TriPeak

Pyramidal training

A wide easy base, a decent slab of tempo, a little at the top.

How the week is distributed

A pyramidal week puts roughly 70% of training time easy, 20% moderate and 10% hard. The percentages are of time, not of sessions — which is why a week with two hard sessions in it can still be 70% easy.

Easy

70% of weekly training time

Moderate

20%

Hard

10%

How it plans

• Spend most time easy, but do not treat moderate work as wasted — it is where race-specific fitness for long events is built.
• Order the week by decreasing volume as intensity rises: most easy, less tempo, least hard.
• Hold one genuinely hard session a week in most weeks, two in a sharpening block.
• Tempo and sweet spot are the workhorses for half and full distance racing, because that is close to the intensity the race is run at.
• Let the mix shift towards race intensity as the race approaches.

Why it is meant to work

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.

The case for it is specificity. A half-distance triathlon is raced for four or five hours at an intensity that is neither easy nor maximal, and an athlete who has never spent time there arrives unable to hold it. The longer the event, the closer race pace sits to the moderate zone, and the harder it is to argue that zone should be avoided.

It is also what the measured training of elite endurance athletes most often looks like, particularly in longer events and particularly outside the base phase. Where polarised and pyramidal are compared directly, the differences are small — which is itself a reason to prefer the one that includes race-specific work.

Who it suits, and how it fails

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.

Strength of 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.

The research behind it

Every citation below was checked rather than remembered, and each note says what the study found and what it does not establish.

1. Casado et al. (2022), Sports Medicine – Open 8:46Integrates the literature on world-class distance runners with what their coaches actually do. Finds both polarised and pyramidal distributions among athletes at the same level, and that race-pace volume rises as the race approaches. The most useful single read for deciding between the two.
2. Casado et al. (2022), International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance 17(6):820–833Systematic review of periodisation, methods and intensity distribution in highly trained and elite distance runners. Where the claim that elite training is commonly pyramidal comes from.
3. Comparison of Polarized Versus Other Endurance Training Intensity Distributions (2024), Sports MedicineReads as a case for not being dogmatic: no distribution emerges as clearly superior across the literature, which is the strongest argument for the pragmatic middle.