What working with Brett Sutton taught me
01 | The Coach Who Changed What I Was Looking For
I had been coaching for over a decade when I started the Trisutto Coach the Coach programme. Fifteen years in the sport, a coaching practice producing genuine results for time-crunched age-group athletes training around the world alongside jobs and families. I had read the science, understood periodisation, and built programmes I was proud of.
What I was looking for was a framework that matched what my coaching instincts had been pointing toward for years: that the sport was being overcomplicated, that the emphasis on drills and periodisation models and data systems was producing athletes who trained well and raced inconsistently, and that something simpler and more specific to what racing actually demanded was available if someone had the courage to strip everything back and build from there.
Sutton had that courage in ways that most coaches do not. He has coached Daniela Ryf, Nicola Spirig, and Chrissie Wellington to world championships and Olympic medals across four decades. He coached his first swim squad at fourteen, trained racehorses and greyhounds before returning to swimming, and was appointed coach of the Australian national triathlon team without a college degree, a controversial decision that produced extraordinary results. He is widely considered the most unorthodox coach in triathlon and widely considered the best. Those two things are directly connected.
The first thing that became clear when I started working with him was that the hardest people to coach are the ones who think they already know the answers. He said it directly and without softening it. I understood immediately that this was not directed at me specifically. It was a description of the coaching culture around triathlon, and it was accurate.
02 | Endurance Is Easy to Build
Sutton's most disarming quality is the calmness with which he approaches the thing that consumes most triathlon coaching: the question of how to build fitness. Most coaching conversations about endurance involve anxiety. How do we build aerobic capacity? How do we prevent detraining? How do we balance three disciplines when time is limited? How do we periodise intensity distribution to peak at the right moment?
His response to most of these questions was some version of the same thing: endurance is easy to build. Stop worrying about it.
The first time I encountered this it felt counterintuitive. The more I worked through the programme, the more I understood it as a deep confidence in the body's ability to respond to consistent, appropriate training stress. Athletes do not need complicated periodisation models or sophisticated intensity distribution algorithms. They need consistent work, sufficient recovery, and sessions designed for the specific demands of their race. The endurance will come.
This matched something I had already believed but could not fully articulate. The athletes I saw struggling were not struggling because the training lacked complexity. They were struggling because the complexity had replaced the fundamentals rather than supplementing them. Sutton gave me the specific language and the specific structure to act on that instinct consistently rather than occasionally.
Working with time-crunched age-group athletes training in mornings before work, I had been building sessions around the specific limitations of their available hours. Sutton's approach confirmed that the constraint of limited time, rather than being a problem to apologise for, is actually the clearest possible argument for stripping training down to what the race actually requires and doing that consistently. The noise that fills the hours of athletes who have more time is not producing the adaptation it appears to produce.
03 | The Swim Reframe
The concrete shift that had the most immediate effect on my coaching was in how I thought about swim development. I had been building athletes' technique through a process I believed in: structured drill sequences, attention to catch mechanics, body rotation, breathing timing. The patient construction of an efficient stroke from component parts.
Sutton's position on drills is that they are largely a waste of pool time. Not because technique does not matter, but because the technique that matters is not the technique that looks correct when fresh and focused. It is the technique that holds together under accumulated fatigue in the middle of a race swim. These are different patterns and training one does not automatically produce the other.
The session structure he uses is high-repetition short-interval sets at controlled intensity. Forty times 100 metres with pull buoy and paddles is a format I encountered repeatedly. Not ten times 200 with drill focus. Forty times 100 at an effort the athlete can sustain across all forty repetitions, with a stroke that must hold its mechanics into the final reps as the muscles genuinely tire.
The pull buoy eliminates the leg drag that causes most adult-onset swimmers to fight to stay horizontal, freeing the nervous system to direct attention to the pull rather than survival. The paddles load the catch in a way that makes a collapsed elbow immediately obvious: when the placement is right, the load against the palm and forearm is felt clearly; when it drops, the paddle skates rather than bites. The feedback is instant, specific, and does not require a coach to deliver it. The athlete learns the correct sensation under resistance and learns to seek it consistently across the full set as fatigue accumulates.
I had athletes at the time whose technique when fresh was genuinely good and whose stroke at the end of a race swim was barely recognisable as the same pattern. Switching to structured paddle volume produced results in months that extended drill work had not delivered: strokes that degraded less under fatigue, lower heart rates exiting the water, better position entering T1.
04 | Low Cadence and Why It Works
The bike approach Sutton uses runs counter to standard triathlon coaching, which prescribes cadence ranges borrowed from professional road cycling. Spin efficiently, keep the cadence up, reduce the muscular load on the legs to protect the run.
His observation is that athletes without an extensive cycling background cannot sustain high cadence efficiently, because the neuromuscular adaptation that makes high-cadence spinning aerobically efficient takes years to develop. Attempting to spin at 90 rpm without that adaptation drives heart rate up, makes the muscular demand less controllable, and fails to develop the specific pedalling strength that protects the legs across a long bike leg.
Low cadence work at 55 to 65 rpm in a harder gear at controlled intensity does several things simultaneously. It builds the muscular endurance that holds power output in the second half of the bike. It develops posterior chain engagement that distributes load away from the quads and toward the glutes and hamstrings. It keeps heart rate genuinely aerobic rather than drifting into the grey zone. And over time it produces athletes who arrive at T2 with fresher legs than their bike power data suggests, because the muscular cost of producing that power has been reduced through specific adaptation.
This confirmed something I had been moving toward independently. The detail on how to structure this in training is elsewhere on this site. The coaching clarity I took from Sutton was that the rationale for low-cadence work is not a quirky coaching preference. It is a direct response to the physiological reality of athletes who came to cycling through triathlon rather than through cycling, which describes almost every age-grouper I work with.
05 | The 95% Ceiling
The principle that has most shaped how I manage intensity is the ceiling Sutton applies consistently: not above 95% of maximum heart rate in training sessions, applied as a permanent boundary rather than a temporary conservative phase.
The reasoning is specific. Above 95% of maximum effort the neuromuscular and hormonal cost rises steeply without a proportional increase in aerobic adaptation. The athlete who regularly trains to maximum produces more fatigue, requires more recovery time between quality sessions, and accumulates less total specific training stimulus across a build than the athlete who consistently trains just short of maximum. The 5% difference in any single session is small. Across a sixteen-week build the compounded difference in total quality training accumulated is large.
It also changes what the session is asking for. An effort ceiling of 95% means the session is building the athlete's capacity to sustain race-specific output across the full set, rather than testing the maximum they can produce for a short burst before the recovery requirement becomes the dominant variable. The specific adaptation that triathlon demands is sustained output under accumulated fatigue, and sessions that stay below maximum produce that adaptation more specifically than sessions that regularly breach it.
"You start. You finish." This instruction, which Sutton gives to athletes before sessions, is the behavioural expression of the same principle. Not you start and hit every target. Not you start and stop when the session stops feeling productive. You start and you finish at whatever effort is available that day. The specific discipline of completing training in the conditions that exist is the preparation for racing in the conditions that exist on race day.
06 | What the Season Confirmed
Working through two Ironman race seasons applying these principles alongside Sutton's programme gave me something more valuable than individual session ideas. It gave me confidence that the underlying philosophy was correct and a direct experience of what it produces in athletes over a sustained period.
The athletes I coached through that period trained with less variety and more repetition than before. Simpler sessions, applied more consistently, produced better race results than more elaborate programmes had. Sutton's observation that "amateurs become slaves to training programs and cannot let go" is a precise description of what the triathlon coaching industry tends to produce, and letting go of that complexity is harder than it sounds because the complexity feels like rigour. It is not. Rigour is executing the right sessions consistently over months. Complexity is a substitute for that.
Everything I now do at Sense Endurance reflects this. The swim sessions are structured around paddle volume and fatigue resistance rather than drill technique. The bike work is built around low-cadence strength and aerobic efficiency rather than periodised intensity models. The run sessions are sustained efforts at race-specific intensity rather than maximum speed development. The whole coaching philosophy is built around the same thing Sutton demonstrated: strip away what the race does not require, do what it does require consistently, and trust that the endurance will come. It does.
If you want to train on these principles, the Sense Endurance training plans are built around purposeful sessions, discipline-specific strength, and the specific adaptations the race demands.
If you want those principles applied directly to your racing calendar and specific context, Sense Endurance Coaching is where it happens in practice.