About the Book
The Practice of Change looks at training as a living process rather than a set of rules. It explores how bodies learn, adapt, and reorganise themselves over time, and why the most meaningful progress often emerges quietly, shaped as much by rhythm, timing, and environment as by effort.
Drawing on physiology, biomechanics, and the craft of coaching, the book follows the patterns that sit underneath effective training: the dialogue between stress and recovery, the slow stabilisation of skill, and the way coordination, confidence, and capacity grow together. It’s a way of understanding training that works with the body rather than against it — one that helps athletes, coaches, and everyday lifters find a rhythm that makes long-term change feel possible.
Rather than offering a system to follow, The Practice of Change provides a clearer view of how change really happens. It’s an invitation to step back, notice what the body is doing, and build training around signals that matter instead of the noise that surrounds them.
What You'll Learn
Training starts to make more sense when you can see the patterns that sit underneath it. The book spends time with those patterns, not to simplify them into rules, but to show how bodies change when the conditions are right. It looks at the steady conversation between stress and recovery, and how that rhythm shapes strength, skill, and confidence over time. It shows how movements settle when they’re practised with attention, and why coordination isn’t something you force but something the body grows into.
As the ideas unfold, the focus shifts from chasing effort to understanding timing. You start to notice how the nervous system organises movement, how strength becomes more predictable as patterns stabilise, and how capacity builds quietly when you aren’t constantly interrupting the process. The aim isn’t to offer a method. It’s to give you a clearer view of what actually drives long-term improvement — the slow, steady accumulation of work that fits the person you are, rather than the plan you think you should follow.
The result is a different way of looking at training: one that trusts the body to adapt, and trusts the process to work when the noise around it begins to fade.
Who the Book Is For
This book is for anyone who trains and sometimes feels that the process should make more sense than it does. It’s for people who have worked hard, often for years, and still sense that effort alone isn’t the thing that really drives progress. Whether you’re an athlete trying to understand how to organise your work, a coach looking for clearer ways to guide others, or simply someone who wants their training to feel less chaotic, the ideas here are written with you in mind.
It’s also for those who are tired of being pulled between systems, trends, and promises. If you’ve ever felt that training becomes harder to understand the more rules you try to follow, this book is an attempt to offer a calmer view. Not a philosophy to subscribe to, but a way of noticing what is already happening in your training, and why some approaches feel more sustainable than others.
Most of all, it’s for readers who want to work with their bodies rather than against them. People who sense that progress doesn’t need to be dramatic to be real, and that long-term change grows from rhythms that are quieter, steadier, and more honest than the noise surrounding them.
About Dan Cleather
Dan Cleather has spent most of his life trying to understand how people get better at the things they care about. Sometimes that has meant coaching athletes in weight rooms and on tracks; sometimes it has meant teaching critical thinking and research skills; sometimes it has meant writing books to make sense of training in a way that feels human rather than mechanical.
His work has always followed the same thread: training is a process of change, not a set of rules. Bodies learn, adapt, and reorganise themselves over time, because that is what the are designed to do. He tries to help people see that process more clearly - coaches, athletes, teachers, and anyone interested in long-term development.
Over the years he has worked across elite sport, academia, and high-performance environments, including the English Institute of Sport, St Mary’s University, and as a collaborator with national space agencies. Those experiences shaped his interest in how stress, rhythm, coordination, and load interact to produce real, durable change.
The Training Wisdom Collection brings this work together: a set of books, courses, and resources built on first principles rather than trends. The aim is not to provide a system to follow, but a set of tools to think with - a way of making sense of training that respects both physiology and practice, theory and craft.
He lives in Prague, where he writes, teaches, and continues to explore how people learn, move, and adapt.
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.
