We Ruined "Training Smart"
Because we're not smart enough to understand
Long-term email subscribers may vaguely recall a newsletter I wrote on the any-benefit approach, over three years ago. This piece is a revision, and is especially relevant to healthy, sustainable performance.
To recap, the Any Benefit Approach was coined by researcher, Cal Newport, in a section of his book Deep Work. Specifically, in selecting tools to network with others, suggesting that almost any is acceptable if you can find at least one reason to use it that can lead to a life filled with distractions because it fails to weigh the small benefits against the significant costs, like lost time and focus. The obvious example here, is using social media to connect with friends, and getting consumed by the algorithms in a doom scroll.
Therefore, the any-benefit approach is when we justify a decision if we can identify any benefit to that decision.
Where We Went Wrong
My rant back in 2022 was on runners going a bit too fast, a bit too far, a few too many times. That was the era Active Edge (and training science) was pushing the “train smart” narrative.
A narrative - three years later - that’s been distorted into shallow content pushed by influencers who lack the insight to grasp its real meaning. It’s not about “run slow to get fast” or “optimising recovery”, it’s about actually understanding the principles of training and adaptation to understand why these terms exist in the first place.
So now, the rant has developed a new layer. And I’m going to use the Any Benefit Approach to highlight lessons from my recent public health economics studies, to help you understand how to be critical, improve your training decisions and benefit from more sustainable health and performance practices. Because if not, all we’re doing is blindly repeating meaningless slogans.
The Benefit of Thinking Like a Health Economist
… Not because economics is currently fashionable, but because it offers a clearer way to think. If we don’t ground our decisions in a deeper logic, we end up recycling empty phrases. Training deserves more than that.
Health economists work to provide decision-makers with informed evidence on how to use scarce resources. Think about free school meals. It’s health economics at play. If X funding is spent on healthy meals for kids, under Y conditions, Z is the predicted health benefits to society. The same works with training and adaptation.
In training, our scarce resources are not funding pots, but time, tolerance, recovery capacity, emotional bandwidth, and biomechanical resilience. Each decision allocates them somewhere. Which means each decision also diverts them from somewhere else. This is an opportunity cost - the value of the next best alternative that is forgone when a decision is made. It represents what you give up to get something else, and it applies to all choices involving scarce resources. And it is the part the any-benefit approach neglects.
“Each decision allocates resources somewhere, which means it must also divert them from somewhere else.”
For example, when you run harder than planned on an easy day, the cost is not simply additional fatigue. It is the forfeiting of tomorrow’s readiness. The next best alternative - higher quality work later in the week, greater capacity to absorb load, or even the absence of an overuse injury - is sacrificed in exchange for an immediate gain.
Health Is Not Always About Optimising Adaptation
However, I won’t write to you that the marginal benefit of extra pace is always outweighed by the marginal cost to recovery, because it just isn’t. And if it’s simplified like that then whoever is feeding you that narrative does not know enough to be soliciting advice (usually on social media).
Even elite athletes slip! They exceed their plan before getting back on course. Just like you, they too are human. And us humans sometimes get carried away. Us humans sometimes have bad days and want to let off some steam. We are not spreadsheets, and training cannot be reduced to invariant rules.
This is where the parallel to health economics matters. In public health, the best interventions are not always the cheapest, nor always those that produce the best outcomes in isolation. Some are more expensive with better outcomes, some less expensive with worse outcomes. Decisions are only easy when something costs less and delivers more. The rest require evaluation of context, priority, and consequence.
Training is the same. Sometimes the “wrong” intensity on a recovery run is the best decision because it clears psychological stress, breaks rumination, or simply restores you after a difficult day. Sub-optimal physiological stimulus can still be the optimal choice for the person living the life behind the metrics. However, if these costly deviations happen repeatedly and unthinkingly, the imbalance accumulates until progress stalls, reverses, or breaks down entirely.
What It Really Means To “Train Smart”
Objectively, intensity belongs where intensity is designed to create adaptation. Recovery belongs where recovery sustains the capacity to train again. Sessions serve the mesocycle, not the day’s psychology. Allocative efficiency evaluates a session not for any benefit it might produce in isolation, but for the contribution it makes to the strategic goal. An easy run, held truly easy, might not feel maximally productive, but it enables the structural conditions that support future performance. That is the higher return.
If training is something that anchors your identity, brings you happiness, and represents a goal worth pursuing, then your decisions deserve to reflect this level of reasoning. To “train smart” is not to chase visible benefit; it is to make choices that acknowledge opportunity cost and allocate effort in alignment with long-term adaptation as well as creating sustainable paths to this long-term adaptation.
Understanding this is the economics of training. Yet training economics alone is not enough. Because the true peak of performance is not only physical: it is psychological, emotional, relational. You will not run your fastest, strongest, or most resilient if you are chronically tense, unhappy, disconnected, or mentally exhausted. If training anchors your identity and brings you joy, then “training smart” must reach beyond lactate thresholds and optimal load distribution. It has to account for what enables you to remain consistent, fulfilled, and genuinely well.
Make no mistake, optimal load distribution and maximising training volume is still the biggest driver to increasing fitness, and should overwhelmingly consume your exercise and training decisions. But, that’s not just what “training smart” is about.
The Only Definition Worth Keeping
When you plan your exercise, ask where you’re allocating your scarce resources. Not just in pursuit of adaptation, but towards the version of yourself you intend to become. Opportunity cost and allocative efficiency aren’t abstract theories; they’re lenses that reveal whether your choices are quietly supporting or working against the health and performance you say you want.
It also requires having the depth to understand that it goes deeper than those layers. Because “train smart” isn’t a tempo pace. It’s the discipline of deciding with your future in mind. That is the only definition worth keeping.
Your highest performance will come when you’re both in your most physically and mentally capable, but also when you’re feeling your best and at your happiest.
Fnx 4 readin’, and stay critical,
Shane xox
P.S. If you are a runner, we know it’s the calm before the storm. Many of you will be thinking of your events and goals for 2026. Myself (Shane Robinson) and help runners, coaching with a humanistic approach to help set and achieve goals. Please consider one of us, if you would like to work with a running coach.
Want more?
Here’s the my original post from 2022: Click here
Plus some more belters from The Active Edge
