Train Like a Generalist, Not a Specialist
Why We’re Drawn to Specialists
Spend any time online, and you’ll see endless posts about how the pros train. Marathon runners logging hundreds of kilometres per week. Powerlifters chasing three numbers at the edge of human strength. CrossFit athletes throwing themselves through punishing sessions with seemingly endless energy.
It’s inspiring, no doubt. And in the right context, it makes sense. Specialists are specialists for a reason: their training reflects the demands of their sport. They’re chasing performance at the highest level, often at the expense of balance, longevity, or even health.
The problem comes when the rest of us, people with jobs, families, and responsibilities that don’t include podium finishes, try to copy those models. What works for them rarely works for us. Worse, it can lead to the exact opposite of what most people want from fitness: fewer capabilities, more injuries, and a shorter runway for living well.
Most people aren’t training to shave seconds off a marathon time, add ten kilos to a deadlift PR, or survive a punishing competition weekend. They want to move through life with less pain, more energy, and more confidence to say yes to the things that matter. And for that, a generalist approach is not just “good enough.” It is the smarter choice.
The Specialist Trap
To understand why the generalist approach matters, it helps to see what happens when you over specialise. Each type of specialist training comes with strengths, but also predictable weaknesses. The irony is that those weaknesses are often the exact flipside of what makes a specialist successful in their sport.
Marathon Runners
Long-distance runners are masters of endurance. Their cardiovascular efficiency is incredible, and their discipline to log mile after mile is admirable. But the same repetition that makes them efficient also limits them.
Limited range of motion: Running economy depends on doing the same movement over and over as smoothly as possible. Over time, the body trims away anything “unnecessary,” which means tight hips, hamstrings, and ankles. That efficiency is a performance advantage in a marathon, but it comes at the expense of mobility. Outside of running, that stiffness often shows up as back pain, difficulty squatting deeply, or poor balance.
Upper body neglect: When you’re chasing lightweight efficiency, every extra pound matters. Many runners avoid strength training altogether, or keep it minimal, because it doesn’t seem to help their race times. The result is rounded shoulders, weak upper backs, and poor posture. Great for shaving seconds off a finish time, not so great for carrying groceries or maintaining bone density as you age.
Overuse injuries: The human body isn’t designed to take tens of thousands of nearly identical steps every week. Shin splints, stress fractures, tendonitis, plantar fasciitis… these are occupational hazards for the specialist runner. They’re not flaws in character. They’re simply the cost of doing one thing too much.
Powerlifters
Powerlifters are specialists in the purest sense: three lifts, maximal load. Their discipline builds enormous strength, but almost everything else is put on hold.
Mobility trade-offs: The sport rewards moving the heaviest possible weight through the shortest possible distance. That means tight, compact ranges of motion that allow for leverage. In competition, that’s an advantage. In daily life, it can mean stiff joints, poor overhead mobility, and a body that feels like armour plating when you try to do anything dynamic.
Excess body mass: In many weight classes, being bigger makes you stronger. More body mass creates more leverage under the bar. But a bigger body isn’t always a healthier body. Extra fat can increase blood pressure, strain joints, and make even simple cardiovascular tasks harder. It helps in the sport, but hurts in the long run.
Conditioning gaps: Powerlifters can generate enormous force for one to three reps. Ask them to jog across a football pitch or climb a long flight of stairs and the picture changes quickly. Their engines are tuned for short, maximal efforts. The broader systems that support daily life, like cardiovascular health, work capacity and stamina are often left underdeveloped.
HIIT Specialists
High-intensity training thrives on pushing limits. The workouts are varied, explosive, and competitive. That environment can be addictive and it does build work capacity quickly. But it also creates blind spots.
Chronic tightness: Movements like box jumps, Olympic lifts, and sprint-style intervals all demand explosive power. The tissues adapt by stiffening, which is good for speed and force but bad for flexibility. Without mobility work, it’s a fast track to cranky shoulders, sore knees, and tight hips.
Overload injuries: HIIT workouts are built around intensity and fatigue. Under fatigue, form suffers. The shoulder that was stable on the first set becomes unstable by the fifth. The squat that looked great in warm-up rounds deteriorates under speed and exhaustion. That’s when tweaks and tears happen.
No aerobic base: Many people who live on a diet of HIIT stay locked in the “red zone.” The aerobic system, which builds recovery and endurance, never gets the attention it needs. They can crush a short, all-out session, but ask them to sustain steady work for hours and they’ll fall apart.
Stuck in fight-or-flight: High-intensity training constantly stimulates the sympathetic nervous system — the “go, go, go” state that is analogous to “fight or flight”. What’s missing is balance from the parasympathetic side, the “rest and digest” functions that allow the body to repair, regulate hormones, and reset. Without that balance, sleep suffers, stress hormones spike, and recovery lags behind. The training feels productive, but internally it’s like riding the gas pedal with no brake.
A Generalist’s Advantage
Training like a generalist isn’t about dabbling or doing everything half-heartedly. It’s about building a body that can handle the messy, unpredictable demands of real life. Specialists optimise for one outcome. Generalists spread their bets across many, which makes them more resilient overall and gives them more tools in their toolbox.
Injury prevention: When you train across different domains, you balance the body. Strength training builds the muscle that stabilises joints. Aerobic work develops the cardiovascular base that helps tissues recover. Mobility work maintains range of motion so movements stay fluid instead of grinding. The end result is fewer overuse injuries, fewer breakdowns, and a body that holds up under stress instead of collapsing at the first weak link.
Broader capability: Life doesn’t care about your niche. One week you might need to carry a heavy box up the stairs, the next you’re scrambling over rocks on a hike, and the next you’re kneeling on the floor to play with your kids or grandkids. Specialists often find themselves out of their element in those moments. The runner who can’t lift their suitcase into the overhead bin. The lifter who gets winded after climbing two flights of stairs. The HIIT junkie who can’t keep up on a long, steady hike. A generalist may not be world-class at any one of those tasks, but they’re capable enough at all of them to say “yes” instead of bowing out.
Longevity and resilience: Specialists often burn bright but short. They pour themselves into one pursuit, but eventually the injuries, the imbalances, or the sheer monotony catch up. Generalists, by contrast, tend to stay active for decades. They build the kind of broad capacity that makes it possible to keep moving well into their 50s, 60s, and beyond. A balanced training plan also means they’re less likely to yo-yo between extremes of training and inactivity. They can maintain a steady rhythm that keeps the engine running for life.
Engagement and sustainability: There’s also a psychological advantage. Variety keeps training interesting. Shifting gears between strength, cardio, mobility, and skill work gives you more reasons to show up and fewer opportunities to burn out. For most people, the best program isn’t the one that looks perfect on paper, it’s the one they can stick with. A generalist approach makes that much easier.
Think of it this way: specialists train for their sport. Generalists train for life. And as I explored in What a Backyard Project (And A Decade of Spartan Races) Taught Me About Real Strength (www.btgfitness.com/blog/backyard-project-real-strength), the most meaningful gains usually come not from perfecting one narrow skill, but from being ready for anything life throws at you.
My Own Lesson in Specialisation
I’ll admit, I’ve fallen into the trap myself.
Over the past few years, my main focus has been running. A lot of that has been on mountainous trails, and to be fair, trail running did at least keep me moving through a broader range of motion than flat road running ever would. The climbing, descending, twisting and navigating uneven terrain all kept my hips, ankles, and knees from tightening up too badly.
But this past year, as I prepared for my Solstice Run, I shifted gears into a heavy block of road running. Hours upon hours on the pavement, long ascents without paying much attention to posture, and repetitive mileage with little variation. At first it just felt like training. Eventually, it started to feel like wear and tear.
I began noticing pain and stiffness creeping into my hips and knees. At the same time, the loading in my running vest with water and food for those longer road efforts combined with my tendency to look down at the road on gentle climbs (or conversely, crank my neck back to look up on steeper climbs), created problems through my shoulders, upper back, and neck. That cocktail of posture and load led to some pretty scary episodes: sudden, intense headaches that stopped me in my tracks. They were severe enough that my doctor pulled me off all activity until I went through a CT scan to rule out anything dangerous like an unruptured aneurysm. Thankfully, the scan came back clear, and the conclusion was that the issues were muscular and postural in nature. But I’ll be honest, it was a wake-up call.
And as if that wasn’t enough, another problem cropped up that I never would have connected to running: tendinitis in both elbows. The culprit? The many, many hours I spent with my arms locked into a fixed position, my elbows bent, my arm swing loading and unloading those joints in the same pattern mile after mile. It sounds almost silly until you live through it, but the constant low-level strain was enough to create a persistent overuse injury.
That’s when it hit me. I had been preaching balance to my clients for years, telling them not to specialise too narrowly, and here I was doing the exact thing I warned them against. I had let running crowd out the strength training and mobility work that would have kept me balanced. Ironically, this is almost EXACTLY the opposite of my hypocrisy of only training strength and power that first led me down the road of working on endurance with my entry into the world of Spartan Race and trail racing events!
So, I’m scaling back my mileage, recommitting to strength training and rebuilding my mobility routines. Not because running is bad, but because only running has left me lopsided. And more importantly, because I need to walk the talk of what I recommend for everyone.
It’s a humbling reminder that the very advice I give clients applies to me too: you can’t specialise your way to long-term health.
The Fine Line: When Specialisation Makes Sense
It’s important to acknowledge that sometimes, specialisation is the right call.
If you’re a professional athlete, your training reflects the demands of your sport. Even recreational athletes might specialise for a season. Maybe you’re chasing a marathon PB, training for a powerlifting meet, or trying to break through a plateau in CrossFit.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Pursuing a goal that matters to you is part of what makes training rewarding.
The key is understanding the trade-offs. Specialisation can bring performance gains, but it often increases injury risk and reduces versatility. The more you narrow your training, the more you need to watch for signs that your body is paying the price.
Persistent soreness. Injuries that won’t heal. Feeling stuck or brittle. These are the red flags that it’s time to branch back out.
Practical Takeaways for Shifting to Generalist Training
1. Audit Your Weaknesses
Start by looking at what you’ve been doing most. Runners, do you ever train your upper body? Powerlifters, can you run, hike, or even briskly walk without gasping? HIIT devotees, when’s the last time you did slow, easy aerobic work?
Wherever you see gaps, that’s where you need to lean in.
2. Integrate Complementary Work
You don’t need to overhaul your training. Add a couple of sessions a week that counterbalance your main focus.
Runners: add upper body strength, core work, and mobility. The points I made in Muscle: The Most Overlooked Investment in Your Future Health (www.btgfitness.com/blog/muscle-is-your-best-investment) are especially relevant here. Muscle isn’t just about looking better, it’s the insurance policy that keeps you strong, metabolically healthy, and capable as you age.
Powerlifters: build conditioning, flexibility, and a touch of endurance. As I explained in Running Isn’t Just for Runners (www.btgfitness.com/blog/running-isnt-just-for-runners), aerobic fitness is the foundation that supports strength work too.
HIIT specialists: prioritise recovery, aerobic base, and movement quality. This doesn’t have to be complicated. Add easy Baseline Activity like brisk walking, sprinkle in steady-state cardio sessions, and make mobility work a regular part of your week. These slower gears are what keep your faster, harder efforts sustainable.
3. Respect Recovery
Generalists don’t live in extremes. Recovery isn’t a luxury, it’s part of the plan. Sleep, mobility work, steady walks: these are what allow you to keep training without breaking down.
This is also where easy training days come in. As I discussed in What Counts as Hard Work? (www.btgfitness.com/blog/what-counts-as-hard-work), sometimes the hardest choice is to back off and let your body adapt. Recovery isn’t about being lazy. It’s the foundation that makes your harder sessions possible.
4. Think “Life First”
Ask yourself: what do I actually want my body to do? For most people, it’s not “set a bench press record” or “shave seconds off a 10k.” It’s carry groceries, hike hills, play with kids, or stay independent as they age. Train accordingly.
And if you need a manifesto for what this looks like in practice, check out Lift AND Run AND Walk AND Crawl: Building a Truly Capable Body (www.btgfitness.com/blog/lift-run-walk-crawl). That article lays out how layering multiple types of training creates the kind of capability that actually carries over into life.
The Real Work: Building a Life, Not a Sport
At the end of the day, training like a generalist isn’t about mediocrity. It’s about choosing resilience over fragility, adaptability over narrowness, and longevity over short-term performance.
The strongest people I know aren’t just good at one thing. They can lift, run, hike, play, move, and recover. They’re still saying yes to adventures in their 50s, 60s, and beyond.
And that’s the kind of life I want for myself, and for every client who walks into my gym.
Because fitness isn’t about being the best in the world. It’s about being better equipped for your world.