Our Training Principles

Many prospective athletes ask us what methods we use to train athletes. While athletes look for concise answers such as Daniels with X, Y and Z, or more general ones such as we train with certain levels of volume, our answer is always, “It depends.” Training from one athlete to another varies to account for family, life, work stress and their athletic history. Because of this, we never know exactly what training will look like until a perfect balanced is found!

However, we do have several guiding principles that we follow for all athletes with no exceptions. These principles are very general and broad, leading to individualized training to fit an athlete's life stress and athletic background.

Here are our 3 main training principles:

1. Build from General to Race Specific Fitness: There is no one size fits all approach to how a season should be set up. Some athletes can do high volume training throughout the winter and early spring, while others can only do higher volume training in the summer months. We use the puzzle pieces of life to figure out an approach to setting up the year which results in the best fitness as possible come race day.

2. Train for Volatility: When it comes down to, you never know what will happen on race day. Athletes can try to make the day as steady as possible, but more often than not, there will be surges, pacing will not be perfect and large hills may lead to harder efforts than anticipated. Train to deal with these efforts and then return to race pace without missing a beat or burning a match. Training to deal with volatility helps to make a more resilient athlete who can bounce back from setbacks quicker or avoid them all together.

3. Run the Least Amount Possible to Meet the Objective: Most triathlon injuries occur during running. It is the most forceful and stressful of the three sports we do. In addition to that, fitness built from swimming and biking transfer directly to the run. Because of this, most of the filler miles to build aerobic fitness are done on the bike, while the run is primarily about building race specific strength and becoming more economical.