About the author: Mikael is the founder of Scientific Triathlon, which he founded in 2015. He has been working as a triathlon coach full-time since 2017, helping athletes from beginner to professional level achieve wide-ranging goals, from completing their first triathlon to qualifying for World Championships. Mikael is also the host of the famous podcast That Triathlon Show.

After years of coaching triathletes, I've noticed something interesting: we often focus intensely on factors that promise big returns but don’t live up to that promise. The factors that actually drive performance often get overlooked in favour of these overrated factors.

In this article, I’ll go through eleven factors I consider overrated for triathlon performance. Some of them might surprise you.

I want to point out that when I say something is overrated, I don't mean it's useless. Some of these factors are still valuable to varying degrees. The key point is that their usefulness might be overstated, particularly for the typical age-group triathlete. I also want to point out that I don’t consider all of the items on this list equal, neither in terms of actual value, not in terms of the degree of overestimation in the eyes of the general triathlon public.

With these caveats in mind, let’s dive into the list of overrated factors for triathlon performance.

Training methodology

1. Swimming: The Time Investment Paradox

Swimming presents one of the most controversial elements in triathlon training. Many athletes underestimate its importance for long-distance races, starting swim training just one to two months before an Ironman with only weekly sessions. However, swimming can also be significantly overrated by many athletes.

When you compare time invested in swimming to race performance returns, the gains are often minimal. This holds true even in professional long-course triathlon, where the correlation between overall race performance and swim performance is surprisingly weak. Bike and run performances show much stronger correlations with overall success.

For age-group athletes, swimming three to four (or even five) times per week can be helpful in certain stages of your career, while you’re still seeing significant improvements. But when your swim improvements start to plateau, the return on investment of swim training rapidly decreases.

The time commitment of swimming, including commuting, changing rooms and so on, can add up to many hours of commitment per week but may only result in shaving off one to two minutes in an Ironman.

For this reason, cutting swimming back to twice per week and reallocating that time to running or cycling often yields better improvements, as there is a more direct correlation between time put into cycling and running and improvements gained.

Athletes with solid swimming foundations might even reduce to one swim per week during winter months, then increase to twice per week closer to races. The key is finding optimal balance to maximize overall performance rather than chasing marginal swimming gains.

2. Workout Design: Missing the Forest for the Trees

While workout design matters, the finer points of it are often overrated. The difference between easy rides and threshold intervals is substantial, but once you've decided on doing threshold intervals, whether these intervals are 5 or 8 minutes long doesn't significantly impact outcomes, nor does the difference between 1.5 or 3-minute recoveries between intervals.

Focus on big decisions: easy exercise versus hard session, training versus resting, TT bike versus road bike, hilly versus flat terrain. These choices make substantial differences in training effectiveness.

Another example where we go wrong is wanting to pinpoint the perfect intensity target, e.g. “95% of FTP”. This is not how effective training works. Intensity should be adjustable within moderately wide ranges so you can adjust to how you feel and how the body responds on the day. One particular detail I’ve noticed is that athletes often training indoors in ERG-mode tend to get overfixated on such details, leading to potential stagnation because they miss the forest for the trees when it comes to workout design and execution.

3. Specificity: The Unwarranted Obsession

Some athletes intensely focus on race-specific training for months but see similar race results each year. This stagnation often occurs because they neglect fitness for months after their main goal race, which means rebuilding almost from scratch every time they start again.

Consistent (almost) year-round training (with strategic breaks) is crucial for maintaining and improving fitness, far more than specific training in race lead-ups. For the majority of your training year, you should be focusing not on your goal race, but on your goal fitness.

VO2max, threshold, exercise economy and durability are all important, regardless of if you race sprint distance or Ironman. And you know that you will always need to swim, bike and run in a triathlon, so any general improvement in swimming, cycling and running, is very likely to translate to improve triathlon performance.

The takehome message is: train consistently for most of the year, and focus on your fitness, your strengths and weaknesses, your physiology, no matter what your goal race is. Then use the last few weeks before a race to focus on the specifics of that goal event. A well-trained athlete with robust general fitness can perform impressively with minimal specific training.

Experienced athletes with a high training age typically need only four to six weeks of highly race-specific training if base fitness is solid. Extended specific training periods (12+ weeks) can lead to stagnation, injury, or burnout.

4. Lab Testing: Expensive Precision for Minimal Gain

You might not believe it, seeing as I put it on a list of overrated factors, but I’m actually a fan of physiological testing like lactate testing and gas exchange testing.

These tests provide detailed threshold information, but often aren't worth the time and financial investment for most athletes, certainly for most athletes who don’t have coach with significant experience in interpreting test results.

A big problem with lab tests is the automated process of generating test reports based on simplistic algorithms without any critical thinking or intervention on behalf of the lab technician This is not to throw all labs under the bus, as there are exceptions, but I wouldn’t take my chances.

These reports are often full of useless numbers that lead to worse training rather than better. Without going into too much detail, just as one example, you will often see thresholds being way overestimated in a gas exchange test due to the nature of such ramp tests. This could be easily resolved by changing the test protocol (if the athlete wants accurate thresholds and VO2max), or even by the technician collecting RPE data (typically not done in these tests), but this is rarely the case.

So, we have reports that may contain incorrect information, and even if you go to a very good lab and actually get good results, knowing all of these numbers might not actually translate into more effective training.

Instead, analyzing training data like power or speed duration curves offers significant insights into athlete profiles, and this is something that can be done for free, with much less of a learning curve than interpreting physiological test results. Doing this provides practical performance understanding and can guide training decisions effectively.

Critical power testing, a field test you can do for free, is a great example of a test that can help you understand your performance profile without costly lab tests, and with much lower risks of incorrect or misinterpreted results.

Equipment

5. The W/kg Myth

The watts per kilogram metric is vastly overrated in triathlon, except for courses with net positive elevation gain, like the Alpe d’Huez triathlon.

For most courses, even those with decent elevation gain, W/kg is relatively insignificant. In a race like Ironman Nice, W/kg is important, but absolute power is still crucial. The fastest athletes on the Ironman Nice bike course in recent years have certainly not been the lightest athletes, but the most powerful athletes.

Let me illustrate: compare two athletes riding at 3 W/kg on flat terrain. One weighs 80 kg (240 watts), the other 55 kg (165 watts). Assuming a CdA of 0.25 for the heavier rider and 0.24 for the lighter rider, the heavier rider's speed is 39.5 km/h compared to 35.5 km/h. Even reducing the lighter rider's CDA to 0.22 only increases speed to 36.4 km/h, still 3.1 km/h slower, resulting in a 23-minute deficit over 180 km.

This demonstrates that watts per CdA correlates much better with speed in triathlon compared to W/kg. Watts per CDA is harder to measure, which may explain W/kg's popularity, but simplicity doesn't equate to usefulness.

*Additional variables used: Crr 0.003, Mechanical efficiency 95%, Air density 1.225 kg/m3. See https://www.velobike.co.nz/blogs/training-materials/cda-calulator for a useful calculator.

6. Power Meters: The Accuracy Trap

Power meters are incredibly useful tools for objective training load measurement. However, what's overrated is their accuracy between different devices. Most modern power meters are precise (consistent day-to-day) but not necessarily accurate compared to other power meters.

Your 300 watts may be significantly different from your friend's 300 watts on a different power meter. This creates problems when comparing data between different power meters, including your own outdoor power meter versus indoor smart trainer, or comparing power data with other athletes.

For example, if you ride an Ironman segment at 200 watts and your friend rides at 180 watts but finishes faster, you might assume they're more aerodynamic. However, you don't know if they actually pushed the same power, more, or less.

7. Bike Frames: A fortune for a marginal gain

Bike frames represent one of the most overrated and least cost-effective performance improvements.

Since watts per CdA correlates with bike performance, upgrading components like front end, saddle, cranks, wheels, tires, and clothing can significantly impact either power, CdA, or both. Or in the case of tires, rolling resistance, Crr. These components might directly improve CdA (e.g. a high-quality trisuit) or improve CdA and/or power, by improving your position or comfort on the bike (e.g. front end, saddle, cranks).

Buying a new frame, unless you're on the wrong size, switching from road to TT bike, Or switching from a very outdated bike offers minimal improvement at huge cost. Every new frame requires re-optimizing components from scratch, especially since some components may not fit.

In most cases, a better investment is optimizing your current frame setup by continuously refining components and position. This approach delivers much bigger performance impacts than new frames.

Data

8. Compound Scores: Simplification Backfires

Compound scores synthesize multiple metrics into single numbers, like recovery scores combining HRV, resting heart rate, and sleep data, or Training Stress Score and derived (CTL, ATL, TSB) metrics combining external intensity and duration.

These can be useful within specific contexts. CTL can indicate relative training load over time for individual athletes. However, they lose validity when comparing different athletes or sports. Comparing cycling CTL to running CTL, or your CTL to a friend's, provides no meaningful insights.

The primary issue is overuse beyond the valid scope of these compound metrics. Compound scores aim to simplify data, but comprehensive understanding requires examining individual data streams. The original data contains most valuable information while compound scores offer limited insights, and often leads to incorrect conclusions.

9. Wearables and Sensors: The Data Collection Fallacy

GPS watches, bike computers, heart rate monitors, and power meters are valuable tools. However, wearables measuring recovery, sleep trackers, blood glucose, and biomechanical sensors are more questionable.

The perception that merely collecting data improves performance is flawed. Are you actually doing anything with the data you collect? If so, why? Remember Goodhart’s law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Over-reliance on data can also hinder performance by introducing unnecessary complexity. Sleep trackers might improve sleep habits, but they might also cause anxiety about sleep quality (orthosomnia), potentially worsening sleep.

Most wearables are overrated because collecting more data doesn't necessarily lead to better training. Properly utilizing data requires significant time and investment, and can lead to naive interventionism where taking action based on data causes more harm than good.

Recovery

10. Recovery Modalities: Back to Basics

Recovery modalities beyond sleep, nutrition, and hydration have limited value for most athletes. This includes ice baths, cryotherapy, compression devices and garments, and supplements. There may be a (very real) placebo effect from some of these recovery modalities, but it pales in comparison to the impact of sleep, nutrition and hydration. And subconsciously, these recovery modalities are likely to make you do a worse job at taking care of those three big rocks of recovery.

Massage deserves special mention for its psychological benefits through human interaction, allowing athletes to discuss their day and vent frustrations. It also forces you to lie down and do nothing. So massage in my opinion can be a tool in your recovery toolbox, if you feel it works for you.

For all athletes, achieving optimal sleep, nutrition, and hydration should be the top priority. Recovery modalities might offer marginal gains during training camps, multi-day races or travel, but they are often impractical in everyday training due to time constraints and become distractions from what really matters.

Mindset

11. Addition by Addition: Why more is not always better

Athletes often seek to enhance performance by adding something new or by adding more of something they already have. This might be adding more volume, more intensity, or adding new workouts, new training philosophies, new supplements, or new equipment into the mix.

In my coaching experience, significant gains often come from subtraction: reducing intensity or volume for overtraining athletes, eliminating unnecessary self-imposed dietary restrictions, or removing excessive work stress, to name a few.

While adding elements can sometimes help, more often than not the answer lies in subtraction, not addition. Remove the elements that don’t help, rather than adding more elements into the mix, as this “addition by addition” mindset simply dilutes the impact of the factors that matter.

This approach applies beyond athletics to professional and personal development. The most successful athletes focus on fundamentals, eliminate the unnecessary, and resist the temptation to constantly add, but rather, they give the factors that matter room to have a big impact.

The Resource Allocation Framework

Understanding what's overrated doesn't mean dismissing everything entirely. The key is recognizing where your time, energy, and resources yield the greatest returns. For most age-group triathletes, this means focusing on consistency in training, proper recovery through sleep and nutrition, and mastering basics before chasing marginal gains.

Many of the factors mentioned in this article still have their place. However, their importance is often inflated beyond their actual contribution to performance. It’s not about whether something is good or bad, but it’s about where it makes sense to allocate resources, be that physical effort and energy, time, cognitive energy or money.

I hope this article has helped you think about your performance from this perspective of resource allocation, whether you agree or disagree with some or all of the items I listed as generally overrated. This is the main takehome message from the article. Not that some of the items on my list are “bad”, but that if we want to improve performance, we need to be conscious about where we allocate resources.

Learn more about Mikael: https://scientifictriathlon.com/mikael/

Listen to Mikael’s podcast: That Triathlon Show

Follow Mikael on Instagram: @scientifictriathlonhq