How to increase starter's strength/activity?

[Brent-r]

there has been so much weird stuff written about the nurture of starters that Voodoo comes to mind.

The Mike Mavery's newsletter recently published an article on maintaining sourdough starter that makes
a lot of sense to me and in the few short feedings since I read and adopted this technique just makes
simple sense out the confusion.

If you go by traditional methods and take a cup of starter that is mature doing nothing next to nothing in your fridge
and throw half away and add back enough fresh flower to restore the volume... then half of everything in you jar is useless to the
yeasts and bacteria .... they already ate everything good in that lot a day or two ago.  You've got 50% fresh and 50% exhausted
stuff in the jar. 
 But if you toss 95% and restore the volume with lots of fresh flour then there is food everywhere in the jar for the little
critters to feast on.   

see https://www.sourdoughhome.com/index.php?content=blog/2019-06-11fivepercentsolution

In the few weeks since he wrote this and we tried it our starter bounces back to like in a few hours.

[andytiedye]

This all sounds good, except the part about discarding sourdough.  We never do that. we make sourdough pancakes or waffles.  If the sourdough is still a bit sleepy from the fridge, some baking soda will help it rise.  We only put it in the fridge if we are going to be away, since between pizza, bread, pancakes and whatever else we can think of, we use it at least every other day.