WDM Coaching

A warm-up is usually treated as preparation. Get warm, move through the routine and begin the session. But before a quality session, it can also provide the first useful information of the day.

Easy movement gives your breathing and movement time to settle. Steady work begins to show how the effort is building. A few short session-specific exposures give you a chance to check the planned pace, load or movement without committing to the full set.

That doesn’t mean changing the session because the first few minutes feel flat. It means noticing when the response clearly doesn’t match the purpose.

If the target already feels forced, movement quality is changing or the effort is much higher than expected, adjust the pace, load or volume before the first working rep rather than waiting for the session to unravel.

The programme gives you the starting point. The warm-up helps you confirm how to execute it today.

Easy runs are not slow races.

The purpose isn’t to see how fast you can move while still calling the session easy. It’s to add aerobic work at a cost low enough to preserve the rest of the week.

Your normal easy pace can feel comfortable on one day and become too expensive on another. Terrain, conditions and accumulated fatigue all change the demand. The number on the watch might be familiar, but the session is no longer producing the same cost.

That’s why the pace has to move. Keep the effort around RPE 3–5 and conversational. If you can’t speak comfortably, slow down, choose flatter ground or switch to low-impact aerobic work.

An easy day doesn’t need to look impressive in the training data. It needs to build the aerobic system and leave enough available for the next quality session.

Protect the purpose, not the pace.

Rest is often treated as the empty space between the work.

Athletes cut it short because they feel ready, want to finish sooner or think starting early makes the session tougher. It does, but it also changes the session.

Recovery determines how much fatigue carries into the next repetition. That affects the output you can reproduce, the movement quality you can maintain and the demand created across the set.

Fuller recovery can protect high-quality output. Shorter recovery can deliberately train repeatability under fatigue. Neither approach is automatically better. They serve different purposes.

If pace, load, reps and recovery are prescribed, they belong to the same session. Change one and you may change what the session is training.

Another strong week (and a bit) of racing across HYROX, fitness racing and running.

Podiums, PBs and debuts. Good athletes doing the consistent work that keeps things moving forward.

A deload shouldn’t be an emergency response to a programme that has already fallen apart. It should be a planned reduction in training stress that gives the athlete room to absorb the work before beginning the next phase.

Productive training creates fatigue. That doesn’t automatically mean something is wrong, but it can temporarily hide the fitness being developed underneath it. Pace may feel harder, outputs can become less repeatable and normal sessions may require more effort even while the athlete is still adapting.

One poor session doesn’t prove that a deload is needed. The concern is a developing pattern in which quality sessions become less consistent, soreness persists, warm-ups feel unusually demanding and technique begins to deteriorate earlier than expected. Waiting for performance to completely collapse means the reduction has probably arrived too late.

A deload doesn’t have to remove every useful training stimulus. Total volume, session density and station accumulation can be reduced while familiar movements, technical rhythm and small doses of quality remain. The aim is to lower the overall recovery cost without disconnecting the athlete from training.

This is also different from a taper. A taper prepares the athlete to express performance at a particular event. A deload creates room to recover, adapt and continue progressing through the programme.

Train, accumulate, reduce, absorb and progress again. Don’t wait until training stops working before you make room to absorb it.

Threshold training is often prescribed as though there is one correct pace that should apply to every session. The problem is that the same pace can create a very different internal cost depending on the length of the reps, the recovery between them, accumulated fatigue, modality and conditions.

Pace tells you what you are producing, but it doesn’t tell you everything required to produce it. A pace that feels controlled during shorter intervals may become too aggressive when the reps are extended. Equally, defending a target pace on a hot day or when fatigue is already elevated can turn a threshold session into something much harder than intended.

Heart rate provides useful information about how the body is responding, but it can’t make the whole decision either. It takes time to catch up, can drift as the session develops and is influenced by factors beyond the pace itself.

This is why pace, heart rate and RPE should be interpreted together. Start with an appropriate output, allow the response to develop, then use breathing, movement quality and perceived effort to decide whether the intensity remains controlled. If the internal cost is rising too quickly, adjust before the session becomes a test.

Controlled threshold work should still be demanding, but the final rep shouldn’t require a sprint, a collapse or a survival effort. You should finish knowing you worked at a high sustainable output while retaining control of the session.

Don’t chase a threshold pace. Control the threshold cost.

Testing can feel productive because it gives you a clear score, but the number itself is only the beginning. If the result doesn’t change or confirm what happens next in your training, the test hasn’t done much beyond measuring your performance on one particular day.

A useful test starts with a question. Are you trying to establish a training anchor, identify a probable limitation, evaluate the previous block or decide what deserves greater emphasis next? That purpose determines which test you choose and how you interpret the result.

The score still isn’t a complete diagnosis. A disappointing performance might reflect a physical limitation, but it could also be influenced by poor pacing, inefficient technique, accumulated fatigue or unfamiliarity with the test. That’s why the result needs to be considered alongside how the effort was executed, the athlete’s preparation and the wider training profile.

Several relevant tests can then help build a clearer picture of the athlete. The goal isn’t to create a leaderboard or declare one quality good or bad from a single number. It’s to understand what the available evidence suggests and make a better programming decision from it.

Retesting should then evaluate whether that decision worked. When the same test is repeated under similar conditions after enough time has been allowed for adaptation, the comparison can show whether the targeted quality, pacing or ex*****on has actually improved.

Test to learn something. Interpret the result in context. Then use it to decide what you should develop next.

Racing to prove yourself can sound like ambition, but it often pulls attention away from the decisions that actually produce a good performance.

This was one of the clearest lessons from our conversation with Linda Meier. Her most successful racing came when she focused on herself, the next station and the movement improvements she had practised in training. When the race became more about proving that she was still good enough, it became harder to stay connected to the process.

In HYROX, that pressure often appears as a pacing problem. You force the opening run to feel competitive, chase someone else’s pace or attack a station because a split was slower than expected. The result may not have gone wrong yet, but the decisions are already starting to.

A finishing time, podium or qualification target can give the race direction, but it cannot tell you what to do in the current moment. That comes from controllable actions: your pace, breathing, station rhythm, break strategy and movement standards.

You also don’t have to solve the entire race at once. Run the kilometre you are in. Enter the next station under control. Find the rhythm you practised. If something goes wrong, reset your breathing, return to the plan and make the next sensible decision.

Care about the result, but focus on the ex*****on. Race to express what you have built, not to prove that you deserve it.

One of the strongest points from our conversation with Linda 🇩🇪 was how a breakthrough performance can change the way every result that follows is judged. What once felt like an achievement can quietly become the minimum standard you feel required to repeat.

A PB is genuine evidence of what you can produce when your fitness, preparation, ex*****on and race-day circumstances come together. It raises the ceiling of what you know is possible, but it does not guarantee that the same level will appear every time you race.

When the PB becomes the only acceptable result, the review turns into a simple pass or fail. Match it and the race was good. Miss it and everything is treated as a disappointment. That can cause you to overlook better pacing, improved station control, stronger decision-making or a performance that accurately exposed what needs to improve next.

The clock matters, but it cannot explain the whole race. Review the result honestly, then ask how well you expressed the fitness you brought into it, which decisions helped, where the race became more expensive and what the performance taught you about the next training block.

Respect your best day and keep chasing progress. Just don’t turn your greatest performance into the only result you are allowed to value.

Your PB shows what is possible. It doesn’t define what counts as success.

Strength in HYROX is not valuable only because it might improve a station split or add weight to a gym lift. It matters when it changes how much the race costs.

The external task may be the same, but the internal demand can be completely different. For one athlete, the sled sits close to their physical limit. Every step becomes expensive, posture becomes harder to maintain and the following run begins with significant local fatigue. Another athlete may face the same load with more strength in reserve, allowing them to apply force consistently and return to running rhythm sooner.

Both athletes completed the station. They did not pay the same price for it.

This is why strength capacity should be judged by more than gym numbers. It should make the stations more affordable, help preserve movement under fatigue and protect the running fitness you have already built.

Strength work also has to fit within the wider programme. If it creates so much fatigue that running quality, threshold development or recovery begins to suffer, it is competing with the qualities it should support.

The goal is not simply to become stronger. It is to become harder for the race to disrupt.

Strength should serve the race.