Seiler tracked the training of elite athletes across a variety of endurance sports including running, skiing, swimming, and cycling. He found that, irrespective of sport or nationality, their training followed roughly the same distribution. The best athletes in the world weren’t adhering to a “no pain, no gain” model, nor were they doing fitness-magazine popularized high-intensity interval training (HIIT) or random “workouts of the day.” Rather, they were systematically alternating between bouts of very intense work and periods of easy training and recovery, even if that meant walking up
...more
