Runners: stop doing just one type of calf raise.
Your calf isn’t one muscle. It’s two, and they do different jobs. The Gastroc drives power and push-off. It’s what you feel when you sprint or attack a hill. It crosses the knee, so you train it with a straight leg.
The Soleus handles endurance. It keeps you upright km after km. It doesn’t cross the knee, so you bias it with a bent knee.
Train both or your Achilles, plantar, and shins will be doing more work than they want to, meaning you're leaving performance on the table and inviting unwanted aches and pains.
I program all 4 types for my online runners depending on race goals and injury history. Bent knee vs straight knee. Fast vs slow. Heavy vs endurance. Context matters.
How to implement: Sample week
- Mon: Seated - heavy + slow 3x8-10 after easy run - Targets soleus. Think strength. Control down, drive up.
- Wed: Bent-knee - springy 2x10-12 after speed work - Still soleus, but now we teach stiffness = Quick ground contact.
- Fri: Standing - single leg 3x12-15 on strength day - Hits gastroc. Full range. Control the lowering. This is your push-off muscle.
- Sun: Seated - Eccentric Tempo - endurance 3x15-20 after long run Soleus again. 2s hold at the top, 3 sec down. Builds tissue capacity so it doesn’t fail at km 30.
If you do all four, you build a calf that can sprint, endure, and stay healthy.
Which one are you skipping? Fix that this week.
Save this and tag a runner with trash calves.
Meraki Performance
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Daniel Lucchini - Bachelor of Exercise and Sports Science - Masters of Exercise Science Student - Australian Strength and Conditioning Accredited Coach
Meraki is a term used to describe what happens when you put so much effort and care into what you do that you leave apart of yourself in it. I have developed a passion for athletic development that constitutes the idea of Meraki and I want to be able to spread what I have learnt through my study and through my experience in sports science to help develop athletes performance and take them to the n
08/06/2026
Running Hills I Would Die On: 1/8
Distance is a drug. Skill is the cure.
We treat running distances like a scoreboard. 5k becomes 10k. 10k becomes a half. Then we wonder why our knees hurt, our lungs burn, and running still feels like a fight.
More distance won’t fix bad form. Another long run won’t fix pacing that’s all ego. You can’t outrun breath control you never learned.
The unpopular truth: Most runners are addicted to longer before they’re competent at shorter. Long feels like progress because it’s measurable. You can post it. But it numbs you. It hides the fact that you can’t run 30 minutes easy without gasping. It hides that your cadence is sloppy, your easy days are too hard, and you have no gears.
Skill looks like this: You can run 30 minutes and hold a conversation the whole time.
You can speed up and slow down on command, not by accident.
You can finish a workout and feel like you owned it, not like it owned you.
Own the lap before you worship the marathon. Own your breath before you chase a bib. Volume without skill is just louder suffering.
This take pi**es off beginners and coaches selling their 10 week Marathon training plans.
Good. If it stings, it’s probably for you.
From "The 8 Hills I’ll Die On": No. 1/8
06/06/2026
Things I've learnt (again) recently: Doing good isn’t a reaction. It’s a direction
Not because the world earned it.
Because you decided who you want to be when nobody’s watching.
We think goodness shows up in the big moments. The crisis. The call at 2am. The viral act of charity. But that’s the exception. The real work is quiet. It’s repetitive. It’s choosing the small thing when the small thing won’t get applause.
It’s letting the car merge. It’s answering the email with patience you don’t feel. It’s noticing the cashier’s name and using it. It’s shutting your mouth when being right would cost someone their dignity.
Kindness isn’t soft. It’s disciplined.
The world trains you to look for threats. For inconvenience. For reasons to harden.
Looking for opportunities to do good is counter training. It rewires your eyes. Suddenly you see the gaps. The door that needs holding. The friend who’s been quiet for three days. The teammate who needs credit, not critique.
You find goodness by planting it. Every time you choose presence over scrolling. Every time you choose generosity over keeping score.
That’s how the good gets instilled in you. Built. Rep by rep.
You don’t do good to earn peace.
You do good and realise peace was the byproduct.
Your days stop feeling like something you’re surviving. Because you’re not just passing through the world. You’re tending to it.
To walk into every room and ask, silently: What does this moment need from me Sometimes it’s action. Sometimes it’s restraint. Sometimes it’s just your full attention.
But you ask. Every day.
Before the inbox. Before the news. Before your own agenda gets to vote.
You stop waiting for life to be good to you. You become the evidence that it already is.
So hunt for it. The chance to be decent. The chance to be early with encouragement. The chance to be the person you needed five years ago.
One day you’ll look up and realise the good life wasn’t something you found. It was something you practiced into existence.
And it started because you decided to face the day like that.
On purpose.
Again.
Today.
A Step By Step Approach to Reaching Goals: Daniel Zappia
Meet Daniel Zappia.
Dan first came to me and the end of his powerlifting chapter of training with hopes of running a marathon. So went through the steps;
1. Discovery call: a chance to find out about his goals, training history, and lifestyle
2. Tailored program: a plan was built to fit within his work and family commitments including all running and strength programming
3. Implementation: Dan then got set on following the program, utilising the ongoing communication to adjust to the dynamic nature of life until he was able to reach his goal and run that marathon
4. To the moon: Once Dan reached this goal he quickly realised his capabilities were far beyond what he thought and the rest is history
Dan's most recent achievement was completing his first Ironman 70.3 with PBs in all disciplines and a whopping 9kg bodyweight lost, all whilst managing a thriving business and ever growing family.
Meraki delivered all his nutrition, strength, swim/bike/run programming to help him knock off this goal and this man isn't done yet!
If you are ready to realise your limitless capabilities, reach out by booking in your discovery call through the link in my bio or simply send me a message and lets start the conversation.
05/06/2026
From a 300kg Deadlift to over 10,000km of Running Per Year
Powerlifting to ultramarathon wasn’t a switch. It was a rebuild.
I thought strength was transferable. It’s not. Not directly.
Your squat is now a liability. Too much mass, too little economy.
Your pain tolerance is miscalibrated. 9/10 for 10 seconds on the platform ≠ 6/10 for 10 hours on trail.
Your watch is about to become your most honest coach. And your harshest.
Nobody tells you that the engine you built for 3 reps explodes at km 5.
That “cardio kills gains” was a lie, but “cardio kills egos” is too far from the truth.
That you’ll have to relearn hunger, pacing, humility, and how to run downhill without your quads filing for divorce.
This wasn’t a pivot. It was demolition and reconstruction.
New tendons. New mindset. New relationship with suffering.
Swipe across to see 9 things I learned the hard way so you don’t have to:
Save this for when your legs feel like deadlifts, your lungs feel like set 5, and you’re wondering why you traded plates for peaks (Plot twist, its worth it).
You didn’t downgrade. You rebuilt.
I didn’t just lose running. I lost the version of me that only knew how to move at full speed. At least for a moment.
The injury drew a line through the middle of my routine, my identity, my plan. For weeks I stared at that line and called it failure. I tried to rehab my way back to the person who existed before it.
Same certainty.
Same illusion that my body was a machine I could out-discipline.
It didn’t work. Because you can’t tape a fracture and pretend the stress never happened.
So I stopped trying to erase it.
I started studying the break instead. Where it hurt. Why it happened. What it was trying to say under all the inflammation and ego. The pause gave me back my hearing. Turns out my body had been whispering for months. I was just too fast to listen.
Now the line is still there. It has to be. It’s the most honest part of me.
And something strange happened when I quit hiding it: the break became a seam. Not a weakness. A place where two parts of my life were stitched together with something stronger than they were alone.
Before and after. Ignorance and attention. Motion and meaning.
I’m not aiming to 'return' to running. Returning implies the goal is to get back to who I was. I’m advancing to running, this timeN as someone who knows what it costs to lose it.
Someone who understands that durability isn’t built by avoiding breaks, but by knowing how to live with the lines they leave. The first few months won’t be about proving the injury didn’t happen. They’ll be about proving it mattered.
This chapter isn’t a comeback. It’s a continuation with depth. The pace might be different. The reason isn’t.
I move now with scars that hold more light than my old PRs ever did. Watch the seams. That’s where the strength is.
03/06/2026
02/06/2026
She's My Both
You’re all in for the wild ideas and the quiet nights.
For the sand-blowing, wind-in-our-hair kind of days riding horses in Morocco
For the slow evenings binge watching a show we both hate but can’t stop watching.
You find wonder in the big leaps as intently as you do with the way light moves across a room in the mid-morning sun
Somehow you teach ordinary hours to feel like they were meant for us.
On the days I misplace my best parts, you find them.
You hand them back to me, patiently, until I can hold them again myself.
You round my rough corners without changing my shape.
You give me more ground to stand on and leave every door open.
Not by force, not by script.
With you, home isn’t an address we arrive at.
It’s a rhythm we fall into. A way of moving through the world that feels like ours.
It’s being heard without being managed.
It’s being held without being held back.
You’re my steady place in a series of endless wild adventures. A constant. A safe place. A surety
My heart doesn’t just reach for you.
It comes home to you. It exhales in you. It’s known in you.
Life with you isn’t about more noise or more speed.
It’s about more depth. More kindness.
More lived-in, worn-soft, fully felt days.
If love is the essence of life, then you are the quiet, certain center of mine.
From Chronic Pain to Making Gains: Phil Ji
After first working together back when he was powerlifting, Phil has continued to be coached by me through a series of endeavours, most recently to develop his power and athleticism for muay thai. As part of that, we have been working to not just rehab a chronic elbow injury, but ensure that in the meantime we are still training hard and maximising all the things he can do.
Too often we let an injury derail us, but it doesnt need to. There is always something we can do, always some way we can develop, and always some progress to made. Phil is the perfect example of that. Despite his injury limitations he is still adhering to a full strength program and cardio program. Utilising tools such as blood flow restriction and some rather creative exercise he's back on the gain train while simultaneously progressing back to full health.
If you're stuck with an injury and need help returning to full health and/or designing a training program that will still give you the gains you want in the meantime, get in contact today and let's see what we can do!
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