There are many factors that affect our recovery and adaptation to a high-intensity workout, but some basic guidelines can help your triathlon training.

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Training season has started. Step by step, your base is being built, and soon you’ll need to include more specific workouts in terms of intensity. One of the big questions in training is about the allocation in the program of high-intensity sessions. How much time is needed to recover from these sessions? And when can you do another one?

This thematic is at certain points complex, and the variables are difficult to control. We are all different, and the same workout may impact one athlete differently than it would impact another. Even for the same athlete, a very wide range of factors (like the time of season, environment and recovery status) can cause different adaptations, even if the workout is the same.

However, some guidelines should be considered and applied in order to reduce the risks of pushing again too hard or too soon. Similarly, it’s important to avoid having too much recovery before the next high-intensity session. The intensity level of each workout is the major factor to consider when planning several high-intensity workouts over a span of days. So, let’s keep things simple and start there.

We will consider five basic intensity levels:

Level	Name	Range of effort	RPE*
1	RECOVERY	Warm-up / enter reps and sets / cool down Recovery sessions by itself	1-2Very Easy
2	ENDURANCE	Continuous workouts. The upper limit is intensive and very similar to race perception for Long Distance Triathlon	3-4Moderate
3	THRESHOLD	Average HR, Power and Pace for 40’-60’ max. steady FTP for cycling is the more common measure	5-6Hard
4	VO2 MAX	Can be sustained for 5-8 minutes max. Typical 2-3k Maximal run field test is an effective reference	7-8Very Hard
5	ANAEROBIC	Under 1 minute max. Speed. Lactate Production / Lactate Tolerance	9-10Max.

*Adapted from 0-10 Borg Rate of Perceived Exertion Scale

By the graphs below, we can easily visualize the time needed to recover when a different high-intensity workout is applied. The time needed to recover depends on the level of intensity you have planned to develop next.

*Adapted from Bompa

Level	THRESHOLD	VO2 MAX	ANAEROBIC
THRESHOLD	48 – 72h	24 – 36h	6 -12h
VO2 MAX	6 – 12h	36 – 48h	24 – 36h
ANAEROBIC	12 – 24h	24 – 36h	48 – 72h

Just because a workout has a higher intensity doesn’t mean you should recover longer. The threshold workouts with a duration around one hour in total are in fact the more demanding in terms of recovery time. The mechanical impact is smaller compared to Vo2Max or Anaerobic workouts, but the energy cost is high, leading to very high glycogen depletion, which requires longer recovery times to enable the energy storage to be completed.

In terms of anaerobic workouts, the duration of recovery can be very variable. If the workout is to develop speed (with repetitions under 10 seconds) the recovery should be really fast because the energy cost is low. But if the workout is about Lactate Production, with repetitions around 30 seconds, or to develop Lactate Tolerance, with reps around 1 minute, the recovery times will be longer.

The influence of different activities is another important aspect to be considered. If different muscles are used in different activities, you’ll still be able to perform well in each. But if the same muscles are used (for example doing a heavy lower-body weight lifting session before doing a sprint workout in cycling), your performance will be more affected, and recovery time will be longer.

It is proved and agreed-upon by the triathlon community that performance on the bike is not highly influenced by the swim—however performance on the run is highly related to the effort and energy spent on the bike. Therefore, it is acceptable to plan a hard swim and hard bike or run on consecutive days or on the same day, but advisable to respect the proper recovery times for the run and bike sessions, unless if the goal is to cause consecutive stress.

When to Plan Consecutive Intensity Workouts

For obvious reasons, triathletes need to include consecutive high-intensity workouts in their planning, to develop the needed specificity of non-stop swim-bike-run. This need and planning method is not unique, and also used in other sports. In Marathon training, for example, I will recommend some threshold + long marathon pace sessions in 2 consecutive days—as long as the athlete is in an advanced stage in their training and has logged the required base miles.

As an example, we can plan a 90-minute to two-hour run on one day, with 4-6 X 8-15 minutes at Threshold pace with 2 to 5 minutes of active recovery, trying to reach 50 to 60 minutes of total threshold duration. The next day, I will ask the athlete to complete a progressive long run of two to three hours, entering on marathon race pace or very close to it, for the last hour. The objective is to try to run on a very specific race pace on day 2, after having induced glycogen (energy) depletion on day one.

How to Plan Intensity in Regular Training

If you use intensity as the starting point in your planning, you’ll have a full vision of the recovery you’ll need. My advice is to allocate all your high-intensity sessions first on your training plan. Once you have one to two weeks of intensity workouts planned, you can add in recovery sessions according to the high-intensity ones. You can then use endurance sessions to fulfill your planned training volume.

This is just a planning exercise, and you don’t need to follow it rigidly. The perception and real impact of each session should be your guide to adapt to the initial plan. That said, as a rule of thumb don’t pile up hard sessions and respect the needed recovery times! You will avoid injuries and enjoy more of your training.