperature swings, and terrain require more than experience or intuition. They demand a decision system: a data-informed, systematic approach to ski selection and preparation, built on rigorous testing and collaboration.

At the elite level, having the right ski on the right day determines how efficiently an athlete can move, which in turn gives them the chance to still be in contention deep into a 50 km race.

Read more about the “secret sauce” of material choice in our article with Knut & Trond Nystad:

2. Peaking is a fine Line

Our article on peaking for the World Championships explored how athletes transition from general preparation into a competition-ready state through load management (“tapering”) and psychological readiness.

The Olympic 50 km separates the wheat from the chaff. It’s the longest and the last race for the cross-country skiers. Peaking here is all about sculpting readiness one last time, so that physiology, psychology and confidence align when the start gun fires

Read more about whether there is such a thing as a perfect tapering recipe:

3. Pacing Is the Invisible Skill That Determines Outcomes

In Trondheim, we also highlighted how pacing in cross-country skiing differs fundamentally from many other endurance sports. While runners may rely on relatively even pacing or negative splits, skiing performance unfold in a constantly changing landscape.

Variable terrain, shifting snow conditions, equipment choice, and tactical dynamics demand adaptive pacing. Success depends on knowing when and how much to push, reading conditions and competitor’s body language in real time, and integrate pacing strategy with equipment performance and nutrition under fatigue.

Read our full article on lessons in pacing strategies:

A holistic view of performance

Performance is never the result of a single factor. It emerges from the integration of many – technology, physiology, psychology, experience – supported by continuous learning and adaptation.

As the athletes tackle the 50 km distances this Olympic weekend – it offers a moment of reflection for coaches, sports scientists, and athletes alike to reflect on what high-performance in a specific race, under specific conditions demands.

An article written by Sophie Herzog, Øyvind Sandbakk, Trond Nystad and Rune Talsnes

Once again, Norway finds itself at the top of the medal table after the first week of the Winter Olympic Games 2026. For many, this dominance has almost become expected. Yet what makes Norway’s success remarkable is not only how often it wins in winter sports - but how consistently it continues to develop world-class athletes across an ever-widening range of summer disciplines as well.

With a population of just 5.6 million, Norway repeatedly outperforms far larger nations. The obvious question resurfaces each time Norwegian athletes step into the global spotlight: how is this possible?

We’ve explored this question before. And still, interest peaks whenever results make the underlying system visible again. That, in itself, is telling. Because beyond medals and moments, Norway’s success rests on principles that are neither seasonal nor sport-specific.

So here we go again - let’s once more highlight Norway’s timeless, holistic principles of athlete development.

Some of the key elements of Norway's sports model are:

1. Children’s rights in sports
   Norway ensures that children up to age 12 participate in sports in a way that prioritizes enjoyment, safety, and skill development – free from pressure or results-based judgement. The "Children’s Rights in Sports" framework encourages lifelong participation and provides a strong foundation for those who later pursue elite sports. Rather than pushing for early specialization, young athletes are encouraged to explore multiple sports, fostering well-rounded development before committing to a specific path. The core philosophy emphasizes mastery of skills over results, prioritizing long-term growth and enjoyment.

2. Olympiatoppen and elite athlete development
   Olympiatoppen, Norway’s national high-performance sports center works across Olympic sports and plays a vital role in developing elite athletes through supporting and challenging coaches and athletes. It has regional centers across the country, integrating expertise from academia and local sports communities to create a strong foundation for long-term success. Olympiatoppen is responsible for identifying and defining the “Gold Standards” across all areas of preparation and training, ensuring that this knowledge is effectively shared with each sport federation. They also play a key role in establishing a common “language” and shared understanding of key training principles (e.g., definition of intensity zones).

3. A shared, holistic training philosophy
   The Norwegian sports model emphasizes a holistic athlete development, focusing on social, mental, and physical aspects. However, there is also a shared understanding of what it takes to train towards world-class performance within and across sports, and shared tools such as intensity scales, terminology and test systems.

4. The (Norwegian) team model
   Most Norwegian athletes train together in teams and clubs, reinforcing the belief that collective strength leads to greater individual success. Cooperation and knowledge-sharing among teammates, even in individual sports, creates a supportive environment that drives excellence.

5. Collaboration across sports
   Norway promotes knowledge-sharing across different sports through joint research and development projects. This interdisciplinary approach ensures continuous enhancement of training methods, innovation, and fosters team-building, benefitting athletes across various disciplines.

6. Education and development of coaches
   Norway invests in the education of coaches through universities and colleges. This includes embracing the combination of academic and best-practice experiences, ensuring that coaches are well-equipped to support athletes' development in a structured and effective way.

7. Balancing sports and education
   Young athletes are encouraged to combine their sporting careers with education, ensuring long-term career opportunities beyond sports. Norway’s sports-focused high schools and flexible university programs allow athletes to build their careers in parallel without having to sacrifice their athletic ambitions.

Accordingly, Norwegian sports are built on a foundation of inclusivity, long-term development, and collaboration, ensuring that athletes thrive both on and off the field. At the grassroots level, broad participation ensures that all children and young athletes have access to sports, regardless of ability. This inclusive approach, supported by community engagement and volunteerism, creates a strong social foundation for lifelong participation in sports and paves the way for future elite athletes. Furthermore, Norway’s focus on long-term athlete development ensures that training is structured around gradual progression rather than immediate results…. and the effectiveness of this model is evident again in Norway’s performance at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, just like it was last year at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Trondheim.

At MYRA Center for Athlete Development, we embrace the same philosophy that has driven Norway’s sporting success. Our approach prioritizes the overall well-being of athletes, integrating physical, mental, emotional, and social growth into their training. By fostering environments that support personal development, education, and long-term sustainability, we help athletes and sports organizations achieve lasting success beyond competition.

By following these principles, Norway has created a blueprint for sustained excellence in sports. MYRA continues to build on this foundation, empowering athletes to reach their full potential both on and off the field.

Recently, our co-founder Dr. Øyvind Sandbakk joined The Real Science of Sport Podcast to discuss a recurring debate in high-performance sport: what laboratory testing can tell us – and what it cannot.

A central theme was the challenge of measuring performance in sports like cross-country skiing. Unlike cycling, where power output can be assessed with high precision, skiing performance is much more context-dependent. Terrain, snow conditions, equipment, and technique all interact to shape how power is produced and translated into speed.

A skier’s power profile differs between flat and uphill terrain, and between hard-packed and soft snow. Athletes with smooth, finely regulated force application may excel in one environment, while those with more aggressive push-offs may perform better in another. This variability makes it difficult to define “universal performance” through standardized tests alone.

This highlights the limitations of lab-based talent identification.

Øyvind emphasized caution when using laboratory data to judge future potential, especially in young athletes. While a certain level of aerobic capacity is necessary, lab values alone rarely tell the full story. Technical proficiency, adaptability, pacing, and tactical intelligence can compensate for, or even outweigh, physiological differences measured in the lab.

He pointed to Johannes Klæbo as a clear example. Klæbo is not uniquely exceptional in laboratory testing, yet on snow he is extraordinary. His balance, ability to read terrain, efficiency through turns, and capacity to accelerate make him an “artist on skis” – qualities that are impossible to capture in a lab setting. Judged only on lab results as a teenager, his future success would have been impossible to predict.

This is why Øyvind advocates using lab testing primarily to track individual progression. Repeated testing in the same lab, with consistent protocols, helps answer a simple but important question: Am I moving in the right direction? It is far less useful for answering: Who is better than whom?

Perhaps the clearest reminder comes from Klæbo’s early years. At 14, he was not even among the top 100 skiers in Norway. In many systems, that would have ended the story. Instead, he was given time – and time changed everything.

For us, this conversation reinforces a central principle: development is rarely linear, and potential is not easily captured by early metrics. Lab testing has real value when used thoughtfully, namely as part of a broader, long-term understanding of performance and development.

You can listen to the full episode of The Real Science of Sport Podcast here:

That’s why we’re sharing this piece again: to affirm that thoughtful systems, built on timeless principles, remain essential tools in the pursuit of successful, fulfilling and sustainable development.

An article written by Sophie Herzog, Øyvind Sandbakk, Trond Nystad and Rune Talsnes

Training theory and the underlying scientific principles can sometimes seem a little overwhelming. With so many options (training programs, training platforms, “smart” gadgets, AI-guided assistants etc.), it’s challenging to separate the wheat from the chaff. Even more concerning, the sheer volume of information can often lead to “analysis paralysis,” making it harder to take good decisions. Therefore, we should remember Albert Einstein’s wise words:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

This is especially true for coaches who want to design and implement the best possible systems and training plans for athletes who want to fulfil their potential. Coaches need to have a clear training philosophy and communicate it concisely so that athletes can easily follow and implement it.

Although long-term development and sustainable success in sport are dependent on a very complex combination of physiology, psychology, nutrition, and other factors, we always need to understand the basics first before we can move on to the details. Training is a little like preparing a steak – there is no need to focus on the spices if you do not have a quality steak to start with.

This article will focus on introducing basic training principles that should later enable you to plan and execute training in the best possible way.

There are many training principles which one should be aware of to ensure optimal development. Note, however, that the importance of each principle varies with (biological) age, training years, experience, physical and mental state, fitness, health, goals, and the sport(s) the athlete is participating in. Here, we provide a short overview of common main principles:

These principles provide building blocks to structure an effective training program and ensure that training is safe, challenging (enough), fun and effective. Optimal development requires attention to all of these principles. In this article, however, we will focus on the two principles that we believe are the most important to avoid underperformance or burnout.

Continuity

Continuity in training is perhaps the most overlooked, and at the same time, the most important principle to safeguard. The importance of “continuity” is intuitive to understand, but unfortunately very hard to implement. Continuity requires a systematic approach to training and life, to ensure that the athlete can train well over a long period of time without having to take any breaks due to injuries, mental burnout, sickness, or other disruptive factors. Consistent and high-quality training without any breaks leads to a positive athlete development as the load (of training and life in general) is balanced, or in other words, “just right”. The athlete should not be training too much (negating injuries, being overly tired or “sick of training”), but the stimulus of training should be large enough to facilitate positive adaptations. To ensure continuity, one must be flexible and not be afraid to adapt the training plan to changing circumstances. This “sweet spot”, i.e., the balance between training load and recovery, is dependent on training years, health, life situation, environment, nutrition, mental state, sleep, and a wealth of other factors.

So how do we ensure continuity? Why are the best athletes in the world able to perform on a high level over long periods of time? The key is that they have found this dynamic “sweet spot”. In other words, they know what is required to train ”just right” and they have the resources to be a “24-hour athlete” (i.e., to focus on improving training quality, recovery, nutrition/hydration etc.) without losing balance in life. In addition, they have great body awareness and intuition, enabling them to take more correct decisions. This “skill” is of utmost importance to avoid mistakes in daily training and preparation, which would disrupt continuity. Athletes, coaches and teams are responsible to develop a culture and set of values that enable the best possible development. Toughness is often seen as a prerequisite for athletic success, but toughness, without a fine feeling for doing what is right, can jeopardize training. Who hasn’t heard the glorious and heroic slogans such as:

“No pain no gain” / ”The more the merrier” / ”Tough as nails” / ”Blood, sweat and tears” / ”A balance on a knifes edge”.

But now compare this to:

“Passion for training” / “Listen to your body” / “Long term development” / “Body and mind balance” / “Fun and rewarding”.

Which approach seems more sustainable? Which one allows long-term development? What sounds more fun?

Experienced and successful coaches and athletes know that development takes time!

Although popular literature is full of programs promising to get you ready for a “big event” in 6 weeks or less, good coaches and athletes know that development is a process which takes several years. The “10 000 hours” rule[i], might not be entirely accurate, but it is closer to reality than the 6-week plans. To reach your potential and ensure development you must train with continuity for a long period of time and avoid making mistakes which force you to take longer breaks. And it may come as no surprise that passion and fun must also be present in order to stay motivated for this process long enough and to be successful.

To get good in anything, you must devote a considerable amount of time and effort to training and preparation. It cannot be a mindless process where you are beating yourself up every day and in every session. Training volume and quality are necessary components to develop, but more importantly you must listen to your body and make correct training decisions every day. A famous skier once said: “If you have doubts whether you should train, then you should not have any doubts” – in other words, if you feel a little sick and/or tired and doubt whether training hard or racing is the right decision, then you already know that you should not race or train hard. Take a day off or reduce the intensity of the session to secure continuity in the training – increase the margin of safety. Taking more correct decisions ensures better continuity in your training, whereas poor decision-making leads to interruptions and increases the risk of UUPS.

Variation/Periodization:

Training periodization includes a sub-division of the training program into sequential, focused training periods designed to prepare athletes for peak performance during prioritized time frames[ii]. Periodization lays the foundation for the subsequent programming, where training load variables become concretized. The typical key periods of periodization are:

• Macrocycle: The long-term plan, typically a year or more.

• Mesocycle: Intermediate phases, weeks to months.

• Microcycle: Short-term plans, days to weeks.

It is not so important what we call the different periods. The important concept to understand is that you need to periodize the training to match your training state, goals, life demands etc. and to meet the demands of your sport(s). Most coaches and athletes divide the training planning/season into different phases which have different development goals and focuses. The most common ones are the preparatory phase (pre competition season), competition season and a transition period (post competition season). The idea behind periodization is to organize the training focus in a way that stress/load and recovery/adaptation are optimally modulated to facilitate continuous development (progressive overload). Many of you may be familiar with the concept of “supercompensation”. Basically, training makes the body tired (in the short term), but with enough time to recover/adaptation, the performance improves.

Examples of periodization:

• Build in more volume and intensity as the athlete gets older, is more experienced, and more resilient.

• Start with less training in the preparatory phase and then increase volume when the athlete tolerates and has adapted to the lower load.

• Start with less and lighter intensity in the preparatory phase and then increase volume and intensity of the harder sessions when the athlete is ready for it.

• Start with less specific training and then increase specificity closer to the competition season.

• Organize the training in easy, medium and hard training weeks.

• Organize training within a week in harder and easier days.

• Train more in the preparatory phase and less in the competition phase.

Periodization is a multi-faceted and complex process, involving the application of other training principles (e.g., overload, specificity, progression, variation, individualization), and the examples given above, with a gradual change in focus from period to period, align with the so-called “traditional periodization” model. A possible limitation associated with traditional periodization is the focus on the simultaneous development of many underlying fitness components, which can sometimes cause conflicting physiological responses (i.e., interference effects). This can be avoided by prioritizing some areas of development over others in a given time period. An extreme variant of this is the so-called “block periodization”, which involves the planning of successive specialized mesocycle-blocks, where highly concentrated training workloads are focused on a minimal number of performance determinants/skills. Two examples of this are high-intensity (HIT) blocks with many intervals over short timer periods or strength-blocks with many subsequent strength sessions. This has the advantage that performance-limiting factors can be extensively targeted and developed over a given time-period, but its use can also lead to monotony (lack of variation) and thus staleness of the athlete. The block periodization can also be used to prepare for or use environmental factors (i.e., heat, cold, and altitude) to improve performance. Overall, we believe that a pragmatic approach to periodization is most effective, with a general use of traditional periodization. However, a well thought-through and purposeful implementation of specific blocks of concentrated stimuli (e.g., altitude training, heat exposure, periods with high density of competitions, etc.) can be beneficial in periods where this fits into the training plan.

To summarize, organizing the training in easier and harder periods (sessions, days, weeks, months, and years) increases the chances of achieving training continuity and allows the body to adapt to the training. If done correctly this will inevitably lead to performance improvements. As the saying goes, “failing to plan, is planning to fail”, and if training is not organized correctly, it can lead to underperformance. Another word of wisdom is that the biggest mistake is to have no plan, the second biggest mistake is to blindly follow the plan. Make sure to plan and then adjust the plan according to how you respond to the training and your daily physical and mental state.

Training systems evolve through practice, reflection, and purposeful iteration.
We invite you to revisit your own training frameworks with curiosity. Explore where continuity and principled structure can deepen learning, and reach out to us if you need support in making your training system more sustainable long-term.

References

[i] Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

[ii] Kiely J. Periodization Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth. Sports Med. 2018 Apr;48(4):753-764. doi: 10.1007/s40279-017-0823-y. PMID: 29189930; PMCID: PMC5856877.