About StratFit
Built From a Question That Wouldn’t Go Away.
StratFit began with a simple problem:
How do you know whether the effort you’re putting into training is actually producing the adaptation you want?
For founder Daniel McKee, that wasn’t an abstract question.
It came from years of training, competing, studying, and coaching—and from refusing to accept that effective training should depend on guesswork.
What started as a personal question eventually became a discipline, a system, a studio, and a company.
All built around one belief:
Your effort should count.
Before It Was a System,
It Was a Question.
Daniel began as an athlete.
In the early 2000s, he trained in bodybuilding and Strongman and experienced firsthand what serious physical preparation demands:
time, discipline, discomfort, consistency, and a willingness to work.
The effort was never the problem.
The harder question was whether that effort was being used well.
You can train hard.
You can become exhausted.
You can follow a program.
But none of those things, by themselves, tell you whether the training is producing the adaptation you intended.
That gap bothered him.
Not because training wasn’t difficult enough.
Because it wasn’t measurable enough.
The problem wasn’t effort. It was knowing whether the effort was being applied effectively.
When the Standard Answers Weren’t Enough.
That question pushed Daniel deeper into training science.
In 2012, he began a more focused study of the systems and principles developed by researchers and coaches including Verkhoshansky, Zatsiorsky, Prilepin, and others who worked with Olympic, elite, and world-class athletes.
He also pursued formal coaching education, including Westside Barbell Special Strengths certification and USA Weightlifting certification.
The goal wasn’t to collect credentials.
It was to understand the principles that make training effective:
adaptation
loading
Progressive Overload
fatigue
strength development
periodization
The deeper he studied, the clearer something became.
The principles were strong.
The real challenge was applying them precisely to an individual athlete, over time, as that athlete changed.
Knowing what works is one problem. Knowing exactly how to apply it to a person is another.
Theory Became Practice.
Study gave Daniel the principles.
Coaching revealed the application problem.
Over the years, he worked with athletes and clients from very different backgrounds:
business professionals, models, actors and actresses, trainers, cricketers, high-level badminton players, strength athletes, and everyday people in Kansas City.
The differences mattered.
A fashion model preparing for a shoot does not train like a strength athlete.
A cricketer building explosive power does not have the same needs as a business owner training for health and longevity.
Different goals.
Different schedules.
Different training histories.
Different recovery capacities.
Different starting points.
The principles could still apply.
But the application had to change.
That experience made one thing unavoidable:
Training principles may be universal. Their application is not.
The athlete changes. The training has to change with them.
The Better the Coaching Became, the Bigger the Problem Became.
Individualization sounds simple until you try to maintain it across:
multiple athletes,
multiple exercises,
multiple weeks,
changing performance,
changing body weight,
fatigue,
missed sessions,
progression,
and competing training demands.
A coach can track a great deal.
But as the number of variables grows, so does the difficulty of integrating all of them consistently.
That was the turning point.
The problem was no longer:
“Do we know enough about training?”
The problem became:
“How do we apply what we know continuously and precisely without losing the individual in the complexity?”
That is where mathematics, computation, and technology entered the picture.
The science existed. The missing piece was a practical system for applying it continuously.
The Pieces Finally Came Together.
TRAINING
How do I know my effort is working?
SCIENCE
How do we apply established principles more precisely?
COACHING
How do we individualize training across changing athletes and changing conditions?
COMPUTATION
How do we measure and regulate that complexity continuously?
By 2024, the same problem had been approaching Daniel from several directions.
From training:
How do I know my effort is working?
From science:
How do we apply established principles more precisely?
From coaching:
How do we individualize training across changing athletes and changing conditions?
From computation:
How do we measure and regulate that complexity continuously?
APPLIED TRAINING SCIENCE
Those questions converged.
Applied Training Science emerged from that convergence:
a framework for turning established training principles into systems that can be measured, modeled, computed, regulated, and individually applied.
The idea was no longer just to know more.
It was to make what was already known more usable.
Your Effort Matters.
The story eventually comes back to where it started.
The athlete.
The person doing the work.
The person choosing to spend an hour training instead of doing something easier.
The person trusting that the effort means something.
Everything StratFit has become—
the study,
the coaching,
the mathematics,
the studio,
the software,
the discipline of Applied Training Science—
exists to make that relationship between effort and progress more measurable, more precise, and less dependent on guesswork.
You still have to do the work.
No system can do that for you.
But if you’re willing to put in the effort, you should have a process worthy of it.