At thirty-three I did something I had never done in twenty-eight years of training: I wrote down every kind of physical work I had ever done, grouped it by what it actually develops rather than what it was called, and checked it against a laboratory test.
The result was not that I was unfit, though I was. It was that I had a hole I could not have found from the inside: an entire category of training I had never done once, in any of five sports, across three decades. And it was precisely the category the evidence says matters most.
This page is that audit. It is the personal half, and honestly the more useful one, because the specific hole it found is the sort you cannot see from inside your own history.
Where to start, depending on who you are
| If you are | What is here for you |
|---|---|
| Curious how to audit your own training history | The audit: the method, which took one evening and is free |
| Confident you are reasonably fit | Then I got tested: I was confident too, and I was in the bottom third |
| Restarting after a long gap | How to restart: my rule, and the injuries that produced it |
| Someone who was athletic and is not any more | What the audit really taught me: two assets, only one of which decays |
| Looking for what to actually do | Not this page. The evidence and the plan are on the training plan |
⚠ This page is one person’s history and one person’s lab test. It is a worked example of a method, not a source of recommendations. For those, use the page above, which is built on studies rather than on me.
The audit, and the hole it found
Here is the exercise, and I recommend it to anyone who has trained for a long time. Lived
I listed every training stimulus I had ever accumulated. Not sports, stimuli, because the body adapts to the type of loading rather than to the name of the activity. Fifteen categories. Then I marked how much of each my history actually contained.
Karate as a child, cricket, football, a CrossFit era, years of beach running, kickboxing, a movement class, a COVID stretch of daily home training at my leanest and strongest. Ten of the fifteen came back high or very high.
And two came back empty. I had never once done maximal aerobic interval training, the hard four-minutes-on, three-minutes-off style work that specifically builds VO2 max. Not in karate, not in CrossFit, not in years of running. I had done enormous amounts of moderately hard work and none of the specific thing.
The other gap was dedicated trunk and anti-rotation work, which I had actively skipped because I had been told at some point that it was unnecessary.
Then I got tested, and the test agreed
I took a proper laboratory test: mask on, gas exchange measured, taken to genuine maximum. Two numbers came back and they told the same story the audit did.
VO2 max: 36.3 mL/kg/min. Twenty-sixth percentile for my age. The report’s word was “Poor.” Lived
Anaerobic threshold: 84% of maximum, which is a high number, the signature of someone with a well-tuned engine.
Read together: a small engine, unusually well tuned. Which is precisely what twenty-eight years rich in play, power, strength and moderate running, and completely empty of maximal aerobic work, would be expected to produce. The audit predicted the test.
Two things worth saying plainly. The first is that I felt fine. I looked reasonably fit. Nothing in my subjective experience suggested I was in the bottom third, and I would have told you confidently otherwise. Fitness is not something you can assess from the inside, and that is not just my embarrassment talking. Studies comparing self-rated capacity against measured VO2 max find people overestimate by around 17%, with only a moderate correlation between what they think and what they can do. The direction of the error is the useful part: the least fit overestimate the most. Which is exactly the group for whom the number would change something.
The second is that I published it. A number that unflattering is exactly the kind that quietly does not get mentioned, and a page arguing you should measure things is worthless if the author only shows you the good results.
How to restart, if you have stopped
This is the part I have personally got wrong the most, so it is the part I trust most.
Come back at about half. Reasoned, not tested Half the weight, half the volume, for roughly two weeks, then build. ⚠ This is my rule, not a research finding. The evidence on training-load spikes, and how contested it is, is on the other page. Fitness returns faster than tissue tolerance does: your cardiovascular system will happily let you do something your tendons and connective tissue are not ready for, and it will not warn you.
I know this because I have restarted from a layoff many times and hurt myself doing it more than once. I also, twice, completed a 21 km half-marathon with essentially no training, through leg and ankle pain I would describe as severe. I finished both. My own word for it, unprompted, is reckless, and I include it because the ability to override your body’s signals is not a strength, it is a liability wearing a strength’s costume. It is the exact trait that makes someone ignore the warning that matters.
Guardrails have to be external and mechanical, not sensation-based, for anybody built like that. The number on the plan, decided in advance, is what protects you. Not how you feel in the moment.
What the audit really taught me
The fitness decayed. The motor skill did not.
The same audit that found me in the bottom third for aerobic fitness also showed me something I had been dismissing my whole life: I acquire physical skills unusually fast, and I always have. It shows up in things where fitness cannot explain it. I placed second in a pool tournament, I have won money and a tournament at poker, and I picked up pickleball recently, at the most detrained I have been as an adult, and got good at it quickly.
Those are two separate assets, and only one of them had degraded. I had spent years reading myself as “decent at things” because I benchmarked against where I started, which is genuinely average, rather than against how fast I climbed.
That is the audit’s real lesson, and it generalises past me: you almost certainly cannot see your own training history accurately. You know what you enjoyed and what you avoided. You do not know what you actually built, and you definitely do not know what you skipped, because the thing you never did leaves no memory of not doing it.
There is no cheat sheet on this page, deliberately. A list of instructions is exactly what a personal history should not produce. The sourced version, with each claim’s evidence and its limits, is on the training plan.
Message me
If you want to run the audit on yourself and are not sure how to group your own history, or if you are restarting after a long gap and want a second opinion on how conservative to be, message me. I am not a coach and will not write you a programme. But the audit is free, it takes an evening, and it is the single most useful thing I have done about my own training in a decade.
Email: abhishek@terrak.ai LinkedIn: Abhishek Chaudhry
What’s changed
- 31 August 2026. Split in two. This page is now only my own training history and what auditing it taught me. Everything that was a claim about how people should train (the four pillars, the intensity distribution, the studies) moved to the training plan, where the evidence can be weighed properly. Mixing a personal story with research advice made it too easy to read one as the other.
- 30 August 2026. Added a full evidence section after a fair challenge: the summary had been presenting well-evidenced findings, a book’s framework and my own heuristics as if they carried equal weight. Every claim is now tagged with its source and its limits. One real correction: strength training alone does not prevent falls. A Cochrane review found it works only combined with balance training, and the page previously implied otherwise.
- 30 August 2026. First published.