Fads in Triathlon: What to Ignore and Why
Triathlon is unusually vulnerable to fads. The sport spans three disciplines, each with its own equipment market, technique debate, and coaching culture, which means there are three times as many products promising to fix a weakness the athlete was not sure they had. An insecure runner can only be sold running products. An insecure triathlete can be sold running products, cycling products, swimming products, recovery protocols, nutrition systems, and testing packages across all three. The market reflects this generously.
What drives the spending is not stupidity. It is the same motivation that drives good training: the desire to improve. The fad industry targets athletes who are training consistently but not progressing as fast as they would like, which describes most age-group triathletes at some point in a season. The pitch is rarely "this replaces training." The pitch is "this optimises the training you are already doing." That framing is harder to dismiss, and it is largely why the industry sustains itself year after year regardless of whether the products deliver.
01 | Gadgets
The gadget end of the market operates on a simple principle: if performance is measurable, more measurement must produce better performance. At-home metabolic gas analysis masks promise to reveal how well the body burns fat versus carbohydrate during exercise. Wrist-worn swim stroke devices claim to measure catch efficiency and stroke length. AI-powered platforms offer field-based aerodynamic and metabolic profiling, generating drag coefficients and metabolic thresholds from algorithms applied to GPS and power data collected on a training ride.
The problem with all of these is the same: the data they produce is unreliable, unactionable, or both. The at-home metabolic mask measures respiratory gases under conditions no consistent protocol can standardise. Small errors in fit, airflow, or movement introduce large errors in output. What the athlete receives is a number that resembles science and does not describe physiology accurately enough to change anything meaningful about how they train. The AI metabolic platforms apply population averages and theoretical drag models to the athlete's existing device data. Environmental variables including wind, temperature, road surface, and gradient changes introduce errors the algorithm cannot correct for. Running the same protocol on the same route on two consecutive days in different conditions will produce different figures. The athlete has not changed; the measurement has. Any training decision made on that data is made on noise. The broader problem with lab-style metabolic testing is covered in the article on why lab testing is a waste of money for triathletes.
HRV monitoring has become a daily habit for a significant number of age-group triathletes. Heart rate variability is a real physiological signal: it reflects autonomic nervous system function and does carry information about recovery status in longitudinal trends reviewed over weeks and months. The problem is using it as a daily go/no-go training decision tool. HRV is sensitive to enough variables — hydration, alcohol, temperature, time of measurement, posture — that the day-to-day fluctuation is too noisy to support confident individual training decisions. An athlete who skips a planned threshold session because the morning score is low may have done so on the basis of poor sleep, a glass of wine the evening before, or a slightly different measurement position. The session is missed. The fitness is not banked. A coach working from knowledge of the athlete's full training context will make better session decisions than a score generated from a single resting reading.
Smart insoles claim that foot mechanics tracked during running can identify injury risk and prompt corrections. Injury causation in running is complex enough that experienced clinicians working with force plates and slow-motion video struggle to isolate it reliably. An insole producing a readiness score does not improve on that difficulty. The most robust injury prevention tool available to any triathlete remains gradual load progression, and no device changes that. The article on marginal gains in triathlon covers why fine-tuning only has value once a solid foundation already exists.
02 | Supplements
The supplement industry's core strategy is to identify ingredients with genuine physiological relevance, blend them into a proprietary formulation, apply premium branding, and market the result as something qualitatively different from eating a varied diet. The ingredients are often real. The premium attached to them rarely is.
AG1 is the most prominent current example. It is a daily greens powder combining vitamins, minerals, probiotics, adaptogens, and a greens blend, marketed as a comprehensive nutritional foundation for active people. It costs considerably more than the equivalent micronutrient profile from whole food or standard supplementation. The benefit over a reasonably balanced diet is minimal. The price premium exists because the brand is premium, not because the formulation achieves something the components cannot achieve separately and more cheaply.
Ketone esters occupy the higher-end and more technically credible tier of the market. Research on exogenous ketones has shown performance effects in elite athletes under specific protocols, typically co-ingested with carbohydrate at calibrated doses during efforts where fat metabolism is a limiting variable. The cost runs at roughly £5 to £8 per serving. For most age-group triathletes taking them as a pre-session or pre-race supplement on the basis of professional athlete endorsements, the evidence for benefit at that dose and in that context is not established. The science supporting ketone esters was conducted on athletes with a substantially different training base and under protocols that bear little resemblance to the typical age-group application.
Beetroot juice and dietary nitrate supplementation have a real evidence base. Nitrate loading does produce vascular adaptations that carry a modest performance effect in certain populations. The problem is how the product is typically used. Consistent multi-day loading is required to produce the relevant adaptations. The pre-race beetroot shot that has become a fixture of many athletes' race morning routines is not the protocol the research describes. Acute dosing in trained athletes does not reliably replicate the effect of multi-day loading, and the evidence on acute single doses is considerably weaker than the marketing implies.
The general position on supplementation for most age-group triathletes is that a varied diet meeting caloric and macronutrient needs covers micronutrient requirements adequately. Where genuine deficiencies exist — iron, vitamin D in low-sunlight environments, B12 for athletes on plant-based diets — targeted, generic supplementation addresses them directly and cheaply. Caffeine has a consistent and well-evidenced performance effect at doses achievable from a standard cup of coffee. For most other marketed compounds, the evidence base is considerably weaker than the promotional material suggests, and the gap between claimed and demonstrated benefit tends to widen the more closely the research is examined.
03 | Sports Nutrition
Sports nutrition has genuine scientific merit as a category. Carbohydrate delivery during extended effort is well-supported. Electrolyte replacement in the heat makes a real difference to performance and safety. The format in which fuel is delivered matters for gastrointestinal tolerance. The problem is the margin between what products cost and what they actually contain.
Energy gels are predominantly glucose and fructose in a carrier. The ratio of the two sugars affects absorption rate and GI tolerance, and some formulations do outperform others in that specific respect. Beyond that, the differences between brands are largely cosmetic. The business model relies partly on athletes being reluctant to experiment with race nutrition close to a goal event, which creates product loyalty once something is established as tolerated.
The production side of this market is less opaque than the marketing suggests. Bulk manufacturers offer the complete supply chain including formulation, production, labelling, and packaging from a minimum order of 250 kilograms of a base glucose-fructose mix. Most of what sits in the nutrition section of a triathlon expo is a variation of the same starting material, differentiated by flavour and marketing spend.
The electrolyte category has developed its own premium tier through personalised sweat testing. Individual sweat sodium concentration does vary between athletes, and significant sodium losers exist and can benefit from targeted supplementation. For most age-group triathletes racing in typical conditions and eating a normal diet, the sodium available from standard race nutrition is adequate. The proposition that every triathlete requires a personalised electrolyte profile established through proprietary testing, expressed through a premium product line, is solving a genuine problem for a minority of athletes and selling that solution to everyone.
Homemade race nutrition built from maltodextrin, fructose, salt, and water comes close to matching commercial gels in function at a fraction of the cost for any athlete willing to test the approach in training. That testing in training is exactly where race nutrition decisions should be made, regardless of which products are involved. The practical approach to race fuelling is covered in more depth in the article on simplifying triathlon nutrition.
04 | Training Methodology
Product fads are easy to identify because they involve spending money. Training methodology fads are harder to recognise because they arrive with research behind them and professional athlete endorsements. The issue is not usually that the method is wrong. It is that the context in which it works is stripped away when it is adopted by athletes for whom that context does not exist.
The Norwegian double-threshold method generated significant attention after the success of professional triathletes using it. The method involves two threshold sessions per day, supported by high training volume and extensive recovery infrastructure. For athletes training 25 to 30 hours per week with professional support structures, it is a legitimate and well-evidenced approach. For a time-crunched age-group triathlete on eight to ten hours per week, the volume and recovery capacity that make double-threshold work as intended simply do not exist. The session structure without the surrounding context produces an athlete doing too much moderate-intensity work without adequate recovery, which is the training trap most age-groupers already need help escaping. I have written about this specifically in You're Not a Norwegian Triathlete.
The MAF method, built around Phil Maffetone's 180-minus-age aerobic threshold formula, has a large and committed following. The formula has no research base establishing it as an accurate threshold estimate for individuals. An athlete of 45 using a heart rate ceiling of 135 and another athlete of the same age using the same formula are not necessarily working at the same physiological intensity, because the formula makes no adjustment for individual fitness level, resting heart rate, or training history. Some athletes do report meaningful improvement over extended MAF training periods. This is likely because any coherent and consistent programme produces adaptation over 12 to 18 months, not because the formula itself is accurate. The cost is typically a year or more of very low intensity training before the athlete feels confident enough to test whether it has transferred to performance.
Zone 2 training as a concept has genuine merit and a real evidence base. The problem is the application of a professional training distribution to athletes working at a fraction of the required volume with none of the recovery support. At lower total volumes, the proportion of intensity that drives adaptation needs to be higher, not identical to the distribution used by an athlete training 30 hours per week. I have covered this in the article on zone 2 obsession and what it misses. The broader pattern of how training trends get adopted without their underlying context is something I wrote about directly in why triathletes overcomplicate their training.
05 | Recovery
Cold water immersion became a fixture of professional sports recovery during the 2000s and migrated into amateur endurance sport with similar momentum. The evidence is genuinely mixed. Short-term reductions in perceived soreness have been recorded. There is also research suggesting that repeated cold immersion blunts some adaptive responses to training, particularly mitochondrial and hypertrophic adaptations, which matters for athletes whose goal is to get fitter as well as to recover. As an occasional tool when acute soreness is genuinely limiting subsequent training, cold immersion is reasonable. As a daily ritual marketed as a health and performance enhancer, the evidence does not support the investment of time and discomfort. The article on how fitness actually builds is worth reading alongside this: understanding what the adaptation process actually requires makes it easier to identify which recovery interventions support it and which may interfere with it.
Infrared saunas have attracted premium positioning in the recovery market. Heat exposure in general has some evidence for cardiovascular adaptation and may support certain recovery processes. Whether infrared specifically produces effects distinct from conventional heat exposure is not clearly established, and the optimal protocols are disputed. Consumer devices vary widely in how closely they are calibrated to the wavelengths and intensities used in the research that underpins the category's health claims. Red light therapy sits in similar territory: the research base exists, mechanisms are not well understood, protocols are contested, and the gap between clinical research conditions and what a consumer device delivers at home is significant.
Sleep tracking has a particular irony. A device designed to improve sleep can disrupt it through anxiety about the score. Athletes who sleep adequately do not need to measure their sleep architecture. Athletes who sleep poorly are better served identifying and addressing the behavioural causes than monitoring the symptom nightly and waiting for the number to improve.
For most athletes, what determines next-day readiness is whether they slept adequately, ate enough to support the training, and structured the week so that hard sessions were followed by sessions light enough to allow genuine recovery. No product substitutes for those factors. The athletes who recover best are not the ones with the most elaborate protocols. They are the ones who treat sleep and food as training inputs, manage load progression sensibly, and resist the pull of adding more when the body is signalling that it needs less.
The fad industry exists because training is slow and improvement is non-linear. When an athlete has trained consistently for six months without clear visible progress, the proposition that a product or method might accelerate things is genuinely attractive. The answer to that frustration is not better products. It is a clearer understanding of how fitness builds and a plan patient enough to let it happen. If you want to work with a coach who keeps the focus on what actually moves performance, Sense Endurance Coaching is where to start.
If you are preparing independently, my training plans are built on the same principles. The sessions are structured, the progression is deliberate, and nothing in them is designed to sell you anything. You can find the full range on the training plans page. Progress comes from the work, not from what you take before it.