Matty Abel Running Academy

This is something I see more and more with the athletes I coach.

They wake up feeling good. Then they check their watch. HRV is down. Readiness is in the red. Sleep score is low. And suddenly they don't feel good anymore.

It's called the nocebo effect. Negative information making you feel worse regardless of your actual physical state. Your watch tells your brain you're not recovered. Your brain believes it. Your body follows.

Here's the thing: consumer sleep trackers are only about 60% accurate. HRV is wildly variable day to day. Readiness scores are built on algorithms nobody fully discloses. You're making training decisions based on incomplete, inconsistent data and letting it override the most sophisticated feedback system ever built: your own body.

The best athletes I coach don't check their data before a session. They check it after. They feel the run first. Then they use the data to confirm or question what they felt. That's how data should work. As a tool, not a coach.

Leave your watch at home once a week. Run by feel. Remember what it's like to just run.

Tag the runner who checks their Garmin before deciding how they feel.

Runners... you don't have a shoe problem. You have a foot strength problem.

I see it constantly. Athletes cycling through shoe after shoe trying to fix recurring shin splints, plantar fasciitis, achilles issues. Spending hundreds of dollars on the next "solution."

But the research is clear: despite 40 years of advances in shoe technology, running injury rates haven't changed. No shoe type has been shown to consistently prevent injuries. Because the shoe was never the problem.

Your foot has its own core system. Over 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments that are supposed to absorb shock, stabilise your arch, and control your balance with every stride. Most runners have never trained any of them.

5-10 minutes of barefoot foot strengthening a day. Toe spreads. Short foot exercises. Calf raises. Single leg balance. It's not complicated. It's just ignored.

Stop spending money on shoes to fix a problem your feet can solve themselves.

Tag someone who's on their 4th pair of shoes this year and still injured.

This is one of the biggest gaps I see in runners' programs.

They tell me they're doing strength training. Then I ask what they're doing. Bodyweight squats. Banded clamshells. A few planks. Maybe some light lunges.
That's not strength training. That's muscular endurance work. And runners already have muscular endurance. That's what running gives you.

What running doesn't give you is maximal force production, tendon stiffness, and neuromuscular power. The things that protect your joints, improve your efficiency, and keep you running for decades.

Band work is great for warm-ups, activation, and rehab. It has its place. But it's not the main event.

Research is clear: heavy resistance training (70-85% of your max) improves running economy more than any other form of strength work. A 2024 review in Sports Medicine found loads above 80% 1RM are most effective for trained runners. And you only need two sessions per week.

You don't need to live in the gym. You need to lift heavy when you're there.

Tag the runner who thinks 20 clam shells counts as leg day.

This is the conversation I have with athletes more than almost any other.

"I can't take time off. I'll lose everything I've built."

No, you won't. Research shows your fitness barely moves in the first 7-10 days of rest. And any small losses come back faster than they took to build.

What most runners forget is it's not just the race that your body needs to recover from. It's the entire training block leading into it. 16 weeks for a marathon. 20+ weeks for an ultra. Then the race itself on top of all that accumulated load. Your hormones need time to rebalance. Your bones need time to remodel. Research shows bone formation markers can drop by up to 45% after an ultra and don't return to baseline even 9 days post-race. Your immune system needs time to rebuild. None of that happens if you jump straight into the next block.

The best thing you can do after a race? Go back to basics. Sleep. Eat properly. Walk. Let your body do what it's designed to do when you give it space.

The pros build off-seasons into their year. Not because they're lazy. Because they know that's where long-term development happens. Rest isn't the opposite of progress. It's part of the plan.

If you haven't taken a proper break in the last 12 months, this is your sign.

Send to the runner in your life who needs to hear this before they sign up for another race.

This one may sting a bit.

You're training hard every single session. And it's the reason you're not getting faster.
I see it constantly. Runners who turn every easy day into a tempo effort, every recovery run into a race. They look great on Strava. They feel like they're working hard. But they're accumulating fatigue without ever giving their body the space to adapt.

Research estimates 60% of runners will experience nonfunctional overreaching in their career. That's where you push so hard for so long that your performance goes backwards. Not for a day. For weeks. Sometimes months.

The fix isn't more. It's less. Genuinely easy days. Structured deload weeks. And the hardest skill in running: holding back when your ego says push.

The best runners I coach aren't the ones who smash every session. They're the ones who know when to back off.

Women who run... nobody talks about this enough.

Your menstrual cycle changes your physiology every single week. Strength, energy, recovery, perceived exertion, mood, all of it shifts depending on where you are in your cycle. And if your training plan doesn't account for that, you're fighting a battle you can't win.

This isn't about doing less. It's about doing the right things at the right time. Push when your body can handle it. Pull back when it can't. That's not weakness. That's smart training.

I'm a male coach. And I'm passionate about getting this right for female athletes. Cycle awareness sits at the front of every program I write for women. Because a training plan that ignores 50% of your hormonal reality isn't a good plan.

The bar for male coaches needs to be higher. If your coach isn't having this conversation with you, ask why.

Start tracking. Start noticing. Start training with your biology, not against it.
Share this with every woman who runs.

Swipe >>>>>

Paige Strudwick. Takayna Trail Ultra. 62km through one of the last Gondwanan rainforests on the planet. 11:05:04.

This wasn't just a race. The Takayna Trail Ultra is a fundraiser for the Bob Brown Foundation, raising money to protect the takayna wilderness in northwest Tasmania from logging and mining. Paige ran 62km through the forest she was helping to save.

What makes Paige's story different is who she is off the trail. She's a postdoctoral researcher at UTS studying coral reef resilience. She spends her career protecting one of Earth's most fragile ecosystems and her weekends protecting another.
She trained for this through a Far North Queensland summer. Heat, humidity, flat terrain. About as far from Tasmanian mountain trails as you can get. But she was disciplined, consistent, and trusted the process.

Then she backed it up with UTA100 weeks later. 100km. 16:07:19.

Proud to coach athletes like Paige who run for something bigger than a PB.

Congrats

Women... this one comes up in coaching conversations more than almost anything else.

You're training hard. You're eating well. You're doing everything you're supposed to do. And your body isn't responding.

It's not your metabolism slowing down. It's not ageing. It's cortisol doing exactly what it's designed to do when your body is under more stress than it can handle.

The counterintuitive fix? Train less. Eat more. Sleep more. Let your hormones recalibrate.

I've watched this play out dozens of times with female athletes I coach. The ones who trust the process and pull back always come out the other side feeling and performing better.

Send this to a friend who needs to hear it.

Men... you're not lazy. You're not losing your edge. You're not "getting old."

Your testosterone might be suppressed from chronic training stress and your body is telling you in the only way it knows how.

I see this in male runners constantly. They push through, blame their mindset, and train harder. Which makes it worse.

Get bloods done. Eat properly. Sleep properly. Give your body the raw materials it needs to function.

The best athletes I coach aren't the ones who train the hardest. They're the ones who recover the smartest.

Send this to the runner in your life who's lost their spark.

Cole Winarick. London Marathon. 2:59:40. First time under 3 hours.

This one means a lot. Cole ran Tokyo Marathon on March 1st in 3:06:10. We had 7 weeks to turn it around for London on April 26th. Then a popliteus strain showed up mid-block.

We had to adapt. Couldn't stack the volume I wanted, we peaked at about 85km. So we focused on what we could control: race-specific sessions at just under marathon pace, getting the heart rate right for the London course, and a lot of mental work.

The biggest thing with Cole was building genuine belief that sub-3 was there. Not hope. Belief. You earn that in training, not on race morning.

2:59:40. The build wasn't textbook. The ex*****on was.

Proud of this one. Congrats