TriPeak

Controlled threshold training

A lot of work at the edge, held deliberately below the cliff.

How the week is distributed

A controlled threshold week puts roughly 75% of training time easy, 20% moderate and 5% hard. The percentages are of time, not of sessions — which is why a week with two hard sessions in it can still be 75% easy.

Easy

75% of weekly training time

Moderate

20%

Hard

5%

How it plans

• Accumulate large volumes of work near threshold, kept strictly sub-maximal — the session should end feeling repeatable.
• Split threshold work into intervals rather than continuous blocks, so the intensity stays controlled for longer.
• Twice-daily threshold days are possible for well-adapted athletes, one session in the morning and one in the afternoon, both restrained.
• Measure. This approach depends on knowing where threshold is and staying under it, so test often and use lactate or a well-calibrated proxy.
• Keep genuinely maximal work rare — it is a sharpening tool, not the training.

Why it is meant to work

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.

Because that intensity is sub-maximal, far more of it can be accumulated than of true interval work — and because it is broken into intervals rather than run continuously, the intensity can be held there for longer without drifting up. Two such sessions in a day, morning and afternoon, is the distinctive feature, and is only possible because each one is restrained.

The whole method depends on knowing where the line is and not crossing it, which is why its practitioners measure lactate directly rather than trusting pace or heart rate. Without the measurement it is not this method; it is simply a lot of hard running.

Who it suits, and how it fails

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.

Strength of 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.

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. Norwegian double-threshold method in distance running: systematic literature review (2024), Scientific Journal of Sport and PerformanceThe most direct review of the approach. Describes the protocol as it is actually run — morning and evening sub-threshold sessions, lactate held around 2–4 mmol/L, two or three days between double days. Notes how little controlled evidence exists for it outside elite practice.
2. Bakken, The Norwegian model of lactate threshold trainingA first-hand account from the athlete who developed much of it. Not peer-reviewed and not neutral, but the clearest description of the reasoning, and honest about how much monitoring it assumes.
3. Rosenblat, Perrotta & Vicenzino (2019), Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 33(12):3491–3500Included here because it is the case against: in the four trials it pooled, threshold-focused training came out behind polarised for time-trial performance. The threshold training in those trials was not lactate-guided double-threshold work, which is a real objection — but it is the closest comparison that exists.