Eighty Twenty: The 80/20 Rule in Triathlon Training
Most of your training should feel easy. That's the 80/20 rule, and it's been around since long before it had a name. Here's what it looks like in a triathlon week.
The 80/20 rule says about 80 percent of your training should be easy, aerobic work, and about 20 percent should be hard. In a triathlon week that means most of your swimming, riding and running is at a pace you could hold a conversation at, with a couple of harder sessions spread across the three sports.
We were training this way in the 90s, long before anyone called it 80/20. My original take on it is further down. First, the plain version.
What 80/20 looks like in a week
Count it by time, not by sessions. If you train eight hours a week, roughly six and a half of those hours are easy and about an hour and a half is hard.
Easy doesn't mean nothing but easy, though. Here's how I described setting up an Ironman build on the Effortless Swimming podcast in 2016:
I don't think you can ignore any energy system. I use a lot of strength: some of it will be aerobic threshold, some of it 70.3 power, some of it threshold power. That strength is the underpinning background, and within that there's work around aerobic threshold, so your capacity to operate at high pace for low oxygen cost is always in play. And then in the last eight to nine weeks, yes, there's intensity there, definitely.
The hard 20 percent might be a set of threshold intervals on the bike, some faster running off the bike, and the main set of one swim. Everything else is steady: long rides, easy runs, technique swims.
Why it works
The easy work builds the engine. It teaches your body to hold good speed for a low oxygen cost, and that's what holds you together in the second half of a race. The hard work sharpens the engine, but it only pays off once the base is there. And because most of the week is easy, you recover well enough to make the hard sessions count.
It's actually the underpinning strength, the background work, that still creates those performances. You can go back to Lydiard and all those guys. It doesn't matter how far forward we go with technology, that's always going to be the case.
That's me on the Effortless Swimming podcast in 2016, and it still holds.
Where people get it wrong
- Easy days that aren't easy. Most people ride their easy rides too hard and their hard rides too easy, and end up in the middle every day.
- Chasing the threshold number. FTP is a useful number. It isn't the point.
- Adding intensity when results stall. Usually the answer is more patience, not more pain.
As I put it on the Effortless Swimming podcast:
People often think that I'm against technology and measurement and data. I'm not at all. The thing is, it comes afterwards. It's a product of your focus. Your focus can't be a product of your data.
The question I want athletes asking in their easy work isn't "what's my number?" It's "how fast can I go without tension?" I'd rather set someone's bike zones from a 40 km time trial on the road than from a 20-minute test in the garage.
My take, from 2024
There's a long held belief that the anaerobic threshold is the governor of our fitness and form. Mate, that depends on how you view fitness.
Anaerobic threshold is the flashy sibling of sub threshold work, but make no mistake, it's the sub threshold work that AT takes all the credit for. FTP has sold too many of us on the idea that threshold is the golden chalice. It is not!
I sometimes laugh at the whole 80/20 deal. We were rolling that back in the 90s and to me, not much has changed other than technology. But if you zoom out you'll see 80/20 applies right through life, 80 percent foundational / 20 percent pushing for shift.
If you don't do the work that's required, then you won't have the requirement when the shit is hitting the fan. With all the developing pro athletes that came through my program, I can tell you, straight up, it was the work we did at speed for low oxygen cost that manifested physical and mental success of that period.
That takes a shitload of patience, faith and trust. Looking back, I can see how fortunate I was to have had that trust.
It's not as easy to find now…Like physical output, your development is 80 percent faith, trust and patience, but when you start to move really well at low oxygen cost for good speed, there's no confidence like that.
That's when your anaerobic work becomes truly effective and not before it.
Without an effective ability to maintain speed for low oxygen cost, your speed will be unreliable, you'll be yo-yoing in races unable to sustain a pace, and yea, you'll go looking for the answer in more intensity and dig a deeper form hole.
The upshot is- do your work!
Don't shirk responsibility to yourself, leave the ego at home and work diligently at your under pinning strength.
Nothing has really changed that much.
Gilesy
If you want a plan built this way, my free training plans are a good start. If you'd like one built around you, that's what my coaching is for.
Grant Giles coaches a small number of athletes one-to-one, writes this newsletter from Brunswick Heads, and hosts The Roaring Heads. If this piece resonated, a letter in the post every couple of weeks is the best way to keep in touch.