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Triathlon: Why You Need One Training Load for Three Sports
Greg · UpGreg AI Coach
5 min read
Many amateur triathletes track their swimming in one app, their cycling in another and their running in a third. Each sport, taken alone, looks reasonable. But your body adds everything up.
Your body doesn't tell the difference
A three-hour Saturday ride and a Sunday long run don't load exactly the same muscles. But they draw on the same reserves: energy, sleep, nervous system recovery, tendons. Counting them separately means underestimating your real fatigue.
Training load, in plain words
The load of a session combines its duration and its intensity. Added up over the last few days, it gives your acute load, in other words your recent fatigue. Averaged over several weeks, it gives your chronic load, your underlying fitness.
The ratio between the two is a useful signal: when recent load climbs much faster than underlying load, injury risk rises. This ratio, popularised by Tim Gabbett in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2016, is debated by researchers; it remains a good safeguard, as long as you don't treat it as absolute truth.
What it changes for a triathlete
- A big cycling week should lighten the running that follows, even if “the running was going fine”.
- Swimming costs your legs less, but it counts in overall fatigue.
- Recovery weeks are planned on total load, not sport by sport.
In practice
You need one place where all your sessions land, and a plan recalculated from total load. That is exactly what UpGreg does: all your activities, whatever the sport, feed a single training load, and your programme adjusts accordingly. To see how this compares with other tools: TrainingPeaks alternatives. And to get started: training for your first triathlon.
“You can lie to three apps. Not to your legs. I look at everything together, and when Saturday's ride was too big, Sunday's run gets shorter.”
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