Tactics Win Battles. Logistics Win Wars.

As a child growing up in Southern Ontario, I vividly remember my father putting on old black-and-white war reels from the Second World War. On damp, bitterly cold winter weekends, we would sit inside and watch grainy footage of the Battle of Stalingrad or the Battle of the Coral Sea.

The sounds were hypnotic — engines droning, bombs falling, tanks grinding forward. By the end of each reel, the story was always the same: the Germans or the Japanese were driven back, and the Red Army or the U.S. Navy stood victorious.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned something critical: it wasn’t tactics that decided those wars. It was logistics.

Training Makes the Same Mistake

Modern sport training makes the same error historians once did. Coaches obsess over tactics: sets and reps, exercise order, percentages and schemes. These things matter, but they are not decisive.

What determines long-term performance isn’t tactical precision. It’s energy. Energy is the logistics of training.

The central question isn’t “What did we do today?” It’s “What did this cost the athlete — and can they afford it?”

What Li Yan Taught Me About the Battery

While working with the Chinese national speed skating program, I spent years learning from Li Yan, one of the most successful coaches in Olympic history.

What stood out wasn’t a drill, a system, or a secret method. It was how she thought about consequences — not immediate ones, but delayed ones.

She explained that she trained the same athletes differently each year of an Olympic cycle: Year 1 relatively easy. Year 2 higher volume. Year 3 the hardest year. Year 4 realization of previous work.

She wasn’t talking about tapering for a meet or resting for a week. She was talking about protecting something fragile — something that, once lost, could not be rushed back. She warned me that athletes could work themselves into a hole so deep it could take more than a year to escape.

At the time, I understood the words. I didn’t yet understand the cost.

I would eventually see what happens when that warning is ignored.

A Saturday Night at the Changchun Oval

From 2006 to 2010, I worked with both the Chinese short track and long track teams. Short track was centralized and tightly controlled in Beijing. Long track, based in Changchun, was decentralized — each coach ran their own stable of athletes and made their own decisions.

The Changchun Olympic Oval. Cavernous, cold, and silent — except on Saturday nights when one coach pushed athletes past what the battery could afford.

Most teams followed the same unspoken agreement: two sessions per day during the week, one session Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon and Sunday off. Recovery wasn’t emphasized, but at least it was respected.

One Saturday night, I decided to take a walk inside the Changchun Olympic Oval. The building was massive. Cavernous. When the lights were off, it felt less like a rink and more like an abandoned aircraft hangar. The air was cold and still. Every footstep echoed longer than it should have.

Then, at the far end of the oval, a door opened. A thin slice of light cut across the ice. A small group of athletes shuffled in, quietly, almost cautiously, as if they weren’t supposed to be there.

It was Saturday night.

Then I heard the voice. I recognized it before I could see her. Coach “Mei.” She had a reputation — one that followed her quietly through the system — for breaking athletes with volume. For believing that more work always meant more commitment, more toughness, more results.

As long as I was in China, her athletes never performed well. Some faded quietly. Some stalled. Some disappeared from the system entirely. No one called it overtraining. No one sounded an alarm. It just quietly ended careers.

That night didn’t just change how I viewed training. It changed what I felt responsible for.

Ten Laws of the Athlete Battery

What I eventually understood is this: training programs don’t succeed because they’re clever. They succeed because the athlete has the capacity to support the work. Energy is the true currency of high performance.