About the Book
The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom began with a simple observation: most people make training far more complicated than it needs to be. This book strips the process back to its essentials and shows that effective training rests on a few clear principles rather than elaborate systems. At the centre is the cardinal rule: be consistent, and avoid anything that interferes with that consistency. Everything else builds from there.
The book introduces the two main ways we improve through training – adaptation and practice – and explains why it helps to see training as a balance between developing capacities and learning skills. It then shows how to organise the training week, how to build a base and build up performance, and how to use rhythm, freshness and fatigue to give training its shape. A key theme runs throughout: the most important parts of training are usually the simplest, and they work because they can be repeated.
Across seventeen chapters, the book covers the full sweep of the training process – planning, progression, learning, recovery, psychology, competition and coaching. The aim is not to offer a single method, but to give you a way of thinking about training that is practical, grounded and clearer than the noise that surrounds most advice.
What You'll Learn
This book helps you see the underlying structure of training by returning to first principles. You will learn why consistency matters more than complexity, and why the simplest plans are often the most effective. You will see how bodies adapt to stress, why progressive overload and variation are natural consequences of that process, and how skills and capacities improve along different timelines.
You will learn how to structure a training week so that it supports both practice and harder, more demanding work. Most sessions should feel light and repeatable – the sort of training that leaves you feeling better than when you started – with only a few sessions each week that truly drive adaptation. The book shows how to build a base, how to build up performance when the time is right, and how to avoid the common trap of training moderately hard every day.
You will also learn how to think about skills, why repetition stabilises patterns, and how to plan without overplanning. The book offers a realistic view of periodisation, explains why trying to predict too far ahead is rarely useful, and shows how to align your week, your cycles and your goals without getting lost in detail.
Who the Book Is For
This book is for anyone who wants training to feel understandable. It is written for coaches who want a clearer way to organise training and guide athletes through the rhythms of practice, stress and recovery. It is for athletes who are tired of switching between programmes or trying to make sense of mixed messages, and who want to understand why training works when it does.
It is equally suited to beginners and experienced trainers. The ideas do not require any background knowledge, but they are broad enough to support the decisions of advanced athletes and coaches. The book is practical without being prescriptive, and simple without being simplistic.
Above all, it is for people who prefer clarity over complexity. If training has ever felt more confusing than it should be, this book offers a way to cut through the noise and see the principles that matter.
What They Said
The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom: How to Train to Improve at Any Sport provides an excellent summary of what is required for a successful training programme. The overriding take-away from the book is the cardinal rule of training, “above all else, be consistent”. While this might seem obvious, Cleather points out the many mistakes people make in their training programmes which ultimately don’t allow them to train consistently.
The advice provided is universally applicable to all that train, and is what makes this an excellent and wide-reaching text. Across the 17 chapters, topics such as training theory, key principles and the organisation of training are discussed. While the book won’t necessarily introduce topics that you haven’t come across before, it does make the sometimes complex, simple again.
For a fraction of the price compared to some books, this offers an easy-to-read text with applications for your training programme design. Therefore, I would recommend this book for all individuals who design training programmes, particularly strength and conditioning coaches. To summarise the book, train smart (and occasionally hard).
DR. DALE B. READ, MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY
Rating 9/10
About The Training Wisdom Collection
The Training Wisdom Collection began as an attempt to make sense of the ideas that kept returning in coaching conversations - the patterns that sit underneath good training, regardless of method or sport. Over time it grew into a set of books and courses that approach training from first principles, not fashion.
The Collection isn’t a system. It doesn’t claim to reveal the hidden truth of strength and conditioning or promise a shortcut to progress. Instead, it tries to show how training actually works: how bodies learn, how stress and rhythm shape adaptation, how coordination becomes skill, and why long-term development depends more on clarity and patience than on novelty.
Each book takes a different angle on that same problem. The Little Black Book of Training Wisdom was the starting point - a compact attempt to explain why simple principles matter, and the thread that runs through everything that followed. The Practice of Change looks at the rhythms of work and recovery that shape adaptation. The Force series examines how movement and load interact. The courses take these ideas into practice, turning them into tools a coach or athlete can use straight away.
The aim is simple. Training should feel understandable. It should have a shape that makes sense. And it should help people build capacities that last longer than the programmes they come from. The Training Wisdom Collection exists to offer that kind of clarity - not by reducing training to rules, but by giving people a language that reflects what actually happens when bodies change.
