Running form is one of those topics where everyone has an opinion and almost nobody agrees. Coaches tell you to run tall. Physios tell you to stop heel striking. Instagram tells you to forefoot strike. Podcasts tell you not to overthink it. The noise is substantial enough that many runners tune it out entirely and decide their form is probably fine.Sometimes it is. Often it is not. And the cost of poor form is not always obvious, because it tends to show up as accumulated inj

Plyometrics is one of those categories that gets treated as a single thing when it is actually several distinct things with meaningfully different mechanisms and outcomes. Box jumps, depth jumps, bounding, pogo hops - these are not interchangeable variations of the same stimulus. They sit at different points on a spectrum defined by ground contact time, and that single variable determines whether you are training explosive power, reactive strength, or something in between.

For trail runners trying to use isometric work deliberately rather than just adding holds to a programme because they sound useful, the distinction between yielding and overcoming isometrics is worth understanding properly.

Tendons do not respond to training the way muscles do, and most runners' strength programmes don't account for this. Muscles adapt readily to a wide range of stimuli - heavy lifting, bodyweight work, plyometrics, even running itself. Tendons are slower, more particular tissue, and the type of loading that builds tendon resilience most effectively is one that almost nobody programmes deliberately: the isometric hold.For mountain runners, whose sport places extreme and repeated

Sports science produces a lot of useful findings, and we cite them regularly. But there is a limitation built into almost every study in the exercise physiology literature that rarely gets acknowledged when the findings get distilled into training advice: the results describe what happened to the average participant across the sample, and you are not the average participant. You are one specific person with a specific training history, specific genetics, specific sleep patter

Most trail runners treat rest after a race or a training block as a binary: either they're training or they're not, and the "not" part is something to get through as quickly as possible before returning to normal and getting back to training.