How I work
The method behind the plan
Before you pay anyone to coach you, it is reasonable to ask how they make decisions. This is how I make mine. It is the same approach I take with Olympic, professional and age-group athletes.
Modelled systematically, discovered in practice
Training can be treated as a machine, where the parts add up to a known answer, or as a complex system that has to be learned. I take both perspectives. I model performance systematically, while understanding your context and the complexity of physiology.
Performance modelling and systematic planning
Modelling what performance demands and planning step by step towards it.
Context and complexity
Reading context and responding to how you actually adapt.
My approach: both, held together
Systematic modelling of what performance demands and where you are now, read through your context and the complexity of how you actually adapt. The model gives direction. Your response decides what happens next.
The continual exploration and refinement of your optimal training, in pursuit of the limits of performance.
Six principles hold that together.
Performance anchor
The event that matters, what it takes to perform there, and the physical model behind it. Everything else is measured against it.
Built around you
What your event demands, what you are and what you need. The plan is optimised for you and your context, and built with you rather than handed to you.
Applied training science
Sound training theory, applied through creative solutions that fit the context. Theory on its own is not a plan.
Iterative learning
A learning process that gets sharper over time, drawing on data, context and expertise together.
Training experience
I design the environment and the experience, because that is what drives adaptation. The document is not the intervention.
Performance change
Accountability for change against a set goal, with a clear line from each block to the progress it should produce.
The training design process
The process I use with every athlete I coach. Read it top to bottom.
-
1What sets the direction
Performance vision and direction
The anchor, agreed between you, me and, where there is one, your team.
Performance requirement
What the event demands, the gap to close and your physiological profile.
Calendar, constraints and context
Your races, the hours you actually have, and the life around them.
-
2How the plan is held
The planning paradox
Robust planningContinual adaptability
Structure gives direction. Adaptability keeps it useful. You need both.
The learning process
DataContextExpertise
Each block shows how you respond, and that feeds back into the plan.
-
3Where adaptation happens
The training environment and experience drive adaptation and learning
Long term: framework and phases
General to specific, with one clear priority per phase.
Short term: micro-structure
The week built around your stress and recovery balance.
The session: quality
One clear purpose, judged against how you are that day.
Targeted training stimulus enhancement is added deliberately on top of this structure, never in place of it.
It is all about balance and conflict
- RiskReward
- PlanningAdaptability
- MonotonyVariability
- VolumeIntensity
- StressRest
Base: Volume and repetition build the foundation, with risk kept low.
Build: Intensity, variability and risk rise as specific fitness is developed.
Race: Load comes down, rest goes up, and the plan stays flexible around the event.
The faint markers show where the other phases sit. Each phase has a right answer for you, and it moves through the season.
Your week is built from how you recover
Hard days are spaced by what you need to absorb them, not by a Monday to Sunday grid. Choose an answer to see the shape change.
After a hard session, how long until you feel ready for another?
Three hard days across seven
Quick recovery lets the hard days come closer together, with an easy day after each.
Two hard days across seven
The same idea with one fewer hard day, so each one lands on fresh legs.
A ten-day cycle
When seven days is the wrong container, the cycle gets longer instead of the hard days getting closer.
An illustration of the principle, not a template. If a pattern leaves you flat, it changes, and it keeps changing until the balance works.
Where your sessions sit
Two thresholds split training into three physiological domains, with sprinting beyond them. Your zones are set from your own thresholds. Select a session to see what it is for.
Select a session
Threshold work straddles the second threshold on purpose.
Ranges are indicative. Yours are set from your own testing or field data. Every session in the free Endurance Training Library is anchored the same way.
Most of the gain is in the ordinary weeks, done properly
Tell me what you are working towards and where it is not working. I read every enquiry myself.
Three questions to ask any coach, including me
- How do you decide what goes in my week?
- From how you recover, not from a template. See your week
- What happens when I respond differently from the plan?
- The plan changes. That is what the learning process is for. See the process
- Where does each session sit against my thresholds?
- Every session has a domain, and I will tell you where your numbers came from. See intensity