Author: Joachim Cronquist

Anyone who’s ever met an endurance athlete knows that they can be pretty single-minded – they love training and racing and tend to do it hard and often. However, we don’t necessarily believe that this is a fruitful approach. Yes, training is absolutely vital to success in swimrun and triathlon, but what about the quality of that training? 

Let’s face it, training can be pretty addictive, and most athletes enjoy the rush that they get from pushing themselves. However, like everything, this can become a negative, when done to excess. Unfortunately, we meet with too many athletes that assume that if they are not completely exhausted after each training session, then it was a waste of time. Add to this that it is all too common to train in a somewhat random fashion, without a clear race goal or training plan. 

These problems are often compounded when people are new to endurance sports – training for a big race can be a daunting task and if you don’t do it the right way, then you may find it difficult to achieve your goals or even worse, overtraining and getting injured. Note that the above is very common if an athlete trains without structure.

We believe that we can help – by enabling endurance athletes to add structure, shape, and purpose to their endurance training program. Simplifying the things that you need to do to succeed and then helping to design an individual training plan that will allow you to achieve what you want. Thus, we started TOT Endurance, with its sub-brands TOT Triathlon and TOT Swimrun – to help you to train smarter. 

This is the introduction to our article series on how to create your endurance training program and our philosophy about how we formulate our training plans.

Our training philosophy

We like to think about endurance training as a journey – not the kind of journey that you take to work, when all the matters is getting from point a to point b as quickly as possible, but the kind of journey that you take when you are backpacking, where the things that you do along the way are as enrichening as the destination itself.

Our training philosophy builds upon this insight, seeking to give structure, organization, and purpose to your training and racing season. So that you can be as motivated about the training, as you are about the big challenge at the end of it.

The journey is never easy, whether you plan to compete in triathlon or swimrun, whether the race is short, medium or long, whether you’re a first-timer or a seasoned endurance athlete – you’re always going to face challenges along the way. However, those challenges become infinitely more daunting, if you approach your endurance training program in a chaotic manner.

Yet, it’s difficult and time-consuming to come up with a dedicated training plan. We all face real-world demands from family and work, not to mention all the other unexpected things that can spring up over the course of a season. Sprinkle endurance training on top and you have a serious balancing act on your hands. Professional athletes have teams of coaches and other specialists, so they can just focus on their training schedule, but that isn’t available to most people. 

We want to simplify and democratize endurance sports, opening them up to a far larger pool of people – because we passionately believe that with the right guidance anyone can achieve their endurance goals.

This is where our digital service comes in, acting like a digital coach that gives your endurance training purpose and helps you to achieve your goals. It designs an individual endurance training program based on your needs and allows you to take your training to the next level.

5 steps to successful training and racing

If you’re going to balance everyday life with the rigors of endurance training and racing, then you need a plan. This plan can be complicated or simple, but it needs to be realistic and well thought out. To help you discover this plan, we’ve developed five simple steps that will help you define your starting point, your goal, and your journey to get there. We’ll also help you answer how much, how often, and how hard you should workout. Then collate it all into a dedicated individual endurance training program.

In the following articles, we’ll walk you through – 

How to start endurance training – The best way to begin anything is with a realistic assessment of your own abilities – there’s no point in starting an astrophysics course without basic knowledge of maths. The same is true of endurance training, you need to have a realistic understanding of your physical and mental abilities, so you can make a good self-assessment and start at the right level.

Endurance training and racing – Most training seasons revolve around a main race. So, how do you identify it, and what are your training objectives? Do you have a specific time in mind or would completing it be an achievement in itself?

Training volume in endurance sports – You’ll need to slowly build up your capacity over the course of the season, via a series of training sessions. But how many hours do you need to train to achieve your goal – how much and how often do you need to work out?

Endurance training zones – The intensity of your training is vital. Whether you base your training on heart rate, pace or effect, your training zones are the foundation for all training and racing. How hard do you need to work out? How can you avoid overtraining?

Endurance training plan – Most things in life are about quality rather than quantity. Thus, you need to periodize your training. Training for training’s sake is much less helpful than targeted training with a specific purpose. This is why an individual training plan, with different phases, is so important. When do you train what?

Welcome to TOT Endurance

Read more about endurance training

Big days – A part of triathlon training

Bike training at home – Motivational indoor cycling

Swimming training tips – Analyze your swimming

Free trial week of triathlon training

Rock’n’roll – swim drills to improve rotation

The recovery phase – swim drills for endurance

We all have an unfortunate habit of assuming that more is always better – more knowledge is better than less knowledge, more money is better than less money, a faster car is better than a slower car. This problem is often more pronounced in successful people, who have spent their entire lives doing more and getting more out of the world. However, despite working in many situations, more isn’t always better. More has the potential to lead to a reduction in quality while doing things to excess can also lead to problems such as addiction.

This is the fourth in our series of articles on our training philosophy, check out the others here –

1. Our philosophy
2. How to start endurance training – define your baseline
3. Endurance training and racing – finding your goal
4. Training volume in endurance sports
5. Endurance training zones – intensity in endurance racing
6. Endurance training plan – how to periodize training

Endurance athletes are particularly prone to such thinking – planning to run for 26 miles, swim for 2.4 miles, and cycle for 112 miles, clearly shows that a person sees some value in the concept of more! This often extends to the volume of training an athlete does – it’s only natural to assume that 12 hours training is better than 11 hours training because 12 is more than 11. However, that fails to take a holistic approach to a training schedule – focussing on the quantity of training, rather than the quality of training.

Quantity vs quality

This debate between quantity and quality occurs in numerous other aspects of our lives. We usually come down on the side of quantity, because it’s much easier to identify quantity than it is quality. Imagine that you are working as a manager in a company and you have a choice between two prospective employees – one will do 40 hours of average work a week, while the other will do 2 hours of exceptional work each week and sit around doing nothing for the other 38 hours.

Every instinct in your body will probably tell you to hire, the worker who will do 40 hours each week because that is a greater quantity and thus, sounds better. However, in many cases, you may actually be better off getting the 2 hours of exceptional work, illustrating the difficulty that we have of selecting high-quality over, high quantity.

Volume vs intensity

The debate between quality and quantity in endurance sports can be simply expressed as – training volume (how much and how often) vs training intensity (how hard). Clearly, both are important, and you will never be able to complete an endurance race without some training volume. However, we believe that the intensity of your training is more important than how much you train. We think that you should judge success according to the quality of the training that you do, as opposed to the amount that you do.

So, instead of seeking to increase the amount that you train each week, we believe that you should seek to improve the quality of your training over time. This is why a periodized training plan is so vital, it allows you to improve the quality of your training in a coherent way and gives structure to your overall schedule. Endurance sports are all about doing the right things, doing them right, and doing them right consistently!

Enjoy the journey

This approach will save you time because you won’t have to keep adding volume to your training schedule each week; ensure that you don’t over-train; and allow you to stay motivated for your training each week. Endurance training is a journey, and you have to enjoy the journey because racing is a very small part of your overall commitment to endurance sports.

In this article, we will explain the different parameters that you build your training plan around. Examining two of the following ideas in more detail –

• How much should I train? – Training duration
• How often should I train? – Training frequency
• How hard should I train? – Training intensity

So, if we leave the last variable out for now (more about intensity here), and focus on duration and frequency…

Duration

Duration refers to how many hours you can commit to training. This is usually a highly personal decision, which is impacted by your friends, family and work commitments. Only you can know how many hours that you can commit, however, it’s important to be consistent – there’s no point in training 20 hours one week and 0 the next. 

As we saw in the article on goals, you generally need to commit the following numbers of hours a week to training to prepare for a race –

null
• 6-10 Supersprint/sprint
• 8-12 Sprint/Olympic/Middle distance
• 10-12 Middle and long distance
• 10-14 Long distance

However, this needs to be divided over the sports. Typically, for a triathlon, you’ll need to do double the amount of cycling than the other sports – so, if you plan to train for 8 hours a week, then you need to commit 4 hours to cycling, 2 hours to running and 2 hours to swimming.

Frequency

As a general rule, it’s better to train for a short time and often, than for a long time and seldom. As we said earlier, endurance training is consistent work overtime. You have to gradually build your skills and fitness levels to do well in endurance sports.

Thus, your workouts should reflect this – even if you have scheduled your workouts a certain way that is not possible on a particular day – switch it to another day or shorten it so it can fit into your life.

Volume – the combination of frequency and duration

The training volume is what it is. If you have committed to training a certain number of hours on average, that is your base. Try to stick to this base as much as possible, to avoid the damage that can be done by overtraining or undertraining.  After that, you portion it out during your week to work out training frequency. Remember, when you are short on time, the recipe is to train more often (frequency) with a shorter duration, than to save everything until the weekend (less frequent with a high duration).

Finally, you have to take into account the intensity of the workout. Imagine that you are doing a really tough running session on Tuesday morning. Then, we do not recommend that you do another hard session in the evening. If you are doing two sessions close to each other, see to it that they match so that you can get as much out of it as possible. Training volume in endurance sports is very important. Regardless of if you are training for a sprint distance or a long distance, all endurance sports are built around training in higher volumes at a lower intensity.

Start training smarter

Our digital service will help develop a highly individualized training program. It seeks to understand you as an athlete and then help you find the right duration, frequency and intensity for your endurance training journey. If you’re interested in finding out more, then fill in the form below, or sign up and start training smarter.

If you are a swimrunner, use this form instead.

Read more about endurance training

Big days – A part of triathlon training

Bike training at home – Motivational indoor cycling

Swimming training tips – Analyze your swimming

Free trial week of triathlon training

Rock’n’roll – swim drills to improve rotation

The recovery phase – swim drills for endurance

Intensity levels of endurance training

Training intensity and how to measure it can often seem like an obscure concept that can only really be done by professional athletes and sports scientists. Questions such as “what is the lactic threshold” – appear to be unnecessarily complicated and not worth worrying about during your endurance training journey. However, they’re actually far simpler, than their complex names suggest and play a vital role in ensuring that you make the most out of your training plan.

In this article, we’re going to examine training zones in endurance sports – what they are, how you can measure them, and what they mean, before also looking at how you can implement your knowledge of them into your training schedule.  

This is the fifth in our series of articles on our training philosophy, check out the others here –

1. Our philosophy
2. How to start endurance training – define your baseline
3. Endurance training and racing – finding your goal
4. Training volume in endurance sports
5. Endurance training zones – intensity in endurance racing
6. Endurance training plan – how to periodize training

Functional threshold

The aim of endurance training is simple – to firstly discover your functional threshold, and then improve both the level of it and the period of time that you can operate at it.

So, what is functional threshold?

Your functional threshold is the maximum amount of hard exercise that you can sustain over a specific period of time (usually an hour). When Usain Bolt runs a 100m sprint he is operating significantly above his functional threshold, forcing his body to create energy anaerobically, which produces lactic acid, eventually meaning that he has to slow down. 

Sprint times are an excellent example of just how difficult it is to maintain hard exercise for long periods of time – the world record for 400m is 43.03 seconds, while the world record for 100m is 9.58 seconds. If you multiply the 100m time by four you get a value of 38.32, showing that even the best athletes in the world, can’t operate at maximum effort for around 40 seconds. 

To be an endurance athlete you have to be able to exercise for a lot longer than 40 seconds – meaning that you should forget any notions of going all out, all the time. Instead, you need to discover your personal functional threshold – the intensity of exercise that you can maintain, without having to stop.

How to measure intensity

Training intensity can be measured in the following ways –

• Perceived effort – A relative measure that can be used for all sports.
• Tempo – A measure that is usually used for swimming and running.
• Power – A measure that is used with cycling.
• Heart rate – A measure that is traditionally used with cycling and running.

Perceived effort

Perceived effort is often measured by the Borg-scale and can be hard to define. It’s a relative measure that allows you to apply a number between 6-20, to the amount of effort it takes you to do a particular activity. The lowest, which would have a rating of 6 would be something like reading a book, whilst the highest, which would have a rating of 20, would be something like the final kick in a sprint race that you really can only maintain for a couple of seconds.

However, there are obviously flaws to this, because our perceptions of how difficult something is can often be incorrect. For example, if you are training with a group, it is easier to get dragged into the “group psychosis” and go with the flow of the group. But, if you don’t have a heart rate monitor, tempo or power meter, then this is your best option.

Tempo

The tempo is measured via the value of speed over a distance. It can be minutes per kilometer in running, time over 100 meters in swimming or kilometers per hour in cycling. This can be a good way of keeping track of your training, but it doesn’t take into account your form on a specific day. 

Imagine that you usually run a 10k in 45 minutes, which gives you a kilometer pace of 4:30 per kilometer. However, on some days, that tempo will be as tough as your usual time splits over a 3k run. You are not suddenly out of shape, but your body is trying to tell you something. Perhaps you have had a bad night’s sleep, are getting sick, or simply have something on your mind that prevents you from focusing? 

We use tempo to measure swim training zones, because it is the most reliable way – heart rate monitors are unreliable in water. This is most commonly expressed as T-pace, which is the amount of time it takes you to swim 100m.

Power

Measuring power is mostly associated with cycling. Though we are seeing a rise of power meters for running, and power meters for swimming exist, but are rare. Your power is measured in watts. Watts is energy over time, fun fact: 1 horsepower is 735 watts. Power helps you to understand the number of calories that you are burning and by measuring the amount of power you produce; you will also gain an insight into how well your cardiovascular system is functioning.

Your Functional Threshold Power (FTP) is the maximum amount of power that your muscles can produce, while still being able to remove lactic acid from them. Your aim is to train at this level for a long period of time, which will eventually increase your FTP, allowing you to operate at it for longer.

Heart rate

Heart rate is commonly used to measure your functional threshold for running and cycling. Your aim should be to discover your functional threshold heart rate, which is the maximum heart rate that your body can maintain, while still being able to remove lactic acid from your muscles.

Much like FTP with cycling, you then seek to train at (or below) this level for a long period of time, allowing you to travel at faster speeds over longer periods. Remember, you’re aiming to be an endurance athlete, not Usain Bolt, meaning that your functional threshold will be significantly lower, than your maximum all-out speed.

Using tests zones

To understand where your threshold is, you can do tests. And in our training programs, we regularly do tests in all sports. This is because your functional threshold is specific to each sport, so you might have a higher one for running, then you do for cycling. 

We take test values from –

• Swimming – Time/100 meter
• Cycling – Heart rate or power
• Running – Heart rate or tempo

There is no magical test that will define your functional threshold for all sports. In swimming, you will not be able to get the same puls as in running or biking. And your power on the bike does not apply to your running. That is why you need to do sports specific tests. 

When you have your test scores, it is time to look at what intensity you should train at.

Endurance training zones

Once we have discovered your functional threshold, we will help you break your training down into 5 zones, in each sport, which are defined according to your functional threshold in that sport. We will examine the zones in more detail in a later article, however, as an example for running –

• Zone 1 – less than 85% of LHTR
• Zone 2 – 85-89% of LHTR
• Zone 3 – 90% to 94% of LTHR
• Zone 4 – 95% to 99% of LTHR   
• Zone 5 – more than 100% of LTHR

(LTHR – Lactate Threshold Heart Rate)

Training intensity

Most people assume that athletes spend most of their time training in Zone 5 – putting in maximal training effort and reaping huge benefits from it. However, this is totally incorrect – most people should spend little to no time in zone 5, as training in zone 5 for too long, would inevitably lead to burn out or injury. 

You will train in zone 2 for the majority of your training volume, with most athletes spending up to 80% of their training in zone 2. With the remainder divided between zones 3-5. Zone 5 being around 5 – 15 percent depending on where you’re at in your season and your race distance. 

Training in lower zones will give you effect over the whole spectrum. Training in zone 2 and zone 3 will push your functional threshold upwards. This is because of the work done in the lower zones, will widen your range of those zones, and that will help to push your zone 4 upwards. Remember it’s impossible to train in Zone 5 for very long, meaning that the aim of most training programs is to make your scope to go into zone 5 less.  

When doing your training plan, you need to focus on these numbers. If you are unsure about anything in the top end of the zones. We recommend that you focus on zone 2 and zone 4. That will be the most beneficial.

To conclude, your training zones are individual, and not applicable to others. Therefore, you need to keep track of your own progress. Following other people’s training zones, no matter how good they seem, will never help, because your training zones are individual to you.

Do the right thing

We will help you to discover how intense your endurance training should be, allowing you to train smarter. Sign up, today, for an individualized plan that will allow you to add structure and purpose to your training program.

If you are a swimrunner, use this form instead.

Read more about endurance training

Big days – A part of triathlon training

Ötillö swimrun Malta – With Michael Lemmel

Ötillö swimrun Catalina – With Michael Lemmel

Bike training at home – Motivational indoor cycling

Swimming training tips – Analyze your swimming

Triathlon transitions – not a place, a part of racing