Author: Walter Clayton
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Afitpilot 2.0
The coach build of Afitpilot ships soon. Two-stage plan generation with the reasoning exposed, a 3,000+ exercise library with full enrichment metadata, sRPE and Hooper-Mackinnon readiness fed directly into the next regeneration, and a flat €89/month price that isn’t tied to your coaching revenue.
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Claude Gordon Douglas
Claude Gordon Douglas published a method in 1911 that became the gold standard for measuring human metabolism for most of the 20th century. The method is named after the bag he designed to collect exhaled air — a canvas bag, a mouthpiece, a one-way valve, a stopcock. From that apparatus, plus two analytical refinements published…
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Reps in reserve
Reps in reserve is the strength-training cousin of Borg’s perceived exertion scale, applied per set rather than per session. Unlike the other measurement instruments in this series, RIR has no single inventor — it came from a coach in 2008, a research group in 2012, and another in 2016. A history of how a powerlifting…
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Gunnar Borg
Gunnar Borg built the instrument exercise science uses to ask people how hard they are working. A history from the 6–20 scale in 1962 to the CR10 in 1982 to Foster’s session RPE in 2001, plus notes on how RPE sits inside Afitpilot — and why the acute:chronic workload ratio is shown but deliberately not…
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Daily readiness
Daily readiness — asking an athlete how they feel before training — is one of the cheapest pieces of monitoring infrastructure in elite sport. According to thirty years of evidence, also one of the most informative. A history from Hooper’s 1995 swimmers to the 2016 review that surprised the field, plus notes on how readiness…
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Two books from my grandfather
In May 2021 my grandfather gave me two books from his shelves. They came with a folded note in his handwriting: William Harvey, De Motu Cordis (trigesimo-secundo ie 5.5 inches high) — valued at Keys valuation day at Greshams school 4/7/04 £800. N.B. this was a student copy meant to be carried in a student’s…
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A.V. Hill
Archibald Vivian Hill won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on heat production in muscle. Most people who recognise his name today do so for a different reason: he is the physiologist who introduced the concept of maximum oxygen uptake — VO₂ max — in the same year, while running…
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Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace wrote the first published computer program in 1843, a step-by-step procedure for computing Bernoulli numbers on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine — a machine that was never built in her lifetime.
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William Sheldon
William Sheldon coined the term “somatotype” and named its three components — endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph. He also produced personality theories and a photographic methodology that did not survive scrutiny.
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Adolphe Quetelet
Adolphe Quetelet founded modern anthropometry in 19th-century Brussels. He also designed the formula now misused as BMI. A short profile of his work and its limits.