The To Succeed Blog
Insights Across
Every Series
Sport coaching, travel guides, interview preparation, AI skills and exam strategies — practical articles written by our coaching team.
Sports & Fitness
Walking To Succeed: The Real Number That Actually Matters
10,000 steps started as 1965 pedometer marketing, not a clinical finding. Walking To Succeed replaces it with what the real dose-response research actually shows — and is honest about what walking alone can't claim.
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Travel Guides
The Farne Islands and Cornwall: Where British Diving Isn't About Wrecks at All
The Farne Islands' playful grey seal colony and Cornwall's kelp-forest reefs are two of Great Britain's best dives, and neither has anything to do with a shipwreck.
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Travel Guides
Scapa Flow's Scuttled Fleet: How Ernest Cox Salvaged the World's Greatest Wreck-Diving Site
On 21 June 1919, the interned German High Seas Fleet was scuttled in one afternoon at Scapa Flow. The salvage operation that followed, and the wrecks left behind, are why the site remains one of the world's great dive destinations.
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Sports & Fitness
Hydration for Young Athletes: What the Sports Science Actually Recommends
Thirst is not always a reliable early-warning system, sweat rates vary enormously between children, and the right amount of fluid depends heavily on age and heat. Here is what the sports science research actually says.
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Exam Guides
How Junior Cycle History Actually Assesses Students Now (It's Not the Old Leaving Cert Model)
Junior Cycle History has not been assessed by a single terminal written exam for years. Here is what the current specification actually asks students to do, in plain terms.
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Interview Prep
The First Seven Seconds: What the Research Actually Says About Job Interview First Impressions
Interview coaching often repeats a single dramatic number for how fast a first impression forms. The real research is more interesting than one number — and more useful to know before you walk in.
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AI & Digital Skills
Why (Almost) Every Cyberattack Still Starts With an Email
Firewalls, endpoint protection and multi-factor authentication have all improved — and the single biggest point of entry for an attacker has stayed almost exactly where it was in 2019: the inbox.
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Travel Guides
The Munros: Scotland's 282 Mountains, and the Man Who Never Finished His Own List
Before 1891, most people thought Scotland had around thirty mountains over 3,000 feet. One man's list proved there were nearly three hundred — and he died with three of his own left unclimbed.
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Travel Guides
St Andrews: The Real History of the Home of Golf
St Andrews earned its title the slow way — through centuries of play and one man's transformation of the links into something close to the course golfers recognise today. Here is the documented history.
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Sports & Fitness
161 Years Older Than Almost Any Other Sport's Rulebook: The Real History of the Laws of Cricket
Cricket is still played under Laws first written down in 1788 by a club that still owns them today. Here is the real, documented history behind that remarkable continuity.
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Sports & Fitness
Love, Deuce and the Clock Face: Where Tennis Scoring Actually Comes From
Fifteen, thirty, forty, game. No other major sport counts like tennis does — and nobody is entirely sure why. Here is what the historical record actually supports, and where it runs out.
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Sports & Fitness
The Code of Points: How Gymnastics Scoring Actually Works (and Why the Perfect 10 Disappeared)
Nadia Comaneci's perfect 10s are gymnastics history's most famous scores — and a score that no longer exists. Here is what replaced it, why, and what a modern gymnastics score actually measures.
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Sports & Fitness
Ireland's Rowing Revolution: Skibbereen, the O'Donovan Brothers and a Small Club's Outsized Story
A small West Cork town with a rowing club founded in 1970 has produced back-to-back Olympic gold medallists. Here is the real story of Skibbereen Rowing Club, told straight, for anyone opening Row To Succeed.
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Travel Guides
Scuba Diving Great Britain: Scapa Flow's Wrecks, the Farne Islands' Seals and Cornwall's Reefs
The direct sequel to Scuba Diving Ireland, now covering England, Scotland and Wales — the scuttled German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow, the Farne Islands' grey seals, and Cornwall's reefs, across thirteen regional chapters.
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Water Sports
Sail Further: The Bridge From Dinghy Sailor to Cruising Crew
The companion to Sailing to Succeed — for a reader who can already handle a dinghy and wants to know what genuinely changes moving to a keelboat: navigation, COLREGs, docking, and the honest path to chartering.
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Water Sports
Sailing to Succeed: A Zero-Experience Guide to Learning to Sail a Dinghy
Our newest Water Sports title fills a real gap in the shelf: a true-beginner dinghy sailing guide built around the real RYA and Irish Sailing training pathways, not a chartering guide for people who already sail.
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Travel Guides
Sailing the Eastern Aegean: A Second Cruising Companion, for the Sporades, the Dodecanese and Crete
Our twelfth Travel Guide, and the second for sailors — three further cruising grounds that Sailing Greece deliberately left out, matched to your crew and honest about where the research runs thinner.
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Creative Skills
Draw Photorealistic Portraits in 30 Days: A New Course, and a New Category for This Series
Our first title outside sport, travel, interview prep, AI skills and exam guides — a structured 30-day graphite portrait course, with a five-stage demonstration panel for every single lesson.
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Travel Guides
Sailing Greece: A Cruising Companion for the Ionian, the Saronic Gulf and the Cyclades
Our eleventh Travel Guide, and the first for sailors — three cruising grounds, matched to your crew, honest about the meltemi, and deliberately silent on prices that would only go out of date.
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Sports & Fitness
Balance First: A Book That Puts Falls Prevention Before Strength
Most books in this niche put strength on the cover and balance in a chapter near the back. Balance First is built the other way round, because that is what the evidence actually supports.
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Sports & Fitness
Splash to a Mile: A Book for Anyone Who Never Learned to Swim
Swim to Succeed is for junior and competitive swimmers. Open Water Swimming to Succeed assumes you can already swim. Nothing in the catalogue was written for someone who can't swim at all — until now.
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Sports & Fitness
Your First Year in the Gym: A Book for the Person Still Standing at the Door
Most strength books start with a barbell. Almost nobody starts with a barbell. Our newest Sports & Fitness title starts where beginners actually stand — in front of a pin-loaded machine, wondering how the seat adjusts.
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Travel Guides
Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way: A Campervan, Motorhome & RV Road Trip Guide
Our tenth Travel Guide, and the first built specifically for campervans, motorhomes and RVs — 54 stops across all six official Wild Atlantic Way regions, Cork to Donegal.
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Exam Guides
HPAT and UCAT To Succeed: Two New Guides for Third-Level Entry Tests
Two strategy guides for the admission tests that sit between Irish and UK students and a place in medicine — with original practice questions and full mock exams, and no reproduced past papers.
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Endurance
Duathlon To Succeed: The Run-Bike-Run Guide We Kept Being Asked For
Duathlon sits in the gap between our running and triathlon titles — and the transitions that decide races get almost no coverage anywhere else. 142 pages, 85 chapters.
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Parenting in Sport
Parents & Performance: Two New Books on Supporting Young Athletes and Competitive Gamers
The Sports Parent's Guide and Gaming Performance To Succeed open a new subcategory in the Sports & Fitness series — written for the adults on the sideline and the players in front of a screen.
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New Releases
Five New Sports Join the Series: GAA Football, Hurling, Boxing, Netball and Surfing
Five new coaching guides bring the Sports & Fitness series to 46 books — including the two Irish field sports we have been asked for more than any others.
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Travel Guides
Introducing the Travel Guides: Nine Books to Bring on the Trip
Our fifth series is nothing like the other four. Nine premium travel guides to golf, surf, climbing and diving across Ireland, Scotland, England and the UK — written for the trip itself, not just the planning.
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Custom Books
Introducing Custom Books: Commission a Guide for Your Sport or Club
We've built 75 books across four series. Now we're opening that pipeline to clubs and organisations who want a book of their own — either brand new, or tailored to their identity.
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Exam Guides
How to Get a Distinction in Junior Cycle History: The Complete Model Answer Guide
Most JC History students lose marks on the same predictable question types. Here is the model answer structure that consistently earns Distinction.
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Exam Guides
Junior Cycle vs Leaving Cert: What Every Irish Parent Needs to Know
The Irish second-level system has changed significantly in the last five years. A plain-English guide for parents navigating Junior Cycle and Leaving Cert.
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AI & Digital
How to Use AI to Cut Your Admin Time in Half
The professionals saving the most time with AI are the ones who identified their three biggest time drains and built simple AI habits around them.
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AI & Digital
ChatGPT vs Claude: Which AI Tool Should Professionals Use in 2026?
Both tools are remarkable — but they excel in different areas. A practical comparison for working professionals who want to use AI to get more done.
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Interview Prep
The STAR Framework: How to Structure Any Competency Interview Answer
STAR is the gold standard for competency interview answers. Here is how to use it properly — and the mistakes most candidates make.
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Interview Prep
7 Questions Irish School Interview Boards Ask Every Candidate (And How to Answer Them)
Irish school leadership interview boards follow predictable patterns. Here are the seven questions that appear on almost every panel — and the framework for answering them.
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Endurance
Trail Running vs Road Running: A Coach's Guide for Junior Athletes
Trail running has gone from niche to mainstream in junior endurance sport. But is it better than road running for developing juniors? The answer is more nuanced than you might think.
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Recovery
The Science of Recovery: Sleep, Nutrition & Rest for Junior Athletes
Recovery isn't passive. It's where adaptation actually happens. And for junior athletes, the recovery requirements are significantly higher than most coaches and parents realise.
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Parenting in Sport
How to Pick the Right First Sport for Your Child (Ages 6–12)
Sport specialisation before age 12 is a mistake most youth sport science agrees on. Here's how to think about early sport choices and what actually sets athletes up for long-term success.
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Open Water
Cold Water Swimming: The Complete Safety & Training Guide for Parents
Open water and wild swimming have exploded in popularity. But cold water has genuine risks. Here's what every parent of a junior swimmer needs to know.
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Sports Psychology
Why Sports Psychology Is the Secret Weapon Most Junior Athletes Are Missing
Physical training gets 90% of the attention. But research consistently shows mental skills training is what separates good athletes from great ones.
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Training Science
The 5 Signs Your Junior Athlete Is Overtrained (And What To Do About It)
Overtraining syndrome is one of the most underdiagnosed problems in junior sport. Here's how to spot it before it derails your athlete's season.
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Travel Guides
The Open Rota and the Road Hole
The oldest championship in golf, the small group of links courses that host it, and the 495-yard par four that has been beating the world's best players for well over a century.
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Water Sports
How Competitive Surfing Is Actually Judged, and How It Reached the Olympics
Two organisations run competitive surfing, five judges score every wave, and only two waves count. Here is how the scoring works and how the sport got from world tour to Olympic programme.
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Interview Prep
What Interview Boards Actually Score: The Evidence Behind Structured Interviews
Structured interviews predict job performance better than unstructured ones. The research behind that claim is solid, but the famous numbers have been revised. Here is what the evidence supports, and what it means for your preparation.
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Travel Guides
First Ascents That Shaped British and Irish Climbing
A rock tower in Wasdale, a fin of basalt on Skye and a disused granite quarry in south Dublin. Three places where climbing in these islands became a thing people did for its own sake.
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Netball
Netball's Institutional History: A Misread Diagram, a World Cup and a Fifty-Year Olympic Campaign
Netball began as an adaptation of basketball, spread through the schools of the British Empire, and has been recognised by the IOC since 1995 without ever appearing at an Olympic Games. Here is the real institutional record, including where the game stands now in Britain and Ireland.
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Exam Guides
What Aptitude Tests Actually Measure, and Whether You Can Prepare for Them
The HPAT and the UCAT decide entry to medicine in Ireland and the UK, and almost everything about preparing for them is disputed. Here is the structure, the scoring, and an honest account of the disagreement over coaching.
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Gaming Performance
What Peer-Reviewed Research Actually Says About Esports and the Body
Injury rates, wrist fatigue, reaction time and the new caffeine rules. What the published evidence supports, what it does not, and what a competitive player should do about it.
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AI & Digital Skills
AI and Work: What the Evidence Shows, Not What the Headlines Say
Official statistics and field experiments tell a more careful story than the coverage does. Adoption is wide but shallow, exposure is not the same as replacement, and the productivity findings point in more than one direction.
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Travel Guides
Mullaghmore and Aileen's: The Real Story of Irish Big-Wave Surfing
Two Irish waves changed how the surfing world thinks about the North Atlantic. Here is when they were first ridden, what makes them work, and why the reported wave heights should be read with care.
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GAA & Gaelic Games
Hurling's Long History: From the Tain to the Liam MacCarthy Cup
Hurling appears in early Irish literature, in early Irish law, and in a fourteenth-century statute that tried to ban it. Here is the documented history of the game, its cup, its record-holders and its UNESCO status.
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Behind the Books
Behind the Books: How We Research and Build a Title
A catalogue this size invites a fair suspicion: is there a real editorial process, or a template with the nouns swapped out? Here is how a To Succeed title is actually researched, reviewed and held to a standard.
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Endurance
Duathlon's Real History: From Biathlon to Zofingen and the World Titles
Duathlon is usually explained as a triathlon with the swim removed. It has its own history, its own governing structure and its own classic race, and none of it was designed as a consolation prize.
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Interview Prep
Oide, Cineáltas and Bí Cineálta: Getting the Names Right in an Irish Leadership Interview
Irish teacher and school-leader support was restructured in 2023, and the anti-bullying framework changed again in 2024. Using the old names in front of a board is one of the cheapest marks a candidate can lose.
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Travel Guides
La Girona: The Armada Wreck at Lacada Point
A Spanish galleass went onto the rocks near the Giant's Causeway in October 1588 with well over a thousand people aboard. Almost four centuries later a Belgian diver found what was left of her.
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Boxing
What Sports Science Says About Boxing, and What Ireland's Olympic Record Says About Boxing in Ireland
Punch force comes mostly from the floor, the gap between expert and novice boxers is not raw reaction speed, and fatigue degrades mechanics before it degrades effort. Set alongside Ireland's Olympic boxing record, the research points somewhere specific for junior coaching.
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Parenting in Sport
The Relative Age Effect, Bio-Banding, and What Parents Can Actually Do
A finding from 1985 explains why your child's birth month may matter more than their ability. Here is the research, what academies are doing about it, and what the evidence says parents should do.
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Study Skills
The Study Science That Actually Works: Spaced Repetition and Retrieval Practice
Most students revise in a way that feels productive and then underperforms. Here is what the research on spacing, retrieval practice and interleaving actually supports, and where it runs out.
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AI & Digital Skills
What Has Actually Changed in Everyday AI Tools
Long context, file handling, live web access and tool use have quietly reshaped what the main AI assistants can do. Here is what genuinely changed, what is overstated, and why naming a model version is a poor way to plan.
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Travel Guides
Loch Lomond and the Scottish Open: What Actually Happened
For fifteen years Loch Lomond was one of the best-known addresses in European golf, and then it stopped being one almost overnight. The real history includes a naming muddle that produced two Scottish Opens in the same year.
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GAA & Gaelic Games
Sam Maguire: The Real History of Gaelic Football's Most Famous Cup
Ask a young player what the Sam Maguire is and you will get the right answer. Ask who Sam Maguire was and the answers thin out fast. Here is the real history of the cup, the county records, and a championship that has been redesigned more often than most people realise.
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