The High Performance Human

Be Battle Ready Yes, the Pros Train 30 Hours a Week. Here Is Why That Is Irrelevant to You. Last week I wrote about recovery-centred training and why how much you can recover from matters more than how much you train. Not everyone was convinced. Good. The pushback told me people were actually thinking about it, which is exactly what I want. Listen to the full conversation HERE: Recovery centred training. Your questions answered. Here are the eight most common objections, answered as plainly...

Nobody ever asks whether the event they have chosen requires more training than their body can recover from. I know this because in thirty-five years of coaching, not one athlete has ever put that question to me. What they ask instead is whether they should squeeze in another long ride, whether they can increase weekly volume, whether they are doing enough. The question of recovery comes last, if it comes at all. This is precisely the wrong way round. Training breaks you down. Recovery builds...

Sue Reynolds did not start training until she was 60. By 70 she was a world aqua bike champion, working with an Olympic-level coach, and training twice a day. She came out of the swim at a world championship with a three-minute lead on the entire field. Then she was diagnosed with overtraining syndrome, and the world stopped. We chatted about this in our recent podcast. Sue's story is in her new book, Across the Line. But the lessons it contains are not really about Sue. They are about a...

A few months ago I wrote a LinkedIn post about my decision to start taking statins. I had resisted for several years after being told I had a high coronary artery calcium score, and what changed my mind was straightforward: a handful of people I knew well, fit and healthy-looking triathletes with no obvious warning signs, had heart attacks. One of them died. That was enough. The post prompted Katherine Caris-Harris to get in touch. She is a performance nutritionist who works largely with...

Phil Burt has fitted some of the greatest cyclists in history. Tour de France winners, Olympic gold medallists, world record holders. Three weeks before Bradley Wiggins' hour record attempt, Phil dropped his crank length significantly and removed 30 millimetres from the front end of the bike. That is the level of detail that separates performance from potential at the highest level. But when I asked Phil recently what gives him the most satisfaction in his work, it was not the elite results...