FORM / REFERENCE

How the endurance world
actually trains.

Seven ways of organising a training week, what each one makes you do on a Tuesday, and the weekly volume below which each stops being itself. Set your hours and every method re-checks itself against them.

Your weekly hours9h

1 of 7 needs more volume than 9 hours.

BalancedDefault

Mostly easy, one or two threshold sessions

Most of the week genuinely easy, two or three quality sessions weighted toward threshold rather than above it, and no volume floor — this is the shape elite triathletes are measured holding through base and build, and the shape the fastest recreational marathoners arrive at on their own.

Fits your weekRead

Polarised

Truly easy days, genuinely hard intervals

Four out of five sessions genuinely easy and the remaining one or two genuinely hard, with almost nothing in the moderate middle — a pattern Stephen Seiler measured in elite endurance athletes rather than invented.

Fits your weekRead

Norwegian Sub-Threshold

Frequent quality, always just under threshold

Three interval sessions a week, kept mostly in one discipline, every rep harder than a tempo but held under threshold heart rate on 60–120 s recoveries — everything else genuinely easy, the same week repeated, so you never need to recover from it.

Fits your weekRead

Sweet Spot

Time-efficient, bike-led, sustained moderate-hard

Ride just under threshold two or three times a week, so you get most of the fitness of threshold work at a recovery cost you can actually repeat — the watts come from your own FTP, never from a race target.

Fits your weekRead

Key Sessions

Two or three that matter, rest easy

Build the week around two or three sessions that genuinely move the needle, make everything else easy supporting work, and count hard days across all three sports rather than minutes in a zone.

Fits your weekRead

Aerobic Base

Heart-rate capped, no intervals at all

A fixed block in which every session stays under one heart-rate ceiling — 180 minus your age, adjusted for health, diet and training history — with no intervals, no threshold work and no racing until the block ends.

Fits your weekRead

Race-Pace Build

Everything anchored to goal race pace

A final-block method that expresses every quality target as a percentage of your goal race pace or power, then spends 8–12 weeks extending how long you can hold something close to it.

Needs 10h+Read

Then choose when it changes.

A philosophy decides what Tuesday looks like. Periodisation decides whether Tuesday looks different in April. They are separate choices, and not every pair is coherent.

Base → Build → PeakDefault

Traditional or linear periodisation; Joe Friel's Annual Training Plan (the ATP); the Lydiard pyramid; the classic season build

Volume first, sharpen later. One arc from now to your A race, with each phase named and dated.

Reverse

Reverse periodisation; inverse periodisation; intensity-first periodisation; in swimming, Bill Sweetenham's Anaerobic Approach to Training

Short and hard through the winter, long and race-specific near the race. Chosen for your calendar, not because it makes you faster.

Blocks

Block periodisation; concentrated unidirectional loading; mini-block or HIT-block training (the Rønnestad variant); descended from Verkhoshansky's conjugate sequence and formalised by Vladimir Issurin

Concentrate on one thing for two to three weeks, hold the rest at maintenance, then move on before the gain fades.

Repeating Week

No macro-periodisation; the same week year-round; the rolling cycle (Purple Patch's three-week rotation); the Norwegian singles template

The same shape every week. The numbers move when you test; the structure doesn't.