Shownotes

Jacob’s triathlon training approach

03:08 -

• My work career has had a very good couple of years, which meant I got significantly busier and ultimately ran out of time before I could get to the level I had been aiming for. It was never about reaching the top, just a solid middle tier, but even that became difficult to pursue with the time available.
• On the bike it is hard to draw clear conclusions either way, given that I was coming from 20 to 25 hours a week as a semi-professional cyclist. There was never going to be a lot of room to show improvement there.
• Running remained the hard part throughout. I have very big legs for an endurance athlete — all the weight sitting in my calves and quads — and that just does not lend itself to running well, even compared to other athletes around the same overall body weight. That said, the approach did work in the way it was supposed to.
• My form improved noticeably, and I have seen the same hold true for other athletes I coach. The risk with triathletes is that fatigue and a lack of natural running background push people into a lazy pattern — the heart rate might be sitting in the right zone, but mechanically everything has fallen apart. Keeping a semi-decent pace is a simple way of preventing that.
• There was one period where I was away for about a month and running was the only sport I could do, so I pushed the weekly volume to over 100 kilometres.
• To absorb that I had to run slower, and it moved things in the wrong direction rather than forward. For someone with my physiology, more volume at lower pace just reinforced the patterns I had been trying to avoid.

Running economy and the importance of speed

06:43 -

• For a lot of triathletes, running economy is still a significant limiter. If you are going to run in a zone two range anyway, you can either do that lazily or with good mechanics, and I think it matters which one you choose.
• There is not a meaningful difference in fatigue between running at the bottom end of that window and running at the top end of it — ten beats per minute harder is still within the same physiological range — but it can be the difference between moving well and plodding. If your technique is already excellent then perhaps it matters less, but for most people it is worth making the effort.
• The broader point is that speed is the output of everything. It reflects both your physiology and your mechanics, and I think a lot of people have become so focused on lactate numbers and zones that they have stopped paying attention to the mechanical side entirely.
• Swimming is the clearest example of this — you can produce the same heart rate with terrible technique or with great technique, and obviously one is far more useful than the other.
• The same logic applies to running and to cycling. Sitting bolt upright on an indoor trainer and hitting your power targets is not the same as riding in a good position. The metrics on the screen do not capture the whole picture.

Run walk method

11:18 -

• Run-walk is something I have actually used myself coming back from injury and found genuinely useful. For athletes who are slower — say, sub-25-minute 5k runners — it is physiologically difficult to run fast enough to stress the right systems continuously, especially over varied terrain.
• They end up never running at a speed that challenges their mechanics because their lungs or heart are the limiting factor before their legs even get there. Run-walk intervals give those athletes a way to still create the mechanical and speed-related stress without the physiology becoming the only constraint.
• The swimming parallel holds well. There are times when you have to do long, fatiguing reps because that reflects what racing demands, but shorter faster reps that let you hold proper technique are a legitimate and valuable tool.
• The key in swimming is the clock — four by 100 is not about sprinting, but you should know your split time because that is your feedback on how efficiently you moved. You can feel your effort through your breathing and your heart rate, so you have a physiological read.
• The clock gives you the other half: how fast did you actually go for that effort? Together those two things tell you whether you swam that well or not. That combination of effort and output is what people tend to lose when they become too absorbed in any single metric.
• Speed is probably the metric discussed least on podcasts and in training conversations, and yet it is the most important one.
• Lactate, zone two, VO2 max — these all get enormous attention, and rightly so, because physiology is a large part of what makes you fast.
• But it is not the whole of it. Your easy 400 in the pool should be faster than it was a year ago for the same effort. Your easy run should gradually be quicker at the same heart rate.
• That is the goal. Not sprinting everything, not ignoring recovery — just remaining accountable to speed as the ultimate measure of whether training is working.
• Including strides or hill sprints within an otherwise easy run is a reasonable way to address the mechanics and economy point without turning the whole session into something hard.
• There is not a lot of scientific evidence pinning down exactly how effective that is compared to a continuous steady run, but as a practical tool for keeping some speed in the legs while staying mostly aerobic, it fits well with everything we have been discussing.

Coaching Ben Healy

17:00 -

• I have been coaching Ben for nine years, since he was fifteen. He had a remarkable 2025 season, podiuming at Liège-Bastogne-Liège and at the World Championships, winning a stage at the Tour de France, spending time in the yellow jersey.
• The yellow jersey is something that transcends cycling entirely. People who do not follow sport at all know what it means. It was a genuinely emotional moment and something I think will stay with both of us for a long time.
• The honest answer is the most boring one: consistency. At the end of last year we did a full analysis across the team, looking at total hours, time in zones, every angle you can think of, and Ben had done more volume than almost anyone else in the squad.
• That surprised me, because I do not think of myself as a high-volume coach. But the reason was not that we were deliberately piling on hours. It was simply that Ben barely missed any training. In professional cycling, losing weeks to illness or injury is extremely common.
• The travel demands are relentless in a way that is hard to overstate. It is not just getting to races, it is moving three hours after each stage to the next location. Ben just managed all of that exceptionally well and stayed healthy.
• Beyond consistency, the thing I am most proud of in how we have worked together over the last four or five years is that I have always tried to give him room to grow.
• When he was younger he was still in full-time education, which not everyone chooses at that level. His training reflected that. He was doing an hour and a half on the turbo after school, a bit longer at weekends. Nothing dramatic.
• But each year we gave him a little more, and that steady progression meant there was always a clear rationale for why he was going to get better, not just a hope that he would.
• When he first moved to the WorldTour, the head of performance at EF gave me a really useful piece of advice: do not suddenly flip everything on its head just because he is now at that level.
• That first year, his training still looked like a developing rider's programme, because the new stimulus was the racing itself. A week-long stage race or five days of hard Italian racing gives you an enormous amount of physiological stress on its own. There was no need to stack extra volume on top of that.
• Every year since then we have been able to add a little more, whether that is intensity, volume, altitude camps, heat preparation, or motor pacing, and the last couple of years have been about refining what actually works for him specifically.
• Crucially, there has always been a good reason for each step forward. It was never just doing more for the sake of it, and it was never chasing a trend.
• A lot of athletes arrive at the WorldTour already doing 27 or 28 hours a week, with a full programme of major races behind them. When that is your starting point, finding the next level of improvement becomes very difficult.
• With Ben, we still have a little room if we want to be more aggressive, though I genuinely believe what we are doing now is already optimal. But having that option available rather than having already used it is an important place to be.
• If you go to the most aggressive version of training straight away and it does not work, you have nowhere left to go. That is a useful principle for thinking about athlete development at any level.

Minimum effective dose and progressive loading

25:29 -

• I agree with that completely. The right question is not how much training we can give someone, but how little we can give them while still pushing them in the right direction. That approach is lower risk for injuries, lower risk for psychological burnout, and it preserves future levers to pull when progress stalls.
• The body is always trying to return to homeostasis. It has no interest in developing aerobic capacity for the sake of it. You have to give it a reason to adapt, and that reason is novelty, a stimulus that is just a bit more than what it is used to.
• If you take someone straight to 30 hours, two things happen. First, the body probably only produces the same adaptations it would have at 25 hours anyway, because there is a ceiling to how much it can absorb in a given period.
• Second, once it settles at that level, 30 hours stops being a new stimulus. The body simply operates at whatever fitness it has reached and sees no reason to change further.
• Bring someone up from 25 to 27 or 28 hours instead, and that small increase is enough to register as something different, something to adapt to.
• The same principle applies to athletes who are new to endurance sport and come in with a lot of enthusiasm and time available. Someone who averaged four or five hours a week in their first year could probably dedicate 15 hours a week if they wanted to, but the long-term adaptation will be better if that increase happens gradually over several years rather than all at once. Patience matters enormously there.
• As for Ben's annual training hours, it was just over a thousand, though that is not a number we were ever targeting. Training is planned block by block, asking what we can get out of the next period, not how a round number looks at the end of December.
• In professional cycling, annual hours are heavily shaped by race programming anyway. Milan-San Remo is a very long day. Some stage race legs are three hours, some were barely one this year because of weather. So the total accumulates in a way that is largely driven by the calendar rather than a deliberate target.
• Broadly, most professional cyclists sit somewhere between 800 and 1,200 hours per year, with a lot of individual variation depending on whether someone is a high-volume athlete by nature, what their race programme looks like, and how their body is built.
• Cycling has an unusually wide range of athlete types, more so than most endurance sports. A 90-kilo sprinter like Jonathan Milan and a 55-kilo climber like Cepeda are absorbing training load in completely different ways and racing completely different kinds of events.
• That variation means there is no single number that makes sense across the board.

Planning the 2025 season

32:06 -

• At this stage of Ben's development, the planning process is more about refinement than making big changes. We are getting closer to the ceiling of what can be added, so the focus shifts to getting the details right.
• Looking back at 2024, one of the things we examined was the race programme leading into the Ardennes.
• Some races that we had included were adding too much fatigue or simply did not fit well in the schedule, so we reverted closer to what had worked in 2023, removing events like Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana and similar races that were not serving him well.
• We also continued working on the altitude and heat strategies around key target races.
• The bigger factor, though, was tactical. Physiologically, Ben in 2024 was good enough to have produced better results than he did.
• A large part of what changed in 2025 was sitting down with him before the Ardennes and before the Tour, going through footage from the year before and doing something closer to what football teams do with video analysis.
• Looking at how he was racing, what was working, what was not, and building some awareness around that. That work ended up being a significant part of why 2025 went the way it did.

Examples of tactical changes

33:30 -

• The main one was trying to ride less like a headless chicken.
• Ben is known for his aggressive racing style, and that is not something we want to remove. It is a genuine strength. But there were moments where the red mist was coming down and he was simply burning energy he did not need to burn.
• What a lot of people do not see in the highlights is how brutal the first hour of a race can be, particularly on a day when Ben is trying to get into a breakaway.
• On a sprint stage, a move can roll off the front with almost no resistance because everyone knows it is not going to stay. On a day where the break has a real chance of surviving, it can take an hour and over a hundred attacks before something goes.
• The difference in energy cost between those two scenarios is enormous, and there is a lot to be saved by timing the moves better rather than attacking in the most aggressive way possible every single time.
• Once he is in the break, he is generally very solid. But earlier in his career that was not always the case. My favourite example is Brabantse Pijl, which was one of his first real breakthrough results on the cobbles.
• He went with another rider who was a strong sprinter, and Ben did far too much work because he was desperate to make sure the break survived to the finish.
• The problem is that if you take a sprinter to the line, you are not going to win. So doing all that work to guarantee a second place makes no sense.
• The correct approach is to be prepared to lose in order to win. Accept that if you refuse to collaborate and the bunch catches you, that is a possible outcome, but at least you gave yourself a chance of winning.
• Sacrificing a likely second place for a chance at first is a hard mentality to adopt, because second in a semi-classic is still a very good result and the instinct is to protect it.
• We talked through that, showed him the footage, explained the logic, and then just a few days later at Amstel he was in a break and handled it completely differently.
• He was refusing to give riders like Pidcock a turn, actually racing the tactical game rather than just riding as hard as possible to drag the group to the finish. He got a great result out of it, and it was only three days after we had that conversation.
• He has improved a lot in that respect, though it is a continuous process. Strade Bianche this year showed he can still slip back into old habits, so it is something we keep working on.
• Once we get him into the right move, the goal now is making sure he is actually racing to win from it, not just getting it to the line.

Race scheduling and athlete control

38:20 -

• The way the WorldTour calendar works is that teams are obligated to attend all WorldTour races, and that is not always convenient for an individual athlete's physiology.
• Most riders do not get to choose when they peak. You have to show up and do your job. It is the same as football: you cannot be poor for three months and then expect to score hat-tricks in December.
• You are paid to perform consistently across the season, and that inevitably means you rarely get to reach an absolute physiological peak in the way a marathon runner or a triathlete preparing for Kona can.
• For riders at Ben's level, though, there is more freedom. The bigger names in the sport are given more control over their calendars, which means we can be more deliberate about which races serve him well and which ones add fatigue without benefit.
• It is not unlimited freedom. He still has to perform at the Ardennes, at certain end-of-season races, and his programme has to align with the team's broader needs.
• But the ability to remove races that do not fit is a meaningful advantage. Roglic recently announced he would not race again until July in preparation for the Vuelta, which is quite an extreme example of what that freedom can look like at the very top.

Discrepancies between what you read in papers and what actually happens in the real world

42:05 -

• If someone came to professional cycling purely from a sports science background with no practical experience of the sport, I think there would be a serious misalignment between what they expected and what they found.
• A large part of how professional cycling training is structured has come from over a hundred years of people racing seriously, learning what works through trial and error, and passing that knowledge along.
• Sports science has improved our understanding of the underlying mechanisms enormously, but it does not do a particularly good job of telling you how to actually train a cyclist or put a year together.
• The sessions that appear in sports science papers are, in my opinion, some of the worst science in the field. Papers comparing four by fours against four by eights or four by sixteens as if the answer to that question tells you something useful about how to train are frustrating to read. I have never prescribed a four by four session to Ben.
• I have never done one myself with any success. It is a session that gets talked about endlessly in longevity circles as well, and I think it is genuinely a poor session that most people would struggle to get real adaptation from.
• A four by eight is at least closer to something I might use at certain times of year, though even then the context matters enormously. The idea that you can compare those sessions in isolation and declare one the winner is just not how training works.
• What sports science does well is explain the mechanisms behind why things work: why volume drives mitochondrial density, how different aerobic pathways respond to different stimuli, the biomechanics of movement.
• Understanding those mechanisms and then applying practical common sense on top of them is what actually works. But you need both.
• You need to understand the physiology, and you need to have experienced the training yourself well enough to know what a session actually feels like and what it does to you over days and weeks.
• I know four by fours do not work for me because I went out and did them when I was preparing for pursuit training and got nothing from it.
• That experience then pointed me toward other approaches, including things that older coaches from decades ago had been using with no scientific framework at all.
• An old-school cyclist from the seventies might have built a session based purely on feel and experience, and it worked because it was producing the right physiological stimulus, even if he could not have told you why.
• My job is to take something like that, figure out what it is actually doing mechanically and physiologically, and then work out where it fits in a training week for Ben.
• For more specific areas like altitude protocols and heat preparation, we have worked with outside experts and leaned more directly on what the research says, with some adaptation.
• But the core of what Ben's week looks like comes from my own understanding of the literature combined with years of figuring out through experience what actually translates and what does not.

Limits of sports science for cycling

50:30 -

• The point about session science being poor is really specific to cycling, and I think the distinction matters. For something like marathon running, a model like the Joyner model works well because the sport is essentially steady state.
• If you can improve your VO2 max and your threshold in a controlled way, you can predict your performance quite accurately. Cycling is so much more dynamic than that, and the specificity of what it actually demands gets lost when you try to reduce it to the same kind of physiological framework.
• I do actually like the Joyner model as a framework. When I am thinking about sessions, I am still asking whether this is working on fuel utilisation, whether it is giving neuromuscular gains, whether it is hitting threshold or VO2.
• Those underlying models are useful. The problem is not the physiology, it is the way the science is tested and who it is tested on.
• A lot of cycling sports science is done with university students on a watt bike, saddle height set to whatever it happens to be, turning up in trainers, sometimes hungover.
• I have done many lab tests where nobody measured my saddle height. The statistical analysis might be solid and the paper might get published, but if you did not control the warm-up and you did not control who walked through the door that morning, the results are not telling you what you think they are telling you.
• And beyond the quality of the conditions, the participants themselves are the real issue. The top ten cyclists at a typical university are not cyclists in any meaningful sense.
• I am barely training at the moment and half of them would not make the scratch group on a club ride. That is the gulf between the people being studied and the people the science is supposed to apply to.
• With running it is different. The top ten runners at a good university are genuinely good runners. You can get real athletes into a lab and produce results that transfer to the real world.
• In cycling that pool simply does not exist in a university setting, which means the science is being built on the wrong participants from the start.
• There is also a broader representation problem. We cannot even get enough male cyclists for properly controlled studies, which means getting enough trained female cyclists to do research that women actually deserve is even harder.
• The participants are not there, and that is not anyone's fault exactly, but it does mean a large portion of cycling sports science is drawing conclusions from people whose training loads bear no resemblance to what a well-trained cyclist actually does.
• A good interval session for a trained cyclist might be fifty minutes of hard quality work. A university student doing four or five hours a week would simply not survive that session.
• So when a paper compares three interval formats using those participants, it is not even asking the right question, let alone answering it correctly.
• The other thing that still does not get enough attention in the research is how different actual bike racing is from any steady-state model. There are people with impressive threshold numbers on Zwift who get dropped immediately the moment they enter a real race.
• Cycling is not steady state. It is a completely different beast, and a lot of the science has not caught up to that.
• We are seeing more research now on shorter, more dynamic efforts like thirty-fifteens and Tabata-style work, which is at least moving in the right direction, but that was not in the textbooks when I was coming through, so it did not shape much of my early thinking.

Improving bike power for age group triathletes

57:45 -

• Before getting into specific sessions, I want to hammer home the same point I keep coming back to: speed, not power, is what ultimately determines performance on the bike. Power is a tool, not the goal. I cannot emphasise that enough, and it is almost never talked about in the way it deserves to be.
• Beyond that, session design for improving bike power is genuinely individual. What you need depends on where you are as an athlete, what your run and swim training looks like, what your background in other sports is, and whether you are more limited by threshold, VO2 max, or fatigue resistance. There is no magic session. It does not exist.
• That said, one thing I think triathletes should take more advantage of is how much total physical work you can safely accumulate on the bike compared to the other disciplines.
• A hard run session might give you 12 to 20 minutes of quality work before injury risk or physical breakdown becomes a real concern. On the bike, 40 or more minutes of threshold-level work in a single session is very achievable, however you want to structure it, whether that is two by 20, five by eight, or ten by four.
• The format matters less than the total time spent at a meaningfully elevated physiological level. Swimming has the same limitation as running in this respect: for most non-elite swimmers, the arms give out before any serious cardiovascular load can be built.
• Cycling does not have that constraint in the same way, which makes it the most practical tool for pushing the upper end of aerobic stimulus within a triathlon training week.

The role of volume

1:01:36 -

• Volume is the other area where cycling is genuinely useful. On a Sunday morning you can get out at seven, ride for three hours, and be back before the day has really started. Getting that same aerobic time through running would mean multiple sessions, more injury risk, and a much harder day.
• Volume still matters in endurance sport. We cannot pretend it does not. You can see it happening in elite running now too, with athletes like Keely Hodgkinson and others using cycling to add aerobic load they cannot safely add through running alone.
• If someone has been doing eight hours a week for two years and has plateaued, more volume will probably help. If they have two weeks off work and can get to twelve hours, they will likely see a benefit.
• The sensible way to add that volume is through cycling, not by suddenly adding thirty percent more running and getting injured.

Common limiter for stagnating amateur

1:04:02 -

• It depends, and there is genuinely no single answer. Volume works when the time is there to do it. But a lot of people training eight to ten hours a week with jobs and families and everything else that comes with normal life are probably already doing close to the maximum they can sustain.
• If you could have been doing two more hours a week, you probably would be. So telling someone to do more volume when they simply cannot is not useful advice.
• In those cases, the other lever to pull is intensity. Not permanently, not as a new system to follow for the next two years, but as a deliberate change of stimulus for a defined period.
• If your body has been receiving exactly the same training for two years, it does not matter whether that training is polarised, Norwegian method, or anything else. It has already adapted to it and it will stop improving. The body needs a reason to change.
• There is good evidence for block periodisation in this context, where you take one week and go quite hard with several high intensity sessions, then back off significantly for the following four or five weeks.
• That kind of concentrated, temporary spike in stimulus can be enough to drive a new round of adaptation. The broader principle is what I kept coming back to with Ben: always have a lever you have not pulled yet.
• If you have been doing the same thing for two years, find something different, whether that is more volume when the time is available, or more intensity in a controlled window when it is not. Just do not make whichever one you choose the new permanent rule.

Training rules and individuality

1:08:30 -

• Training rules and frameworks are useful, but they are not gospel. The underlying principle is always the same: create stress, recover, force adaptation.
• If you cannot keep finding new ways to create that stress, your body will plateau, and it does not care which model you are following when that happens. You have to be willing to be a little creative and not let a set of rules box you in.
• A good example is someone who used to train at fifteen hours a week, had a life change, and is now doing eight or ten. That person's body is used to more load, so there is room to add stimulus through intensity rather than volume.
• Trying to add both at the same time carries a lot of risk, but using intensity as the lever when volume is constrained is often a very effective approach.
• Recovery capacity is also shaped by fitness itself, not just life circumstances. A fitter athlete recovers faster, can absorb more load, and therefore needs more load to keep improving.
• That is worth keeping in mind when thinking about whether the training you are doing is actually enough of a stimulus for where you are.

Figuring out what works for individual athletes

1:11:00 -

• There is always an element of experiment at the start of working with someone. The first six weeks tend to look relatively similar across athletes because I simply do not yet know how that person is going to respond. From there, you make calls based on what you are seeing.
• One pattern I have noticed, and I think Steve Magness touches on something similar in his writing, is the difference between more fast-twitch and more slow-twitch athletes.
• Fast-twitch athletes tend to get a lot out of over-under style sessions, where there is variation in effort and they can generate real force during the harder efforts.
• Slow-twitch athletes often do not get much from that format because they struggle to hit the right level on the overs, and they respond much better to sitting at a steady metabolic limit for longer efforts.
• If you have been training for a while and listening to a podcast like this, you have probably already figured out which camp you are in.
• Triathlon does tend to attract the diesel types, but being aware of where you sit and which sessions have historically worked well for you is genuinely useful information.
• After a year or two with an athlete, I can identify quite clearly which sessions produce good adaptation and which ones do not.
• Keeping that knowledge as a tool to return to at the right time is part of what good long-term coaching looks like.

Knowing whether a session or block is working

1:13:33 -

• It is largely anecdotal and comes from communication with the athlete. In cycling we race frequently, and race performance is always the biggest indicator of whether things are going in the right direction. Beyond that, the more experienced an athlete is, the more they simply know their own body.
• If I asked a well-trained athlete right now to tell me their threshold without a lab test, most of them could get within five to ten watts. Beginners cannot do that, and it matters less for them anyway because there is so much low-hanging fruit that almost any reasonable load will produce improvement.
• For more advanced athletes, learning to listen to how the body is responding to training is one of the most valuable skills you can develop, and it reduces the need for constant formal testing.
• For beginners specifically: do not overcomplicate it. Use blunt tools, enjoy the fact that gains come relatively easily at that stage, and pick the sessions you actually like doing.
• Check your progress every few months through a race result or a time trial. The time for nuance comes later.

Final tip: focus on speed

1:17:10 -

• Try to go faster. I know I have said this several times already, but it is still the thing I come back to. On the bike, on the run, in the pool, spend some time actually moving quickly.
• Strava segments are a fantastic tool for this because they give you instant, honest feedback on whether you went from A to B faster than you did before.
• They force you to engage with speed as a real metric rather than just checking a heart rate number. It is not about turning every run into a time trial, but being accountable to speed in all three disciplines, as something you are actively trying to improve over time, is still one of the most underused principles in triathlon training.

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Jacob’s website and Instagram 
• Jacob’s previous appearances on That Triathlon Show:

• Jacob Tipper | EP#424

• Training Talk with Jacob Tipper | EP#345

• Sub7/Sub8 with Jacob Tipper | EP#344

• Physiological Profiling Explained – Why, How, and Important Training Implications for Triathletes