Learning to be a better athlete

I have always enjoyed reading about training and keeping up with research about endurance sports. I realised last year that while that knowledge is useful for me in developing my own training plans and for helping the athletes I coach, I haven't been very good at sharing it through other channels. I feel like there is a good opportunity to share what I've been learning with a wider audience and hopefully I can help other athletes become better runners too.

At the beginning of 2020 I started writing a tweet a day with useful information I found online or that I was reading. Over time that practice evolved into a daily tweet sharing an interesting piece of research, then a weekly summary of the studies I had tweeted that week, and finally in into the resource page on my blog. This process has been very beneficial for me because through it I have had multiple interesting conversations, I've met some of the study authors online, and I've learned more than I ever expected. I've also heard back from other runners and endurance athletes who have found the material I've shared to be useful for them.

In this post I'd like to provide a guide of all the places that you can find the articles and information I've been sharing. The goals is that you will have access to everything and can use it to inform your own training.



Twitter

Every day I write a tweet sharing some research that I've found interesting. Sometimes the tweets are just individual tweets with a quick snapshot of a study and sometimes they are a longer thread with some practical takeaways and my initial thoughts. You can see a couple of examples below:



If you'd like to get a quick and easy insight into a piece of research each day then I'd recommend that you follow me on Twitter: @dwrowland.



Weekly summaries

At the end of each week I compile the different studies that I shared on Twitter into a page on my blog. This summary includes links to other related articles, some of the key protocols and findings of each study, and my notes and practical takeaways for athletes. The last few summaries can be found here:

RESEARCH: Studies reviewed this week: 11 January 2021 to 17 January 2021

RESEARCH: Studies reviewed this week: 04 January 2021 to 10 January 2021


This is a great place to go if you just want the weekly update and a set of practical takeaways that you can apply to your training (I tweet this on Sunday so there's always a reminder on Twitter too).



Resources page

Each of the weekly summaries is listed individually on the resources page and categorised into groups so they're easier to search. If you're looking for a specific study or trying to find the answer to a question about your training then this is a great place to look. The link for each study will take you to the weekly summary and then on that page the study you're looking for will be one of the four to six studies summarized from that week.

The resources page also include notes from conferences I've attended, Twitter threads from presentations or conferences that I've shared, and articles that I've written. It's a useful reference point for finding the answers to the endurance questions you may have.



Newsletter

I also prepare a newsletter which I send out roughly every two weeks. The newsletter includes an update on my training, articles from online sources that I've found useful, podcasts I've listened to, and updates on results from friends. You can read all the newsletter archives here and sign up for the newsletter here.


That's everything! I'm always looking for new articles and studies so if you have any ideas or suggestions please let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

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