Training philosophies — TriPeak
Polarised, pyramidal, threshold, sweet spot: what each commits to, who it suits, how it fails, and the research behind it.
Six ways to distribute training intensity across a week. Each ships with the research behind it and a plain statement of how it fails.
Polarised — Most of it easy, some of it very hard, almost none in between.
Roughly 80% easy, 5% moderate, 15% hard, measured as a share of weekly training time.
The argument starts from an observation: when the training of elite endurance athletes is measured rather than recalled, very little of it sits at threshold. Most is easy enough to hold a conversation through, and what is left is genuinely hard. The middle, where it is tempting to spend every session, is largely absent.
Suits: Athletes with the hours to make the easy volume count, and a training age high enough that hard days are genuinely hard.
Watch out for: Needs volume to work. On six hours a week, eighty percent easy is not much stimulus, and this is the philosophy most often applied by people who do not have the hours it assumes.
Evidence: Rests largely on observational work describing what elite endurance athletes actually do, plus a handful of small trials favouring it over threshold-focused training. Descriptive rather than prescriptive: that elites train this way does not establish that it made them elite.
Polarised training in full, with the research
Pyramidal — A wide easy base, a decent slab of tempo, a little at the top.
Roughly 70% easy, 20% moderate, 10% hard, measured as a share of weekly training time.
Pyramidal training keeps the large easy base but refuses to treat moderate work as wasted. The shape is the name: most time easy, less at tempo, least at the top, each layer smaller than the one below it.
Suits: Most age-group triathletes most of the time, and anyone training for events lasting several hours.
Watch out for: Easy to let the moderate share creep upward until the whole week is grey and nothing is either restful or hard.
Evidence: The distribution most commonly observed in trained endurance athletes when their actual training is measured rather than self-reported, particularly in longer events. Comparisons with polarised training are mixed and often underpowered.
Pyramidal training in full, with the research
Controlled threshold — A lot of work at the edge, held deliberately below the cliff.
Roughly 75% easy, 20% moderate, 5% hard, measured as a share of weekly training time.
The method is built on a distinction between two thresholds. The first is where blood lactate first rises above resting levels; the second is the highest intensity at which production and clearance still balance. The training sits deliberately between them, and never above the second.
Suits: High training age, good recovery, and an athlete who can be measured often and will stick to a target.
Watch out for: The whole method rests on the word "controlled". Done a little too hard it becomes chronic overreaching, and the version most often copied is the intensity without the restraint or the monitoring.
Evidence: Popularised by a distinctive national middle-distance running programme and adopted widely since. Strong results at elite level; little controlled evidence that it transfers to athletes training half the hours with none of the testing.
Controlled threshold training in full, with the research
Sweet spot — For the six-hour week: the most fitness per hour available.
Roughly 55% easy, 40% moderate, 5% hard, measured as a share of weekly training time.
The reasoning is arithmetic before it is physiological. Adaptation scales with both how hard a session is and how long it lasts, and the product of the two peaks somewhat below threshold — hard enough to matter, easy enough to sustain for twenty or thirty minutes at a time and to repeat within the same week.
Suits: Athletes on eight hours a week or fewer, especially in winter or around a demanding job.
Watch out for: Sustained for months it flattens out: the same moderate stimulus stops adapting and leaves an athlete permanently slightly tired. Needs deliberate easy weeks and a change of emphasis two or three times a year.
Evidence: Rests on the straightforward observation that adaptation scales with both intensity and duration, and that just below threshold is where their product peaks for a given hour. Well established as efficient; less clear that it is superior when hours are not limited.
Sweet spot training in full, with the research
Aerobic base — Build the engine first. Speed is what you do to it later.
Roughly 88% easy, 10% moderate, 2% hard, measured as a share of weekly training time.
The claim is that the slow adaptations are the ones that matter most and take longest: capillary density, mitochondrial content, the heart's stroke volume, the body's willingness to burn fat rather than glycogen. These respond to duration and frequency far more than to intensity, and they take months rather than weeks.
Suits: Athletes returning from a break, new to endurance sport, coming back from injury, or with a long runway to a late-season race.
Watch out for: Slow to show results and easy to abandon in week five. Held too long it leaves an athlete aerobically strong and unable to go fast — the base has to be built on eventually.
Evidence: The oldest of these approaches and the least formally tested, since nobody runs a controlled trial over two years. Consistent with what is known about mitochondrial and capillary adaptation to prolonged low-intensity work.
Aerobic base training in full, with the research
Reverse periodisation — Sharpen in the winter, build the distance into the spring.
Roughly 65% easy, 20% moderate, 15% hard, measured as a share of weekly training time.
Traditional periodisation builds volume first and adds intensity as the race approaches. Reverse periodisation does the opposite, and the argument for it is mostly practical: in a northern winter the long outdoor sessions are the ones that are hard to do, and the short sharp ones are the ones a trainer or a pool can deliver.
Suits: Northern winters, early-season races, and athletes who can only train long at weekends in good weather.
Watch out for: Front-loads the hardest work into the time of year with the least recovery and the least daylight. Needs a real easy week every third or fourth or it unravels in February.
Evidence: A scheduling argument more than a physiological one: the ordering suits the calendar rather than a known adaptation sequence. Comparisons with traditional periodisation are largely inconclusive.
Reverse periodisation training in full, with the research
Guides
- Polarised training for triathlon — what it is, who it suits, what the evidence says
- Pyramidal training for triathlon — what it is, who it suits, what the evidence says
- Controlled threshold training for triathlon — what it is, who it suits, what the evidence says
- Sweet spot training for triathlon — what it is, who it suits, what the evidence says
- Aerobic base training for triathlon — what it is, who it suits, what the evidence says
- Reverse periodisation training for triathlon — what it is, who it suits, what the evidence says
- Training Stress Score (TSS) explained — how one number measures a session
- CTL, ATL and TSB explained — fitness, fatigue and form
- How TriPeak is different — the choices behind the product
- TriPeak upload API — send a FIT file from any app
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