80/20 Endurance Blog
Are Your Muscles Shrinking and Getting Tighter? Good! (If you’re a runner)
Recently one of the athletes I coach (we’ll call him Scott) came to me with some concerns about the results of his latest DEXA scan and weigh-in. Although he had lost both overall weight and body fat, he had also lost some muscle mass, and the body-fat percentage in his arms had increased slightly. Scott […]
Introducing the 80/20 Workout Library
Unless you’ve been hermetically siloed within the endurance space for as long as you’ve been exercising, you’ve probably heard of muscle confusion. Popular in the vanity-oriented fitness realm, muscle confusion is the idea that muscles undergo the greatest adaptation to training when they are subjected to constantly changing stimuli, and the corresponding practice of mixing […]
Hyperindividualism – Should You Train Your DNA or Train for Your Event?
We live in a highly individualistic society, a situation that has both pluses and minuses. On the plus side, our children tend to grow up with a sense of freedom to choose their own path in life. On the minus side, a growing percentage of us are burdened by feelings of loneliness and isolation that […]
Seiler’s Hierarchy of Endurance Training Needs
If I could clone myself a few times for the sake of taking different paths in life, I would definitely dedicate one of my clones to the pursuit of sports science. This being impossible with current technology, I choose instead to live vicariously through the individual sports scientists who are tackling the questions I would […]
Understanding the Difference Between Rest and Recovery
Recently I received an email message from an athlete who is following one of my online training plans. In it, he asked, “Why do you only have one day off every three weeks?” Although I did not ask the athlete why he asked this question, my assumption was that he was accustomed to training plans […]
Heart Rate Training is Dead, Long Live Heart Rate Training!
I remember my first heart rate monitor. A Polar S720i. It used infrared to download data. Infrared! The first time I wore it, it felt like magic. The device was a key to unlock secrets about my body I could have never observed before. I wore it when I exercised, I wore it all day, […]
Why You Shouldn’t Choose a Training Plan Based on a Time Goal
If you’re like many other endurance athletes, you have probably followed a readymade training plan at one time or another. Perhaps you found it in a book, or maybe you purchased it online from a website such as Final Surge or TrainingPeaks. If so, then you know that readymade plans are generally classified by race […]
Did You Get Enough to Eat?
Eating too much is a widespread problem in America. That’s why more than 70 percent of men and women over the age of 20 are overweight or obese. And while there are plenty of clowns running around blaming individual nutrients or food types for these numbers, the simple fact is that overweight and obesity are […]
