Getting Started with a Triathlon Training Plan

Beginner triathlon training plans come in all shapes and sizes. What’s important is that you choose a plan that’s right for you and even modify it if necessary to suite your individual needs. As a beginner, you’ll have the most success if you can start a triathlon training plan that will lead you to your goal of completing your first triathlon and becoming a triathlete. And even possibly greater athletic endeavors of competing and improving in the sport of triathlon.

There are many types of beginner triathlon training plans. And as there should be, since no one plan is right for everyone. As I discussed in an earlier post, How to Choose a Triathlon Training Program, you need to find a plan that meets all of your individual needs. You’ll need to be honest about your beginning level of fitness and skill, and formulate or adopt a plan that will take into consideration each of your beginning attributes in the three disciplines.

One type of plan that you’ll come across is the strict and rigid plan. These plans are widely available on the internet for all types of race distances and beginning levels of fitness. You’ll know these types of plans when you see them. They are written out in calendar format telling you exactly how many miles and how much time to workout in each sport for every day of the week. These triathlon training plans look great to the beginner triathlete -everything is written out so simply and clearly like a recipe for potato and ham soup. But what these rigid plans are is really a recipe for disaster.

How can this cookie cutter triathlon training plan know what your current level of fitness is? How can it know that you aren’t able to work out twice a day three times a week? Simply, they can’t. Avoid starting these types of beginner plans, as you are surely setting yourself up for injury or failure.

These rigid online training plans are useful for showing you what a plan might look like, or for showing you how frequent and how much you might be working out. But these beginner plans fail to show you how to schedule all of that into your normal daily life. And they fail to take into consideration your current level of endurance.

What can be done with these rigid beginner triathlon training plans is to take them and modify them. Look at how frequently and how much volume there is in the first week and decide if that is something you can do. If not, then maybe only do half of that, or two-thirds of it. Start off slow and do the preparation that you will need to make it to that first week’s level of volume.

There are other types of beginner programs that can be found as well. And I term these “loose” programs. These will give you a list of workouts for each week, and it’s up to you to schedule them into your weekly schedule. I find these to be more accommodating to the beginner triathlete. Flexible plans like these are great because it gives you the freedom to schedule and re-arrange your workouts as you need to. And if you are disciplined enough to schedule each week’s workout, then you are much more likely to complete your weekly training and make progress toward your triathlon goal.

One characteristic that you’ll notice about good beginner triathlon training programs, or any training program for that matter, is that they are built around the principal of periodization. Periodization is the method of varying your training schedule to allow for periods of harder and easier training. The idea being that your body improves and gets stronger during the weeks of easier training. So if you look closely at some plans, you’ll see that there are some weeks with less volume, frequency, duration or intensity – or a combination of all of those. The rest weeks are very important for avoiding injury and continuing to improve all aspects of your triathlon training.

So where is the best place to find a beginner triathlon plan? As always, there is a ton if information online to sift through, both free and for sale. There are all kinds of books and magazines that contain plans or parts of plans. It would be wise to comb through as much information as you can find on training programs. Because remember – there is no one training plan for everyone. There might be one that’s close, but it needs a little tweaking. Or there might be one that has a swim plan that you aren’t quite ready for. Which brings up another idea, you can look at individual training plans for swimming, cycling or running and see what those look like and if there is any particular aspect of those plans that you might like. There are tons of 5k, 10k, half-marathon and marathon plans, as well as century and metric century biking plans.

Remember the idea is to find the training plan that works for you. Or you can hire a coach to do all of that for you, but that is a topic for another post. Hiring a coach can be a considerable investment. But for those athletes that are not sure about triathlon and just want to give it a try, finding your own triathlon training plan will be the most economical way to go.