If you read my blogs regularly, you know I talk a lot about stretching your capacity, resting, then stretching again. That cycle isn’t just a training philosophy. It’s how human beings are built to grow.

The last week or so my body has forced the issue. Tired legs, slow recovery, no motivation to push. So I’ve kept my miles lower, kept the weights to a minimum, and taken it slower than normal. And here’s the thing: that doesn’t make me feel like I’m failing. It means I’m recovering. I’m absorbing the training. This is the most important phase of the whole process.

Everyone says you need to rest but it is so consistently, stubbornly neglected. We live in a culture that celebrates hustle, discipline, working through pain, doing more. But that’s not how the body works. You don’t adapt by digging yourself into an under recovered hole. And when you’re in a hole, it’s usually wise to stop digging.

The Dorian Yates Principle

Dorian Yates, arguably the greatest British bodybuilder of all time, has long made the case that most people train too easy and too often. For bodybuilding that’s probably true. In running you need both hard sessions and easy ones. But the core thesis holds: every six weeks or so, if you’ve been training consistently, a recovery week isn’t just wise, it’s essential. You can try to push through, but the quality of your training suffers and the adaptation doesn’t happen the way it should. And adaptation is the word here.

What You’re Actually Training

When you start out, most people can’t run a marathon or put serious weight on a bar. It takes time, and that time isn’t just building muscle or cardiovascular fitness. You’re training your mind. You’re training your central nervous system. You’re reprogramming what feels normal.

Years ago my training was built around strength. There was a time I could bench press 180kg. I don’t often chase heavy numbers now, I run far more than I lift, but even after a long run, on any given day, I can jump on a bench and press 140kg without much thought. On a good day I’d be confident of 150 to 160kg. Not because I train for it. Because my CNS and my mind have decades of experience at that kind of weight. My body says yes, we’ve got this. To someone who’s never lifted that weight, their mind taps out first, not their muscles.

We Were Built to Adapt

We are so much more capable as humans than we ever give ourselves credit for. Look at persistence hunters, both in our ancestry and in parts of the world today. Humans aren’t the fastest animal or the strongest. Pound for pound we’re outclassed by almost everything. But we can chase an animal for miles, hour after hour, until it collapses. Not because we’re built for speed or power. Because we’re built to adapt and keep going.

Kids who swim competitively tend to swim well their entire lives because they built the movement pattern young. I know a guy who was a gymnast as a child, hasn’t trained in years, has a beer belly now, and can still backflip. That’s his party trick. His mind knows when to jump, when to tuck, when to land. It’s been there his entire life. That’s the part of training no one really talks about.

What You Accept as Normal Changes Everything

The last few weeks I’ve been running 40 to 45 miles a week. Six months ago that would have been an extraordinary one-off week that left me out for a fortnight. Now it’s normal. Thirty miles feels like a short week. My understanding of what the body can do has fundamentally shifted because I’ve adapted to it.

I know guys who make the planche look easy. They’re doing planche push-ups now. To most people the planche is borderline impossible, it would take years to build up to. But that’s exactly the point. You train the body to adapt. You train the mind to adapt. You train the nervous system to adapt. And then that becomes your new baseline.

And this principle doesn’t stop at training. Young men who grow up in environments surrounded by violence adapt to it, it becomes normal behaviour because it’s all they know. People who spend decades in prison cells find ways for their minds to survive it, they adapt. That is simply proof that this law is universal and non negotiable. You will adapt to your environment. The question is what environment are you choosing?

You can adapt in positive ways or negative ones. That choice is yours.

Who You Surround Yourself With Matters

There’s an old idea: hang around five smokers and you’ll become the sixth. Hang around five millionaires and you’ll become the sixth. I got strong at the bench press partly because my old training partner used to bench 220kg. To him 180kg was a warm-up set. That changed my entire sense of what was heavy, not intentionally, just by proximity. My normal shifted.

Spend too long consuming negativity on social media and the algorithm feeds you more, and slowly it starts to feel like reality. What you repeatedly see, what you repeatedly hear, what you repeatedly experience, that is what your mind will accept as normal. And what your mind accepts as normal is how you will behave, what you will attempt, and what you will become.

I train mostly alone these days, but I deliberately put myself around coaches and people who are faster or stronger. Not just to learn their methods but to shift my understanding of what’s possible. If I trained alongside athletes who ran 100 mile weeks, my understanding of what a big week looks like would change entirely. Environment shapes expectation. Expectation shapes performance.

So Here’s the Message

Rest is not a sign of weakness. It is not laziness. It is the phase in which your body and mind consolidate everything you’ve built. The adaptation happens in the recovery, not the session.

But zoom out further than the training. Look at every area of your life. Look at who you spend time with, what you consume, what you accept as normal. Because you are being shaped by all of it, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Stretch your capacity. Then rest. Then stretch again. Build the environment that takes you closer to who you want to be.

Rest, adapt, become. The cycle never stops. The question is whether you’re directing it.