Strength Elite

The people who trim every bit of fat off their chicken and call it “clean eating”?

They’re usually the same people who are always tired, always hungry, and wondering why their energy or their cycle is a mess.

That’s not a coincidence. Fat is not the enemy.

Save this!

Race day is done. Before you sign up for the next one, take fifteen minutes and actually assess it properly.
What worked.

Write it down honestly, not just “the race went well.” Was your pacing controlled early and honest late, or did adrenaline take you out too hard and the second half made you pay for it. Did your long runs actually prepare you for the specific demands of the day.

What needs work. Most recreational runners carry the same weak links. Hips and glutes that fatigue and let your stride collapse late. Calves and tendons that weren’t conditioned for the repeated loading of 42 kilometres. Hamstrings that never got strong enough to hold your form together when you were tired.

If your legs gave out well before your lungs did, the fix is strength work, not more kilometres.

Pacing deserves its own line. Blowing up after 30 kilometres usually means the strategy was built on feel instead of your actual numbers on the day.

What to start now. Recovery comes first, you’re not there yet. But once you’re back running, this is the work for the next block. Strength train the hips, calves and hamstrings that let you down. Build your paces off real data. That turns the next race into an improvement, not a repeat.

This isn’t an attack on assessment. It’s a problem with selling a screen or a running analysis as a diagnosis of who gets hurt, when the research doesn’t back that up.

There are legitimate, narrow uses.

Return to play after an actual injury, where you need a real baseline to track against. High mileage or elite athletes with a genuinely fine margin, where the extra data earns its cost. Those are edge cases, not the rule.

If someone tells you a screen is a prerequisite to train, ask them for the study showing a score reliably predicts injury.

There isn’t one.

Instead of spending the money on a test that lets almost anyone say almost anything with a straight face, grab the low hanging fruit.

Strength train.

Program the movements that actually match your sport. Get proper programming right.

Then watch what happens.

Self sabotage in training isn’t bad luck. It’s self handicapping, a pattern psychologists have studied for decades.

It works like this. You create a reason to fail before you even attempt the thing, so if it goes wrong you’ve already got an excuse ready. Sick. Injured. Too busy. Something that happened to you, not something you did.

Research on athletes backs this up directly. Illness and injury are the two most commonly cited excuses, because they read as circumstance instead of a decision.

The three nights out before race day. The dropped sessions. The ego rep on an easy week that blows out a joint. None of that is misfortune.

It’s the excuse getting built in advance, and it protects your ego at the exact moment it costs you the result.

Notice it before it happens and you get to choose differently.

Follow the plan, own the outcome, and find out what you’re actually capable of.

What are “metcons” ?

Most people track recovery with one signal. Soreness.
It’s the least reliable one you have.

Local fatigue, the stuff sitting in the muscle you just trained, clears fast. Usually a few days, sometimes less. Systemic fatigue runs on a different clock entirely. Nervous system, hormones, immune function, and none of it cares how your legs feel that morning.

A marathon makes the gap obvious. Muscle damage markers like creatine kinase stay elevated five to ten days. Force output, how hard you can actually push, can sit five to fifteen percent below baseline for four to seven days. Your legs might feel completely normal by day four.

That gap between how you feel and where your system actually is is exactly what gets people back into hard training too soon.

Same principle, smaller scale. A heavy lifting session clears locally in one to three days. A long run leans harder on your hormonal and immune systems than an equivalent lift does, even when the soreness is milder.

A training block needs a deload before the fatigue ever shows up as soreness, because by the time it does, you’re already behind on it.

What actually tells you the truth: resting heart rate, HRV, sleep quality, mood. When two or more of those start drifting the wrong way at the same time, that’s your system talking, usually days before your legs will.

Program around the system that takes longest to come back. That’s the one that actually decides when you’re ready again.

Know your population ✅

A few extra notes on training after the flu, since it didn’t all fit on the slides 👇

The neck check isn’t perfect, a couple of viruses can look mild (just upper symptoms) but still mess with your heart.

If something feels off beyond a normal cold, don’t just tick the checklist, get it checked.

Also the “24-48h fever-free” rule only counts if you’re off meds.

Each stage is gated by how you respond, not the calendar, if a stage doesn’t feel clean, repeat it. And the sicker you were, the more you should stretch this out, not rush it because you’re bored of resting.

Last thing, watch your load on the way back in. Jumping straight back to your old volume after a week+ off is its own injury risk, separate from the flu. 

Ease in like you would after any break.

How your immune system works.