This is an independent reference on endurance training for swimmers, cyclists, runners and multisport athletes. It is concerned with principles rather than programmes: what a training week is actually made of, how intensity is judged, what a stroke or a stride is measured against, and why the recovery between sessions is part of the training rather than a gap in it.
The material here grew out of the practices that endurance coaching settled on through the 1980s and 1990s — video and flume stroke assessment, goniometric bike set-up, graded exercise testing, lactate balance points, stride-rate counting — and it is written to explain what those methods were for, what they can and cannot tell you, and how the same questions are answered today with equipment most athletes already own.
Four things govern endurance training
Almost every training decision reduces to a trade between four quantities. They are not independent, and increasing one usually means paying for it somewhere else.
- Volume — how much work is done, expressed in time rather than distance wherever the sports are being compared. An hour of swimming and an hour of running are not equivalent stimuli, but they are comparable costs.
- Intensity — how hard the work is, and, more usefully, how the total volume is distributed across easy, moderate and hard work. The distribution matters more than any single session.
- Technique — the efficiency with which the athlete converts effort into speed. In swimming this dominates; in running it is smaller but real; in cycling it is largely a question of position and set-up.
- Recovery — the interval in which adaptation actually happens. Training is a stimulus; the adaptation is a response to it, and the response occurs afterwards.
The fourth is the one most often treated as slack in the schedule. It is not slack. The molecular bases of training adaptation describe a signalling response to each bout of exercise that unfolds over hours and days; the session is the trigger, not the adaptation.
How this reference is organised
By discipline
Separate sections cover swimming technique, cycling position and pedalling and running biomechanics. Each is written for an adult endurance athlete rather than for a sprint specialist, which changes the emphasis: efficiency at a sustainable pace matters more than peak power.
By method of assessment
A second group of pages covers the assessment methods themselves — flume and video stroke assessment, bike fit and pedalling analysis, running gait analysis and the use of video as a coaching instrument. These pages describe protocols: what is filmed, from where, what is measured, and what a sensible re-test interval looks like.
By planning horizon
A third group works outwards from a single session to a season: the weekly schedule, how a season is built, periodization for clubs and squads, and the purpose of a training camp. Alongside them sit the two questions that cut across every plan: judging training intensity and recovery and restoration.
Multisport is the hardest case
Most of what follows applies to a single-sport athlete, but the harder planning problem belongs to the multisport athlete, who has to fit three disciplines into one week and one body. Multisport training and triathlon training by race distance deal with that directly: which sessions can share a day, which cannot, and how the balance shifts as the race gets longer. Race formats and distances used throughout follow those published by World Triathlon.
What this reference is not
It does not offer coaching, evaluation, testing or programme design, and nothing described here is a service that can be booked. It is not medical advice: the physiological material is explanatory, and any athlete with symptoms, an injury or a medical condition should be assessed by a qualified clinician rather than reading a training page. Where a protocol involves an instrumented test — a graded exercise test, blood lactate sampling — it is described so that an athlete can understand a report they have been given, not so that they can run the test on themselves.
Nor is it a training plan. A plan is specific to one athlete's history, available hours, injury record and goals, and the honest answer to "what should my week look like" is that it depends on all four. What a reference can do is explain the reasoning well enough that the athlete can read their own plan critically, ask better questions of it, and notice when it stops matching the season they are actually having.