Technique Before Volume
Most age-group swimmers lose more time to a dropped elbow and a crossing hand than they could ever recover by swimming further, and most runners are held back by cadence and posture rather than by fitness. We film, analyse and correct before adding load, because volume applied to a poor pattern simply engrains it and eventually injures the athlete. Swim video is repeated every eight weeks so improvement is visible rather than assumed, and drills are prescribed for the specific fault rather than issued as a generic set.
Zones Set by Testing, Not by Age
Training zones calculated from a formula involving your age are worse than useless for a large minority of people. We set them from field tests in each discipline — swim threshold pace over a timed distance, bike threshold power, run threshold pace — repeated every six to eight weeks because they move as fitness changes. That single step usually reveals that an athlete has been riding their easy sessions too hard and their hard sessions too easy, which is the most common pattern we see in new athletes' data.
Plans Built for a Real Week
A plan that assumes ten clean hours will fail for someone who has seven unpredictable ones. We build around the week the athlete actually has, including the days that regularly collapse, with sessions ranked so that if only three happen they are the three that matter. Travel weeks, night shifts, small children and end-of-quarter workloads are planned for rather than apologised for afterwards. Consistency at seven honest hours beats heroics at eleven followed by a fortnight of nothing.
Weekly Adjustment
Every session is reviewed against what the athlete actually did and how it felt, and the following week is written afterwards rather than months in advance. Fatigue, illness, a bad night's sleep, a hard week at work or an unexpectedly good session all change what should come next. Athletes get written feedback on their key sessions, not a green tick, and they can ask a question at any point and get an answer the same day rather than at the next monthly call.
The Bike Position Is Part of the Coaching
A position that is fast in a wind tunnel and unsustainable for four hours costs more than it saves, and one that wrecks the hamstrings guarantees a poor run. Fits are done by the same people who write the plan, so the position is set for the distance being raced and revisited as flexibility and strength change through a season. We also check the run-off from the bike in training rather than discovering the problem in the second transition of a race.
Race Execution Rehearsed
Most bad races are decided in the first twenty minutes by starting too hard, and most of the rest by fuelling that was never practised at race intensity. We write a pacing and nutrition plan with numbers, rehearse it in training including the exact products at the exact intervals, and practise transitions until they are boring. The week itself is planned in detail: travel, sleep, meals, registration, recce, warm-up and a contingency for the things that always go wrong.
