Every few years, endurance sport decides something is ridiculous until it isn’t.
Minimalist running. Strength training for runners. Foam rolling. Mental skills. All once dismissed, all now normalized. The pattern is familiar: if a practice doesn’t fit the narrow definition of “real running,” it gets labeled fluffy, dangerous, or unserious. Until research, experience, and aging bodies force a reckoning.
Right now, a new wave of practices is sitting in that same uncomfortable space. Weighted vests. Grip strength. Hybrid formats like HYROX. And the reason they’re getting pushback has less to do with science and more to do with what they expose.
These aren’t really about performance hacks.
They’re about capacity.
And capacity makes people nervous.
This isn’t the first time running culture has dismissed emerging ideas before eventually embracing them. We’ve seen this pattern before with minimalist running, strength training, and mental skills—practices that once lived on the fringe before becoming mainstream. I explored that evolution in more depth in From Pseudoscience to Proven: Running Practices That Went from Myth to Mainstream, and what’s happening now follows the exact same arc.
Grip Strength Isn’t a Metric — It’s a Survival Skill
Grip strength often gets reduced to a number on a dynamometer. Good grip. Bad grip. Above average. Below average. Which makes it easy to dismiss as irrelevant to runners.
But grip strength isn’t about hand strength.
It’s about independence.
Grip strength correlates strongly with overall strength, neurological health, injury risk, and mortality. Not because gripping harder magically keeps you alive, but because it reflects how well your nervous system and musculature are functioning together.
Here’s the part endurance culture tends to avoid.
As we age, falls are one of the biggest threats to independence. Not the fall itself, but what happens next. The ability to grab something. To push up off the ground. To stabilize your body under unexpected load. If you can’t grip, you can’t assist your own recovery.
That’s not abstract.
That’s real life.
Grip strength is one of the simplest proxies we have for “can this person interact with the world under stress?” It shows up early when someone is under-recovered, under-fueled, hormonally dysregulated, or neurologically taxed. It declines quietly before bigger problems appear.
For runners, grip strength matters because running doesn’t exist in isolation. Arm swing, posture, trunk stability, and neural drive all depend on integrated strength. When grip fades, it’s often a sign that the system as a whole is struggling.
This isn’t about turning runners into lifters.
It’s about keeping bodies usable.
Weighted Vests: Load Isn’t the Enemy — Context Is
Weighted vests get a similar reaction. People see them and immediately jump to extremes. Either they’re revolutionary or they’re reckless.
But load itself isn’t controversial.
Poorly applied load is.
Humans have carried weight for as long as we’ve existed. What’s new is runners adding load without understanding tissue tolerance, recovery capacity, or intent. A weighted vest isn’t a toy. It’s a stressor. And like any stressor, it can build resilience or break things depending on how it’s used.
Strategic weighted walking or short, controlled sessions can improve bone density, posterior chain strength, and connective tissue resilience. This matters enormously for menopausal and masters athletes whose bone and tendon health are already under pressure.
Dismissal usually happens because people see others throwing on 20 pounds and running easy miles like it’s seasoning instead of stimulus. That’s not a vest problem. That’s a coaching problem.
This will follow the same arc as minimalist running. Not for everyone. Not all the time. But absolutely useful when applied with intention.
HYROX and the Identity Crisis of Endurance Sport
HYROX makes endurance purists deeply uncomfortable, which is usually a sign that it’s touching a nerve worth examining.
It blends running with strength. It rewards durability, work capacity, and the ability to move well while fatigued. It doesn’t care about perfect pacing charts or pretty splits. And because of that, it gets dismissed as chaotic or “not real running.”
But what HYROX actually exposes is the cost of over-specialization.
Endurance athletes have spent decades optimizing for efficiency in ideal conditions while quietly losing robustness. Hybrid formats ask a different question. Not how fast you can go when everything is controlled, but how well you can function when you’re tired, loaded, and under systemic stress.
That question becomes more important with age, not less.
HYROX isn’t a replacement for traditional racing. It’s a stress test for capacity. And capacity is what keeps people training, competing, and living independently longer.
Why These Trends Trigger Resistance
There’s a common thread running through all of this.
Grip strength challenges the idea that only legs matter.
Weighted vests challenge the idea that mileage alone is sufficient.
HYROX challenges the idea that endurance should be narrow and aesthetic.
Each one forces a conversation about strength, load tolerance, nervous system health, and aging that running culture has historically avoided. Calling them pseudoscience is easier than admitting the model is incomplete.
This Isn’t About Doing Everything — It’s About Seeing Clearly
Not every runner needs a weighted vest.
Not every runner needs HYROX.
Not every runner needs aggressive grip training.
But pretending these trends are nonsense because they don’t fit a clean endurance narrative is lazy thinking. The real work is discernment. Who benefits. When. Why. And at what cost.
Performance isn’t just about cardiovascular capacity anymore.
It’s about staying capable.
Can you tolerate load?
Can you recover under stress?
Can you get back up when something goes wrong?
That’s not mysticism.
That’s biology.
And once again, what we’re calling pseudoscience today is really just reality catching up with tradition.