Everything We've Learned About Performance
A reflection on The Active Edge's best pieces
Over the past few years, The Active Edge has written about training, recovery, injury, psychology, and the messy intersection where all these things meet. We’ve explored what it means to perform sustainably and to resist the quick-fix culture that dominates online performance content.
As it’s the New Year and all that, we had the idea of figuring out what resonated most, and been of genuine help to you readers. Looking back helped us realise the patterns, and more, the core ideas we keep returning to that we believe are worth repeating. So we thought we’d put together a curation of our best work. We hope you agree.
The collection below represents our most important pieces. These are the posts we’d want you to read if you were new here. The articles that best capture why we write and what we think needs to be said differently about health and performance.
We’ve organised this collection around those core ideas that define our work. Of course with us, some posts appear in multiple sections because good ideas rarely fit into neat boxes. We encourage you to discover them for yourselves, and let them spark your own ideas (and hopefully share them in the comments). There’s also a section for our ‘Greatest Hits’ that seemed to be the most popular and receive the most comments.
So without further ado, here they are…
Training Philosophy: Working Smarter AND Harder
Understanding that sustainable performance comes from intelligent load management, not just grinding harder.
Psychology & Performance: The Mind-Body Connection
Your mental approach shapes physical outcomes. Mindset isn’t fixed—it’s trainable.
Recovery & Adaptation: Where the Magic Happens
Recovery isn’t supplementary. It’s foundational. This is where adaptation occurs.
Injury Prevention & Rehabilitation: Understanding Capacity
Moving beyond simplistic “overuse” narratives to understand how load and capacity interact.
Systems Thinking & Holistic Approaches
Nothing exists in isolation. Everything affects everything else. We are complex and we are contextual.
The Greatest Hits
These recent pieces resonated because they addressed something often missing from performance conversations: the reality that we don’t all start from the same place, and that sustainable performance requires navigating the full complexity of being human.
These articles offer a more honest picture: you have agency, but context profoundly matters. You can’t control everything, but you can work intelligently within your circumstances.
These posts represent a maturation in how we think about performance: less about optimization, more about integration. Less about what you can achieve despite your life, more about what becomes possible when you work with it.
Why We Write What We Write
In case you need reminding, The Active Edge exists because we got tired of seeing the same reductive advice recycled endlessly. “Train harder.” “Just commit.” “Follow this plan.” All of it assumes you exist in a vacuum, that your body responds predictably to inputs, that context doesn’t matter.
But context always matters. You are a whole person, not a collection of isolated parts. Your training exists within a life, not separate from it. Your performance is shaped by sleep, stress, relationships, environment, and countless variables that never make it into the Instagram carousel.
We write about systems thinking because performance is a system. We write about psychology because your mind shapes your body. We write about recovery because that’s where adaptation happens.
Most importantly, we write against the idea that there’s one right way. Health and performance are complex and individual.
What We Hope You Take Away
This collection isn’t meant to give you all the answers. It’s meant to help you ask better questions.
Questions like: What do I actually want from training? What kind of person am I becoming? Am I working with my life or against it? What can I control, and what must I accept?
The best performers are the ones who understand principles well enough to adapt them to their own lives. That’s what we’re trying to help you do.
Happy New Year.
— Ron and Shane.
