Understanding Key Workout Types for Endurance Training

Welcome to a concise guide explaining the workout types in your training plan. These workouts are structured to enhance endurance, speed, and overall fitness, ensuring you're prepared to perform at your best on race day.

1. Aerobic Endurance

• Focus: Builds cardiovascular efficiency and stamina.
• Description: Steady-state workouts performed at an easy effort, typically in Zone 2. These are longer-duration sessions aimed at enhancing overall endurance.

2. Aerobic Speed Endurance

• Focus: Combines speed with aerobic conditioning.
• Description: Intervals of faster-paced efforts combined with aerobic recovery. These workouts help build the ability to sustain faster paces over longer distances.

3. Brick Sessions

• Focus: Prepares athletes for the transition between sports.
• Description: Combined workouts (e.g., cycling followed by running) that simulate the transition in triathlons, improving performance under fatigue.

4. Build Sustained Pace

• Focus: Enhances the ability to maintain a fast pace.
• Description: Workouts aimed at gradually increasing your capacity to hold a fast pace over extended periods— for optimising performance during endurance races.

5. Endurance Ride with Sub-threshold Efforts

• Focus: Builds endurance while maintaining effort.
• Description: Long cycling sessions with intervals just below the threshold pace, designed to enhance endurance without overextending effort.

6. Fitness Tests

• Focus: Measures current fitness for updating thresholds and training zones.
• Description: Structured efforts like time trials to assess your fitness level and determine training zones, ensuring your training is effectively tailored.

7. Open Water Swim

• Focus: Preparation for open water conditions.
• Description: Swim workouts are done in natural open water rather than a pool, which helps with adaptation to race-day conditions such as sighting and coping with waves.

8. Progression Run

• Focus: Teaches adaptation to faster paces.
• Description: Runs where the pace gradually increases throughout the session, helping the body adjust to running at faster speeds over time.

9. Race Pace Efforts

• Focus: Simulates race conditions.
• Description: Endurance sessions that include intervals at the pace you aim to race, helping you practice race-day effort and improve performance when it counts.

10. Recovery

• Focus: Allows for rest and repair.
• Description: Low-intensity workouts or complete rest days, providing your body time to repair and adapt before the next hard training session.

11. Run Off Bike

• Focus: Prepares for transition fatigue.
• Description: A brick workout combining cycling and running, simulating the fatigue athletes experience when transitioning from bike to run in a triathlon.

12. Run Off Bike Faster at First

• Focus: Mimics race-day intensity.
• Description: A variation of the "run off bike" session where you start faster, simulating the intensity you may face when racing after cycling.

13. Speed Intervals

• Focus: Improves speed and anaerobic capacity.
• Description: Short bursts of high-intensity effort followed by recovery periods designed to increase speed and anaerobic endurance.

14. Strength Endurance

• Focus: Builds muscle endurance and strength.
• Description: High-resistance or hill workouts that target muscle endurance and overall strength, crucial for endurance athletes.

15. Swim Technique

• Focus: Improves swimming efficiency.
• Description: Focused drills enhance swim form, efficiency, and technique, helping you swim faster and use less energy.

16. Tempo

• Focus: Develops stamina for maintaining a high pace.
• Description: Moderate-intensity workouts just below your lactate threshold, designed to build the ability to maintain a high pace without accumulating fatigue.

17. Threshold Efforts

• Focus: Enhances sustained power and delays fatigue.
• Description: Workouts at or near your lactate threshold, building your ability to sustain effort at high intensity for longer periods.

18. Torque Session

• Focus: Builds leg power and muscular endurance.
• Description: High-resistance cycling or strength training that focuses on developing power and endurance in the legs.

Each workout type serves a specific purpose in your training plan, helping you target various aspects of endurance, speed, and overall fitness. Phil's plans are designed to incorporate a variety of these sessions, ensuring that you are well-prepared for race day and can reach your peak performance.

Need Help or Have Questions?

If you have any questions about the workouts in your plan or need further clarification, don’t hesitate to contact us at the MyProCoach Help Center.