Dawg & Rabbit FitnessThe gap between a generic plan and a truly individualized one is where most athletes stall.
Most programs hand you a spreadsheet — a block of squats, a week of intervals — and never tell you why that volume, that intensity, that day. They don't adjust when you sleep four hours, when life stress spikes, or when your last block already pushed you past the productive edge. Dawg & Rabbit Fitness was built to close that gap with the science that already exists.
Coach-grade training, without the full-time coach.
Elite athletes have coaches who watch every session, read every rep, and adjust the next block before the athlete ever feels overreached. Everyone else gets a PDF — a template built for a person who isn't them.
Dawg & Rabbit Fitness was built to close that gap: to give any serious athlete the kind of individualized, adaptive, science-governed training that used to require a full-time coach. Not a hype machine. Not a one-size-fits-all plan pretending to be personal. A real training system that reads your data, respects your recovery, and pushes you exactly as hard as you can grow from — and no harder. The premise is simple: you shouldn't need a PhD in exercise physiology to train like someone who has one on staff.
Founded out of necessity.
Dawg & Rabbit Fitness was founded by a competitive athlete who tried the programs everyone recommends — CompTrain, Mayhem, The System, HWPO, Misfit Athletics, PRVN, WodScience — and kept running into the same wall. However well-built each one was, none of them addressed an athlete's specific goals or areas of weakness. They treated everyone the same: the same block for the athlete chasing a first muscle-up and the athlete peaking for semifinals, the same week whether you'd slept eight hours or four.
The frustration was simple — the individualized, periodized programming elite competitors take for granted was either locked behind expensive 1:1 coaching or flattened into a one-size-fits-all template. So the goal became the opposite of another opinion online: start from the peer-reviewed literature, build a deterministic periodization-and-load framework on top of it, and let that framework — not gym lore, and not one champion's routine — build a plan around your goals, your weak points, your schedule, and your recovery. The defining commitment is intellectual honesty: every dial the program turns is traceable to a citation, and those citations are shown to the athlete rather than hidden. Dawg & Rabbit Fitness is operated by EOD 1330 LLC (Texas).
Grounded in peer-reviewed sport science.
These are references the program actually uses — not a reading list. Each governs a specific decision the engine makes.
Banister / Coggan PMC
Fitness (CTL), Fatigue (ATL), and Form (TSB) are modeled daily — the same fitness-fatigue framework elite endurance programs run on.
Foster (1998) — monotony & strain
Session-RPE load across seven calendar days surfaces training that has become too uniform — a pattern Foster linked to higher rates of minor illness. It is a variety signal, not a diagnosis.
Seiler 80/20 + pyramidal (Stöggl & Sperlich 2015)
A large, genuinely-easy Zone-2 base with intentional hard work. For functional fitness the distribution is pyramidal-tolerant — threshold conditioning is programmed on purpose, not junk miles.
Gabbett (2016) — ACWR
Acute:chronic workload ratio shows how fast your load is changing against the baseline you have adapted to. We use the uncoupled form and treat it as a load-dynamics signal, not an injury forecast — Impellizzeri (2020) showed that link is associative, not causal, so Form (TSB) leads and ACWR cross-checks.
Helms / Schoenfeld / Zourdos
Evidence-based hypertrophy, strength, and autoregulation — volume, frequency, and RPE targets drawn from the literature.
Issurin — ATR block periodization
Accumulation → Transmutation → Realization blocks, sequenced so each phase focuses on a small number of adaptations at a time.
Mujika / Bosquet — tapering
Volume-cut, intensity-preserved tapers (and overreach-then-taper sequencing) tuned to peak performance on competition day.
Robineau (2016) · Schlegel (2020)
Strength before conditioning when both share a session, and a six-hour floor between same-day sessions. Robineau's seven-week trial found less than six hours blunts strength gains — and that twenty-four hours beat six, so separate days win when the week allows.
Feito (2018) — HIFT definition
What the engine builds is high-intensity functional training, not HIIT: multimodal work at relative intensity, programmed by time domain rather than fixed work-rest. At most one single-modality conditioning session per week.
Mangine (2020) — CrossFit volume baseline
Recreational Open competitors plateau around five to six sessions per week at sixty to seventy-five minutes, with diminishing returns past seven. Weekly volume targets anchor to that band rather than a generic default.
Schumann (2022) — concurrent training
Across forty-three studies, concurrent aerobic work does not meaningfully cost maximal strength or hypertrophy. The interference lands on explosive and power qualities, so those are what get protected from same-session endurance.
Refalo (2022) · Varela-Olalla (2025) · González-Hernández (2021)
Training to failure is not superior for hypertrophy but costs more fatigue and muscle damage — and the fatigue is worst at light loads taken close to failure. Backing off spares peripheral fatigue, not central: voluntary activation stays depressed for forty-eight hours either way.
Currier (2023) — resistance-training dose network
A 178-study Bayesian network meta-analysis: higher-load (>80% 1RM) multiset prescriptions rank first for strength, and every sensible prescription builds muscle. Governs the strength-phase load bands.
Micke (2026) · Rønnestad (2014) — block periodization trials
A randomized crossover in experienced HIFT athletes found concentrated loading blocks beat an even weekly spread on maximal-strength outcomes at matched volume, without costing conditioning; Rønnestad found the aerobic analog in trained cyclists. Trial evidence behind the block structure.
Hickson (1981–85) · Bickel (2011) · Spiering (2021) — maintenance dosing
Fitness holds for months on a fraction of the training volume — as little as two sessions a week — provided intensity is preserved; cutting intensity loses it, and older athletes need a larger maintenance dose. Governs deload and disrupted-week volume decisions.
Montero & Lundby (2017) — non-response is dose-dependent
Apparent aerobic non-responders responded once weekly training dose increased. When progress stalls despite good adherence and clean recovery, the engine's first lever is more aerobic dose — not harder intervals.
Bell (2023) — deload consensus
A Delphi panel of thirty-four experts: deloads run roughly every four to six weeks for about a week, and are both pre-planned and autoregulated — so when your Form has read overreaching for a week, the next training week the app builds becomes a deload instead of waiting for the calendar.
Explore individual claims, effect sizes, and citations in the evidence hub.
The rabbit in front of you is your next best self.
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