Weekly Training Notes: Balancing Training Stressors

Practical training advice, athlete highlights, and lessons from real training blocks.

Each week I send a short newsletter to my athletes with training tips, coaching notes, and shout-outs. The goal is simple: share things that actually help people train consistently and stay healthy while working toward their goals.

Below is an excerpt from a recent newsletter.

Training Tip: Balancing Training Stressors

One of the biggest keys to staying healthy and continuing to make progress is how you manage stress throughout your training week. Stress isn’t just hard workouts. Long runs, heavy lifting, races, and even demanding life schedules all place load on your body.

A common mistake runners make is stacking major stressors on back-to-back days. That might look like a hard workout followed immediately by a long run, or heavy lifting placed on what’s supposed to be an easy day. When stress piles up like this, recovery never fully catches up. Fatigue builds, form starts to slip, and injury risk goes up.

When it comes to strength training, a simple rule helps a lot: heavy lifting should live on the same day as a hard run, or on a day that already carries stress. Grouping stressors protects your easy days and allows real recovery to happen. What you want to avoid is heavy lifting on an easy day or right before a long run, which often leaves athletes carrying fatigue into key sessions.

The goal isn’t to avoid hard work. It’s to be intentional about when you do it. Hard days should feel purposeful and challenging. Easy days should actually feel easy. That balance is what allows your body to absorb training and continue progressing over time.

A helpful way to think about your week is in terms of hard, moderate, and easy stress rather than exact days. In a well-balanced week, you’ll have two to three days that create meaningful stress, and the rest of the week supports recovery so those hard efforts can actually pay off.

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