Those of you that read our blogs, or subscribe to our monthly Training Science Summaries, will know that we often write about ‘durability’. Durability has been one of our key research areas over the last few years, and something that is seeing a lot of attention in our field by other researchers, too. I think durability has massive implications not only for endurance performance, but also for the day-to-day decisions we make in endurance training.

In this blog, I’m going to provide an update on the durability research – what we know, what we don’t know, and what the implications are for athletes. However, I’ll before we get into durability, I’ll discuss physiological profiling.

Physiological Profiling and Endurance Training

I often have my athletes perform incremental exercise tests. With an incremental exercise test, we can estimate the athlete’s overall aerobic capacity or VO₂max, how economical their movement is, and their speed or...

In the triathlon and cycling communities, many of us have power meters on our bikes, or smart trainers at home. Power output data can be helpful in pacing efforts and tracking longer term progress. I myself programme many of my training sessions using power output – e.g. 4 x 40 min at 270 W for an Ironman workout – with the target number guided by the laboratory-based physiological profile of the athlete I am working with. For example, in the session above, the target power output is designed to be just above the first lactate threshold, in the so-called heavy intensity domain.

However, not all athletes have regular access to laboratory facilities for physiological profiling assessments and the determination of thresholds. For those athletes, power profiling represents an alternative, field-based method that can be used to provide anchor points in our training programming. Also, power profiling may be used to provide a still-elusive ‘durability’ metric. In...