Tag: sports science
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What Elite Coaches Do Differently (And Why Most Coaches Never Figure It Out)
What separates elite coaches from everyone else isn’t experience or talent — it’s systems. Four principles from peer-reviewed research that define world-class coaching practice.
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The 12-Week Athlete: What Happens When You Let Data Override the Plan
The athletes who improve most over 12 weeks aren’t the ones who follow the plan most faithfully — they’re the ones whose coaches adjust when the data says to. Here’s what the research shows.
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Can You Change Your Somatotype? A Constrained-System View
Somatotype gets treated as a fixed label, but the Heath-Carter equations describe a constrained system. Height and bone breadth are locked; fat, muscle, and weight aren’t. A look at which inputs can actually move, by how much, and how fast — and why ectomorphy is the axis you don’t control directly.
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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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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.
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The somatotype experiment
The Afitpilot logo came from a sports science textbook — specifically, the somatochart on the cover of Carter and Heath’s Somatotyping: Development and Applications. Here’s how it became the brand mark.