How to plan a triathlon week that works: one long session per discipline, over 60% easy, a weekly brick and clearly dosed intensity.
How do you plan a triathlon training week that actually works? Honest answer: you build it around one long session per discipline, keep over 60% of your volume easy, add a weekly brick run and ration the hard stimuli. The rest is consistency, not complexity.
This distribution isn't a hunch but the proven standard: in an analysis of 175 training distributions, over 60% of training sat in the low intensity zone in 91% of cases, and pyramidal distributions were more common than polarised ones. Translated: lots of easy, a little moderate, little hard. This guide gives you the framework for your week and your path to the race — without training-plan science, but with the right blocks in the right places.
Build your week around three key sessions: one slightly longer session each in swimming, cycling and running. Around them place shorter, easy sessions and at least one full rest day. This simple framework ensures each discipline has its place and none falls off the table.
The golden rule: over 60% of your volume at an easy pace where you could hold a conversation. That's exactly where you build your aerobic base. Only a small part of your week belongs in the hard zone — quality comes from the contrast of lots of easy and little hard, not from constant full gas.
A brick run per week belongs firmly in the plan. Coaches recommend from practice running straight off the bike one to two times a week to accustom body and nervous system to the transition. This isn't an optional extra: your running economy in the first minutes off the bike is 1.6–11.6% more costly, and only practice lowers that price.
Add one to two demanding sessions a week — say bike intervals or a tempo run. You need no more, and recovery usually tolerates no more. Space hard and easy so that two hard days never follow each other. That keeps every quality session genuinely high quality.
Zoom out: increase volume gently over several weeks, then sharpen intensity, and clearly reduce in the last one to two weeks before the race (tapering). Build running especially carefully, because it's the most injury-prone discipline with 45–92% of injuries. A plan without recovery weeks is a plan toward a slump.
Plan your week backwards from the rest day. Set the full rest day first, then the three key sessions with enough spacing, then the brick, and only last the easy filler sessions into the gaps. That guarantees recovery and quality get the best slots — instead of getting squeezed out at the end of the week under time pressure. A plan that starts with the pause works out far more often.
Build it around three key sessions — one longer each in swim, bike and run — plus a weekly brick and a rest day. Keep over 60% of your volume easy and add one to two quality sessions. This framework gives each discipline its place and keeps you fresh enough for real progress.
One to two times a week is enough and is the common practice recommendation. That accustoms your legs and nervous system to the transition, whose running economy is 1.6–11.6% more costly in the first minutes. More bricks rarely give more but cost much more recovery — quality over quantity.
Over 60%, the clear majority, at an easy conversation pace. Only a small share belongs in moderate and hard intensity. This pyramidal distribution — lots of easy, little hard — is the proven standard in endurance sport and the reason you shouldn't constantly drive yourself into the red.
Increase volume until about two weeks before the race, then reduce it clearly while keeping a few short, sharp stimuli (tapering). That gets you to the start rested yet lively. Avoid new, unfamiliar loads shortly before the race, especially in running.
Triathlon: Nutrition and Recovery