Training Quality: Why How You Train Matters as Much as What You Do
- Mark Turnbull
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
When we talk about endurance training, the conversation usually comes back to the same things: volume, intensity, frequency and training distribution.
How many hours are you doing? How much Zone 2? How many intervals? Is your training polarised or pyramidal?
All useful questions. But they don't tell the whole story.
Two athletes can follow almost identical programmes and get very different results. One reason is something that's much harder to capture in TrainingPeaks or on a spreadsheet: training quality.
It's not simply what you do. It's how well you do it, why you're doing it, and whether it was actually the right training for you on that particular day.
This idea was explored by Silvana Bucher Sandbakk, Jacob Walther, Guro Strøm Solli, Espen Tønnessen and Thomas Haugen in their 2023 commentary, Training Quality—What Is It and How Can We Improve It?
For me, it's an important concept because it fits closely with how I think good endurance coaching should work.
Key takeaways at a glance
Training quality doesn't mean training harder.
Every session should have a clearly defined purpose.
Execution matters just as much as prescription.
Objective data only tells part of the story.
Athlete feedback and coach judgement matter.
Training should be adjusted according to how the athlete is responding, not blindly followed because it's written on the plan.
Consistently good training beats occasionally brilliant training.
What do we actually mean by training quality?
There's a tendency to associate a "quality session" with something hard.
Threshold intervals? Quality.
VO2 max session? Definitely quality.
Three-hour endurance ride? Perhaps not.
That's the wrong way to think about it.
A well-executed easy endurance session can be an extremely high-quality training session. Equally, a badly paced VO2 max workout performed by a tired, under-fuelled athlete can be poor-quality training.
Bucher Sandbakk and colleagues describe training quality as the degree of excellence in how training sessions and the wider training process are carried out to optimise adaptation and performance.
Put more simply:
Do the right training. Do it well. Do it at the right time.
They divide this into two areas.
1. Quality of the overall training process
This is the bigger picture.
What is the athlete trying to achieve? What currently limits their performance? What adaptations are we trying to create? How should training progress over weeks and months?
This includes goal setting, identifying performance gaps, selecting appropriate training methods and adjusting the programme as the athlete develops.
2. Quality of the individual session
Then we zoom in.
What is today's session supposed to achieve?
If it's an endurance ride, are we accumulating aerobic work without unnecessary fatigue?
If it's threshold training, are we creating the metabolic stress we actually want?
If it's VO2 max work, is the athlete spending enough time at a sufficiently high oxygen uptake?
If it's a recovery session, are they genuinely recovering rather than turning it into another moderate training day?
The purpose of the session should dictate how it's performed.
That sounds obvious. In practice, it's surprisingly easy to get wrong.
What determines training quality?
Training doesn't happen in a laboratory.
Athletes have jobs, families, poor nights of sleep, stressful weeks, bad weather and occasionally legs that simply don't want to cooperate.
All of those things affect the training response.
The athlete
Motivation, recovery, sleep, mental focus, nutrition, life stress and training history all influence how someone responds to a session.
The same 4 × 8-minute workout can be completely appropriate on Tuesday and completely inappropriate on Friday.
Context matters.
The coach
A coach's job isn't simply to populate a calendar with workouts.
Planning matters, but so does interpreting what happens afterwards.
Sometimes the best coaching decision is progressing the training. Sometimes it's reducing it. Occasionally it's cancelling the planned session altogether.
That's where coaching judgement becomes important.
The environment
Heat, cold, altitude, terrain, equipment and training partners can all change the demands of a session.
A power target that makes perfect sense indoors may be unrealistic riding into a Peak District headwind on a cold February morning.
The physiological objective matters more than blindly hitting a number.
The athlete-coach relationship
This one is easily underestimated.
Good coaching requires honest feedback.
If an athlete feels they have to report that every session went brilliantly, I'm missing useful information.
I'd much rather hear:
"I completed it, but the last two intervals were awful and my legs haven't felt right for three days."
That's information I can use.
Building a high-quality training culture
Good training works as a continuous feedback loop:
Plan → Execute → Review → Adapt
Not:
Plan → Follow blindly for 12 weeks → Hope for the best.
Here's how that might look in practice.
Before training: know why you're doing it
Every important session should have a purpose.
Imagine a runner preparing for a threshold session.
The objective isn't simply:
"Run 4 × 8 minutes."
The real objective might be to accumulate controlled work around lactate threshold without creating excessive fatigue.
That immediately changes how we approach the session.
Before starting, I'd want to consider:
What adaptation are we targeting?
What intensity is appropriate?
How recovered is the athlete?
Are conditions likely to affect pace or heart rate?
Is the athlete adequately fuelled?
What data will help us evaluate the session?
For a threshold session that could mean monitoring pace, heart rate, RPE and, where appropriate, blood lactate.
But the numbers serve the purpose of the session — the numbers aren't the purpose of the session.
A useful question before any key workout is:
What are we trying to achieve today?
If you can't answer that, I'd question why the session is in the programme.
During training: execute, don't just complete
This is where athletes sometimes get caught out.
Completing the workout isn't necessarily the same as executing it well.
Suppose a cyclist has 5 × 5 minutes of VO2 max work.
They could smash the first interval, chase a power PB, fade badly through the final three intervals and still tick the workout as completed.
But was that good training?
Probably not.
I'd rather see controlled execution that delivers the intended physiological stimulus across the whole session.
The same applies to technique.
A swimmer doing a technically focused session shouldn't become obsessed with lap times if stroke mechanics are deteriorating.
A runner working on economy shouldn't chase pace while their mechanics fall apart.
Stay focused on the objective.
And be prepared to adjust.
Reducing a session from six good repetitions to five isn't failure if repetition six would simply add fatigue without adding a useful training stimulus.
After training: don't just upload and forget
This is arguably where some of the most useful coaching information appears.
After a key session, I want two types of information.
Objective data
Depending on the athlete and sport, that might include:
Power
Pace
Heart rate
Blood lactate
Cadence
Interval consistency
Decoupling
GPS data
But data without context can be misleading.
Which is why I also want:
Subjective feedback
How did it actually feel?
What was the RPE?
How were the legs?
How motivated did you feel?
Was the session controlled or were you hanging on?
Were you properly fuelled?
How did you feel later that day and the following morning?
This is where athlete feedback and objective data become much more useful when combined.
A rider producing normal power at an unusually high heart rate and reporting an RPE of 9/10 is telling me something very different from a rider producing the same power at their normal heart rate with an RPE of 6/10.
The power number is identical. The training response isn't.
A simple example
Let's say I've prescribed a threshold session for a cyclist.
Before
We establish the purpose: accumulate controlled work around threshold.
We check recovery, fuelling and conditions.
We agree on the target power or physiological range rather than treating one exact wattage as sacred.
During
The athlete monitors power, heart rate and RPE.
If power is appropriate, heart rate develops normally and perceived effort is controlled, great.
If heart rate is unusually high, RPE is climbing rapidly and power is falling, forcing the remaining intervals simply because they're written on the plan probably isn't clever.
After
We review:
Was the intended intensity achieved?
Was power reasonably stable?
How did heart rate respond?
Did RPE match expectations?
How did the athlete feel?
Was fuelling adequate?
Did we achieve the purpose of the session?
Then comes the important bit.
We use that information to influence what happens next.
That's coaching.
Can we measure training quality?
Not perfectly.
And I'm not convinced we need to reduce everything to a single score.
But we can monitor it.
Useful objective measures include:
Heart rate relative to intensity
Power or pace relative to the target
Blood lactate where appropriate
Interval repeatability
Technical metrics such as cadence or stroke rate
Subjective measures are equally valuable:
RPE
Motivation
Focus
General sensations
Wellness
Athlete comments
Coach observations
Even a simple 1–5 rating for focus, execution and perceived quality can become useful when tracked consistently.
Patterns are often more valuable than individual scores.
Quality before quantity?
Mostly — but I'd add an important qualification.
Endurance performance still requires volume.
There isn't a clever training-quality shortcut that removes the need to accumulate a substantial amount of aerobic work.
The aim isn't quality instead of quantity.
It's quality within quantity.
If you're training 10 hours each week, how much of those 10 hours genuinely contributes to the adaptation you're trying to create?
How much is appropriate?
How much is just fatigue?
And how much is there simply because that's what you've always done?
Those are much more interesting questions.
My take-home message
Training quality isn't about making every workout perfect.
That's unrealistic.
It's about training with purpose, awareness and adaptability.
Know what you're trying to achieve before the session.
Execute the session according to that purpose.
Then look at what actually happened — both in the data and in how you felt.
And use that information to make the next decision better.
For athletes, that means taking some ownership. Don't just follow the numbers on the screen. Learn what different intensities feel like. Pay attention to your body. Give your coach useful feedback.
For coaches, it means looking beyond whether the boxes turned green.
Power, pace, heart rate and lactate are incredibly useful. But they're pieces of information, not the whole answer.
The real skill is combining those numbers with athlete feedback, training history, recovery and the demands of the event you're preparing for.
Because ultimately, better training isn't simply about doing more work.
It's about getting more of the right adaptation from the work you're already doing.
Reference
Bucher Sandbakk S, Walther J, Solli GS, Tønnessen E, Haugen T. Training Quality—What Is It and How Can We Improve It? International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. 2023;18(5):557–560. doi:10.1123/ijspp.2022-0484.
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