The Ascent Journal

80/20 training is a staple in endurance training circles. The risk is, with all of the focus on optimized methods, that we forget how to adapt in a way that preserves good fundamentals when our situation doesn’t allow for “optimal.” A recent study by researchers in Italy set out to test how essential 80/20 training really is to making progress. Their results will probably surprise you.

"One thing I've always been able to do is find pleasure in discomfort. Again, that sounds like I'm trying to be a tough guy, but I think fun trumps tough... every time, especially in a race like this. So if I say to myself, you're a tough guy, push through it, push through it, it's not gonna work for me. This race is the pinnacle of ultra marathon. I'm so lucky to be doing stuff like this. Look at the scenery, look at the people you're meeting, look at the texts and calls flo

Apple Inc. made headlines last week with the announcement several new products that will be forthcoming, including the Apple Watch Series 12. Among the bold claims backing the new Apple Watch, Apple notes that the Series 12 offers “the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable.” They even included a link to a new company white paper to substantiate their claim. I read the study, and there are a few details to keep in mind when we evaluate how true Apple's superlative cla

Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run is the penultimate one hundred mile trail running race in the United States. For non-elites, the WSER lottery can consume athletes’ hopes for close to a decade before their name is drawn. Once the hurdle of entry is cleared, suddenly runners are left with the burning question: “How am I going to finish this thing?” A new analysis examines more than 15 years of finisher data to help us understand how it’s done.

Running shoe research is a black box to some degree. Researchers put the shoe on a runner’s foot and have them run. Then, we measure some things while they run. In one sense, you can still argue that the results of this kind of research is useful and well controlled. Through a different lens, by changing the shoe, we’ve changed several things at once. A recent paper proposes one way to think more clearly about what might be going on inside the black box.

The evidence has been compounding for decades, and it hasn’t slowed down. Muscles matter. Human muscle mass has been shown to play a massive role not just in strength in the gym, but in healthy aging, prediction of lifespan, and regulation of key features of metabolism, like blood sugar. A new study in Nature offers greater clarity as to whether or not the New Year’s resolution we made in January, to do more strength training, will still have done us any good by the time we m

The recent work of Tizian Scharl and his team help clarify how running shoes affect female running form. Their 2024 paper is a one-hundred-and-seventeen page clinic on the form changes running shoes cause for female runners.

The implicit assumption is that all of those mitochondria are created equal. That’s where a new paper by Mikael Flockhart and colleagues at the Swedish School of Sports and Health Science in Stockholm picks up. If not all mitochondria are the same, then what exactly do the bad ones look like, and how do we avoid them?

Super shoes have taken over elite road and tracking running in the decade since they first emerged with Nike’s invention of the Vaporfly 4%. One category of runner that hasn’t gotten the same boost that everyone else got when super shoes appeared: trail runners. Research on trail running can be hard to do. Simulating rock and switchbacks on a treadmill in a laboratory poses some readily apparent challenges. Two recent studies provide some answers though.

Is your training app running the show? “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” -George Box It used to be that we decided for ourselves how we were doing. I still remember my old manual training log where I’d enter my mileage for the day and a quick thought about how it went. But the roles have reversed. If training apps and sports watches are the new training logs, then it seems more like the training log is telling us how we’re doing instead. There’s a common favorite way t

Early in my coaching career, I came across this idea that has sort of lurked in the shadows of the coaching world for decades: while science is humming along providing rigorous data on what will move the needle on an athlete’s performance, coaches are the innovators. The narrative goes “Science will likely take 10-20 more years to explain why the practices coaches are using today are effective.” The first 2 months of my masters work involved recalibrating my understanding of

If you’ve run long enough, you already know this: your feet at mile 5 are not the same feet at mile 45. After a series of races that absolutely trashed my feet, I decided to dig into what's actually happening during long efforts. How do blisters really form? Why does a shoe that feels fine in training fall apart on race day? What actually matters when picking the right fit?