Training science, coaching, and the 80/20 method — from Matt Fitzgerald and the 80/20 Endurance coaching team.
A while back I wrote a piece titled, “If It’s Not Hard, It’s Not Hard Enough.” In it, I addressed the irony that people become endurance athletes because they want to do something hard, but many of them freak out when they discover that achieving their goals is harder than expected. In essence, they want…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
I learned recently that only 9 percent of triathletes have a coach. This struck me as a very small number—until I learned that just 5 percent of runners have a coach. Now, I’m no mathematician, but I think this means that 91 percent of triathletes and 95 percent of runners are self-coached. Or does it?…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
Everything changed when the stethoscope was invented. Credit Rene Laennec, the 18th-Century French physician and flautist who invented this revolutionary device. Laennec liked to carve his own flutes out of wood, and it was these musical instruments that gave him the inspiration for the medical instrument that has become a symbol of the entire medical…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
In my late teens and early twenties I was a meathead, visiting the gym several times a week to toss around heavy things. At some point during this period I developed a hypothesis that there are both relative and absolute components to how weightlifters perceive resistance. Suppose you are able to bench press 200 pounds,…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
“Believe in your system, and then sell it to your players.” —Billy Donovan I love the above quote from basketball coach Billy Donovan. Like Donovan, I believe that athletes perform better when they understand and believe in their system of preparation. The very same system will yield very different results depending on whether it is…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
The short version. I have never listened to Andrew Huberman’s podcast and I do not intend to, not because of anything about him personally but because the whole project of biohacking, even a respectable version of it, is evidence-based snake oil. It reduces a healthy life to a list of optimizations and steers people away…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
At a recent Endeavorun retreat in San Diego, Jake Tuber and I made a list of key traits of effective coaches. This was not an arbitrary exercise. Jake and I are in the early stages of collaborating on a book about coaching, and we’re trying to nail down our shared beliefs and convictions about the…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
It’s no secret that a lot of the recovery modalities used by endurance athletes are basically bullshit. But are they all bullshit? Not according to a new study on myofascial release (aka foam rolling) in cyclists. The study was conducted by Korean researchers and involved twenty-two cyclists with iliotibial band friction syndrome as subjects. Half…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
The last time I tried to run it did not go well. It was May 2021, four months after I stopped running in the hope that doing so would heal me from long covid. Alas, my symptoms showed no improvement in that time, but neither did they worsen, so I decided to try to ease…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
Every time a television advertisement talks about “making life easier”—and there are many, many such advs—I feel a pitch of annoyance. Of course, I understand why the phrase is used so liberally in messages intended to make people buy things. Commercial products and services often do make certain parts of life (fixing dinner, getting stains…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
