Why You’re Not Getting Faster: The Forgotten Role of Technical Skills in Triathlon
Introduction — Fitness Isn’t the Only Limiter
Every year, countless triathletes hammer out more miles and harder sessions, chasing that next PR. It’s a familiar picture: endless laps in the pool, long weekend rides, punishing track intervals. The assumption is that more training and higher fitness automatically translate to more speed. But if you’ve been grinding and not getting faster – or worse, getting slower – it might be time to consider an overlooked truth: fitness isn’t the only limiter to your performance. In triathlon, how efficiently you move can be just as important as how fit you are. Put simply, building a bigger engine won’t help if you can’t put that power to the ground economically. This is where technical skills come in – the forgotten aspect of training that could be holding you back.
Fitness gains can actually mask poor movement mechanics, especially in short-term training. When you’re fresh and rested, raw fitness can carry you through a swim or allow you to hold a fast pace on the bike. Under fatigue, though, those hidden flaws start to surface. The final miles of the run expose any cracks in technique: a collapsing posture, a shuffling stride, a stroke that falls apart. You don’t slow down only because you’re tired – you slow down because your form breaks down when you’re tired. And that’s a critical distinction. Many age-groupers mistakenly chalk up late-race struggles purely to lacking endurance, when in reality it’s their deteriorating mechanics under cumulative fatigue that cap their performance.
We’ve seen this scenario play out time and again when coaching new athletes. An athlete trains harder and harder, yet on race day their speed hits a ceiling. They exit the swim gassed despite solid pool times, or they fade on the run even though they logged all the miles. The usual response is to double down on fitness training – more volume, more intensity – when the real fix is improving how they swim, bike, and run. It’s not intuitive for a lot of self-coached athletes, but triathlon rewards efficiency as much as endurance. In fact, success in triathlon depends on performing each movement efficiently for prolonged durations. If you’re neglecting technique, you are likely stuck with an invisible ceiling on your performance, no matter how much sweat equity you invest.
In this article, we’ll explore why technical skills matter for every triathlete (not just beginners), how fitness can lull you into a false sense of security, and why piling on training won’t automatically solve your plateau. We’ll break down the major technical limiters in each discipline, show how to train skills in a tri-specific context, and share a real-world case of an athlete who got slower by training harder. Most importantly, we’ll outline the mindset shift needed – efficiency over ego – to finally make speed easy again. By the end, you should see that fitness and technique are two sides of the same coin, and it’s time to give your skills the attention they deserve if you want to keep improving.
The Invisible Ceiling — Why Technique Gets Ignored
If technique is so important, why do so many triathletes ignore it? The reasons are subtle, woven into the culture of endurance sports. First off, fitness is tangible – it’s measured in watts, pace, heart rate, hours logged. You can watch your CTL (Chronic Training Load) rise, count miles on Strava, or boast about a brutal workout that left you wrecked. Technique, on the other hand, is hard to quantify. There’s no easy metric for how clean your swim catch is or how well you hold form at mile 20. Because it lacks immediate numbers, athletes unconsciously de-prioritise it. It’s the classic case of “what gets measured gets managed.” If you’re not measuring your skills, you’re probably not training them.
Another factor is the delayed payoff of technique work. When you start making form adjustments, you might not see instant speed gains – in fact, you might temporarily get slower as you break old habits. Compare that to simply doing more training: add a few kilometres to your long run or throw in an extra interval session and you feel productive, maybe even see a quick fitness bump. Triathletes often take the path of least resistance – which, ironically, is piling on more volume. Over time this creates an invisible ceiling. You get fitter and fitter, but your efficiency remains stuck. Eventually you reach a point where any extra fitness is just compensating for how much energy you’re wasting with flawed mechanics. You’re essentially running up the down escalator.
There’s also a widespread assumption that technique is a beginner’s concern. Coaches and athletes spend the early days learning to swim freestyle, tweaking running form – but once you can cover the distance, the focus shifts almost entirely to building endurance and speed. The sentiment is “technique sorted, now let’s get fit.” This is shortsighted. Good technique is never a finished product; even experienced triathletes have inefficiencies that can be improved, especially as the demands of racing increase. Elite athletes understand this – they continuously refine their form. Many age-groupers, unfortunately, do not. They’ll religiously chase fitness gains while their skill development stagnates after year one. As their training loads grow, those minor flaws they never fixed are compounded by sheer repetition.
Finally, let’s be honest: ego and culture play a role. The triathlon community often glorifies the longest session, the highest mileage week, the suffer-fest stories. Admitting you need to go back to technique basics can feel like a hit to the ego (“I’ve been doing triathlon for 5 years, surely I know how to swim by now!”). Group training dynamics reinforce this– if everyone around you is focused on volume, you follow suit. Too many triathletes focus purely on training volume or metrics but ignore race-day execution. The result is a lot of very fit athletes who are performing below their potential because they’ve maxed out the easy gains of fitness and hit the invisible ceiling imposed by technical limiters.
The irony is that this ceiling often only becomes apparent on race day or under high fatigue. In controlled training, with fresh legs and lower stress, you might never notice your form flaws as catastrophic. You tick the swim, bike, run boxes (as if they’re separate) and assume it’ll come together on race day. But triathlon doesn’t work like that. It’s one continuous event where each discipline compounds fatigue on the next. If your technique starts to falter, the consequences snowball: a poor swim technique leaves you drained for the bike; an inefficient bike position or pedalling style loads your legs more, sabotaging your run. By treating each sport in isolation, many athletes don’t notice the technique ceiling until all three are stitched together in competition. They feel great in siloed training sessions, then fall apart when it counts.
The key takeaway: you cannot separate fitness from technique. Ignoring technical skills is like having a high-performance car with bad wheel alignment – you can keep adding horsepower, but you’ll still wobble and slow down when you push the limits. To break through that invisible ceiling, you have to recognise that improving how you move is as crucial as improving how long or hard you can move. The next sections will shine a light on what that skill deficit looks like in each discipline, and why even a big engine can’t compensate for poor mechanics in a race situation.
The Skill Deficit — One Discipline at a Time
Let’s dissect where and how technical skill deficits commonly show up in triathlon. By examining swim, bike, and run individually, we can identify the specific inefficiencies that might be hiding behind your fitness. Remember, the idea isn’t to treat them as separate sports – it’s to pinpoint weak links in each aspect of your one sport (triathlon) so you can shore them up for the whole race.
Swim: Inefficiency in the Water
For many triathletes – especially those who didn’t grow up swimming – the swim is the most technique-driven leg. You can be extremely fit aerobically and still swim slowly if your form is off. One striking study measured how well athletes converted power into speed and found that competitive swimmers had a propulsive efficiency of ~61%, whereas triathletes managed only ~44%. In other words, the average triathlete wastes a huge chunk of their effort pushing water around rather than moving forward.
Think about that: despite having the engine to produce 1000 watts in the pool, a less skilled triathlete travels slower simply because of poor technique. Common culprits include low distance-per-stroke (flailing with a fast turnover but going nowhere), poor body position (hips and legs dragging and creating drag), and ineffective catch/pull mechanics (slipping water due to dropped elbows or improper hand angle). Many age-groupers also rely on wetsuits and raw fitness to muscle through the swim, essentially out-stroking their inefficiency with effort. It “works” for surviving the swim, but it’s like paying a 30% energy tax upfront. By T1, you’ve burned matches you didn’t need to. As fatigue sets in, that perfect pool form can unravel quickly in open water chaos – you start fighting the water instead of slicing through it. The skill deficit here is a lower economy of movement: every stroke costs more energy than it should.
The good news is that improving swim technique can yield “free speed” and conserve energy for later. Gains in efficiency – better streamlining, a longer stroke, proper breathing and sighting – mean you travel faster with the same or less effort. For example, if you learn to maintain a taut body line and higher elbow catch, you might go from 1:50 to 1:40 per 100m without increasing your heart rate at all. That’s huge in a triathlon: it’s like getting out of the water a minute or two sooner and feeling fresher. Contrast this with trying to brute-force your way to 1:40/100m purely by fitness – you’d spike your HR and exhaust yourself for the bike. It’s clear that swim technique is the great performance lever for adult-onset swimmers. If you’ve plateaued in swim times despite more laps, it’s time to address the skill deficit in the water.
Bike: Power Leaks and Aerodynamic Wastes
On the bike, triathletes often obsess over FTP and wattage, but technical factors can dramatically affect how those watts translate to speed and how much they cost you in energy. Two big areas stand out: pedalling mechanics and aerodynamic positioning.
Pedalling might seem straightforward – just push the pedals hard, right? – but there’s more nuance. An efficient pedalling technique (often described in terms of smooth power throughout the stroke, not just stomping on the downstroke) can improve your gross efficiency, meaning more of your effort goes into forward motion rather than bobbing in the saddle or fighting dead spots. Studies have examined pedalling effectiveness and found that just because a rider produces high force doesn’t mean it’s efficient force if it’s not well-distributed around the pedal circle. Over a long bike leg, an ineffective pedal stroke is like constantly leaking power. By the time you dismount, your legs are heavier than they should be, and some of your capacity to run is already squandered on wasteful effort.
Aerodynamics is another technical skill element. Yes, aero equipment matters, but the rider’s body position and handling of terrain often matter more. An amateur who can’t hold an aero tuck or shifts around on the saddle will give away free speed. Sitting up high or wobbling in crosswinds might feel safer, but it can easily cost minutes over a 40K or 180K ride. Holding a good aero position is partly flexibility and strength, but also practice – it’s a skill to relax the upper body, keep a flat back and head low (without craning like a meerkat), and maintain steady control of the bike. We often see athletes with strong engines who sit upright when they get tired or whenever they a headwind – basically exactly when aero matters most. They end up working harder to go the same speed. Meanwhile, a technically skilled rider with slightly less fitness can pace smarter: staying aero, using the right cadence and gearing over hills (terrain management), and applying power smoothly. The result? They might come off the bike at the same time or faster, but with less neuromuscular fatigue. The technically efficient cyclist has more left in the tank for the run.
It’s worth noting that bike handling and economy under race conditions is also a skill. Navigating aid stations, corners, rolling hills – these require quick adjustments. An athlete who’s only ever hammered on a controlled indoor trainer might struggle with the surges and variations of a real course, burning matches needlessly with poor gearing or inefficient braking and accelerating. Again, fitness can mask this to a point (you can brute force your way through by overpowering each mistake), but it all adds up. By the end of 90km or 180km, the “power leaks” from suboptimal technique show in your legs. It’s no coincidence that athletes who bike more efficiently often have the best runs. They ride within themselves not just by pacing, but by moving economically. The skill deficit on the bike is subtler than in swimming, but it’s there – and closing it can mean big performance gains.
Run: Form Under Fatigue (or Lack Thereof)
The run is where the technical breakdown under fatigue is most obvious to the outside eye. We’ve all seen (or experienced) the Ironman shuffle – shoulders slumped, hips dropped, feet barely leaving the ground. This is the culmination of all the inefficiencies that came before plus the specific challenges of running. Even fresh, running is a high-impact, skill-dependent activity: things like cadence, footstrike, posture, and pelvic stability greatly influence how efficiently you can maintain a pace. Under the cumulative fatigue of swim+bike, those factors become even more critical. Triathletes never get to run with perfect fresh form in a race, so you better have a form that holds up when you’re tired.
Consider an example: an athlete can run 5:00/km pace in open training with decent form, but off the bike that same effort might yield 5:30/km because their stride has shortened and ground contact time has lengthened (classic signs of fatigue-induced form decay). They might think “I need more run fitness,” but actually if they improved their running economy and durability of form, they could hold 5:00/km off the bike at a lower effort. Research indicates that after cycling, running mechanics and efficiency do change. Biking before a run significantly decreases running mechanical efficiency and increased the energy cost from anaerobic sources, even if oxygen consumption (running economy) stays similar. In plain terms: the same pace feels harder and costs more energy after cycling. Why? The athletes weren’t able to recruit their muscles as efficiently – likely due to both fatigue and altered biomechanics (e.g. different muscle firing patterns or less optimal stride mechanics as a carry-over from cycling fatigue).
Common run technique issues among triathletes include low cadence (over-striding), which leads to more braking forces; poor pelvic control, which causes hips to sag and knees to collapse inward; and a weak core or upper body posture, leading to a hunched shuffle late in the race. When form falls apart, energy expenditure skyrockets – you’re basically muscling through each stride with less help from elastic recoil or proper alignment. It’s the equivalent of driving a car with a bent axle; you can do it if you floor the gas (i.e. tap more into anaerobic reserves), but it’s wildly inefficient and things overheat fast. Indeed, most triathletes slow dramatically in the last 10K of a long race not just because of aerobic exhaustion, but because their form has degraded to the point that they can’t maintain speed without a huge effort spike. Biomechanically, they become a less economical runner with every passing mile.
It’s telling that many overuse injuries in triathlon manifest during run training – the repetitive impact amplifies any technical flaw. Over thousands of steps, a slight imbalance or faulty gait can lead to shin splints, IT band pain, etc. Studies of triathlete injuries show overuse injuries are far more prevalent than acute injuries (one review pegged overuse injuries at up to 91% of cases), with running being the usual suspect due to its impact nature. A lot of these overuse issues boil down to doing high volume with suboptimal technique. If you run a high mileage “easy” programme but with a wobbly stride, you’re still courting injury; easy pace with bad form is a ticking time bomb. This underscores the point: technical skill isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a foundational part of being able to run (and train) fast consistently.
In summary, each discipline has its own skill deficit profile: in swimming it’s about reducing drag and increasing propulsion efficiency; in cycling it’s about maximising power transfer and aero advantage for each watt; in running it’s about maintaining form and economy under fatigue. Most triathletes have one or more of these deficits lurking. Recognising them is the first step.
Next, we tackle a mindset that often prevents athletes from addressing these issues – the false security blanket of fitness.
The False Security of Fitness
It’s easy to default to the belief that if you’re not improving, you just need to train harder. Endurance athletes are wired to think in terms of volume and intensity. Feel slow? Add more miles. Feeling weak on hills? Do more intervals. There’s a certain comfort in this approach because it puts the onus on willpower and work ethic – things we pride ourselves on. But this can create a false sense of security: as long as you’re flogging yourself in training, you assume you’re doing everything possible to get faster. The reality is that you might be working extremely hard yet still leaving huge gains on the table due to technical inefficiencies. In fact, your fitness can fool you. A big engine allows you to push through bad form to a point, masking the underlying problems until you reach extreme fatigue or get injured. It’s like painting over rust – looks fine until stress exposes the weakness.
One manifestation of this false security is the “more is better” trap. We’ve written before about how athletes mistakenly believe continuous hard training is what builds fitness, when actually adaptation (and improvement) happens in recovery. Similarly, athletes assume that simply accumulating more training will overcome any shortcomings. Got a limp in your stride? Just run more and it’ll sort itself out once you’re fitter. Struggling to hold pace at the end? Add another speed session each week. But more training won’t fix a technical flaw; often it reinforces it. Practice makes permanent – if you’re practicing poor mechanics while chasing volume, you’re cementing those bad habits deeper. We’ve seen athletes plateau or even regress by doing “more, more, more” with blinders on to technique. They hammer themselves into a wall of diminishing returns.
Popular endurance training frameworks like the Maffetone Method and 80/20 (polarised) training often tout high volumes of low-intensity work as the safe and optimal path for athletes. These methodologies emphasize keeping most training in easy zones – for example, Maffetone’s low heart-rate formula or the classic “80% easy, 20% hard” rule – on the premise that this approach minimizes strain and injury risk while maximizing aerobic development. Proponents point out that long, slow sessions build endurance “without excessive strain” and warn that too much moderate or high intensity (“gray zone” training) leads to fatigue and injuries. Phil Maffetone even claims that strictly aerobic running can prevent or reverse injuries by reducing stress and inflammation. It’s no surprise, then, that many athletes come to equate training easy with training smart – believing that as long as they log lots of Zone 1–2 miles, they are safely on track. This confidence, however, can be misleading.
Neglecting Biomechanics and Skill: What these low-intensity-first models often overlook is how you are training those miles. An exclusive focus on heart rate or pace zones can cause athletes to ignore biomechanical quality – essentially, running form and technical skills. In practice, a person can shuffle through high-mileage weeks strictly at low heart rate, yet ingrain poor habits like slouched posture, overstriding, or low cadence. Because the effort is easy, these flaws may not cause immediate problems; the training even feels “safe.” Meanwhile, the athlete’s neuromuscular coordination and movement economy – the efficiency of their technique – can stagnate or decay from disuse. Over time, this leads to a subtle erosion of skills: your body forgets how to run fast efficiently because it hasn’t needed to. In other words, movement skill is “use it or lose it.” A programme built on all slow miles can inadvertently let an athlete’s form and efficiency deteriorate, even as their aerobic engine grows. This becomes a problem when the athlete finally tries to speed up – often with ugly results.
“Low HR = Smart Training” – Until It’s Not: Athletes who commit to methods like MAF or 80/20 genuinely believe they are training intelligently by avoiding the perils of overtraining. And to an extent, they are – avoiding excessive high-intensity can indeed reduce acute fatigue and certain injury risks. Scientific studies of training intensity distribution support the value of predominantly easy training: endurance athletes who polarize their intensity (majority low, with some high) often outperform those who pile on too much moderate/hard work. In theory, this approach lets you accumulate lots of aerobic training while staying fresh enough to execute key hard workouts – a recipe for both fitness and efficiency gains. Polarized training is also thought to be gentler on the body in the long run; it deliberately limits the volume of stressful high-intensity work, which in novice athletes is linked to higher injury and overtraining risk. It’s easy to see why athletes equate easy miles with safe miles.
However, the devil is in the details. Research findings assume the athlete maintains good form and includes some high-quality efforts – the 20% hard – to spur adaptation. Problems arise when athletes interpret “mostly low-intensity” as “only low-intensity, forever.” Strict Maffetone adherents, for instance, often avoid any faster running for months. If an athlete takes that to an extreme – never straying above an easy trot – they miss out on the neuromuscular stimulus that even a small amount of faster work provides. Over time, their efficiency at race paces may suffer. They might also unwittingly accumulate a high volume of suboptimal movement. Think of a triathlete who does all bike rides at comfortable wattages but with a misaligned bike fit, or a runner doing only Zone 2 runs with a slight limp or improper foot strike. They won’t feel pain when going slow, but each additional hour reinforces the faulty pattern. The athlete proudly logs “injury-free” weeks, convinced that low HR is the ticket to smart training, all while a breakdown is quietly brewing. Aerobic gains can mask technical losses. Then comes the wake-up call – often when introducing intensity or racing. The athlete who neglected form finds that at higher speeds their mechanics fall apart; the result can be a disappointing performance or an injury that seems to appear “out of nowhere.” In reality, the issue wasn’t the small dose of intensity – it was the long-standing technical flaw left uncorrected by months of laissez-faire easy training.
Performance vs. Technique – A Balanced Perspective: It’s important to note that the critique here is not of aerobic base training itself, but of a one-dimensional approach to it. High volumes of low-intensity work are a proven cornerstone of endurance success and remain indispensable. The mistake is treating low intensity as a foolproof safety net, instead of one ingredient in a holistic programme. Yes, most top endurance athletes train mostly easy and get very fit – but they also incorporate strides, drills, strength training, and periodic intensity to hone their technique and robustness. Research on elites shows that even when ~80% of training is easy, the remaining ~20% (or a pyramidal mix with some moderate work) provides critical stimulus for speed, strength, and skill. Crucially, these athletes are typically vigilant about movement economy – they devote attention to how efficiently they swim, bike, or run. That piece is often missing in cookie-cutter “zone” training plans marketed as injury-proof. Scientific literature rarely measures an athlete’s form or skill acquisition when evaluating training models, focusing instead on physiological outcomes like VO₂ max or time trial results. So while a study might conclude “polarized training improves 10K performance,” it doesn’t tell us whether those athletes’ form improved, stayed the same, or quietly worsened during the intervention. In practice, it falls on the athlete and coach to ensure that easy miles are quality miles from a skill standpoint. Without that, an athlete can get fitter on paper yet develop a less economical stride or swim stroke.
Fitness can also give a false sense of invincibility. A highly fit athlete might think, “I can muscle through anything – form be damned.” And for a while, they can. Youth or early training years may shield them; they can compensate with raw strength or cardiovascular capacity. But as performances plateau at higher levels of competition, or as the training years accumulate, those ignored weaknesses bite back. It could be the marathon where the wheels come off dramatically (when you’ve exhausted the ability to compensate), or the chronic Achilles niggle that turns into full-blown tendonitis because the athlete kept ramping mileage instead of addressing their asymmetrical gait. We often see athletes who appear robust and successful for a time, only to implode when the margin for error narrows (e.g. stepping up from Olympic to Ironman distance, or from local races to the national level). The fitness that masked their issues is no longer enough to carry them, and without a base of solid mechanics, they crack.
There’s scientific backing to the idea that being fitter doesn’t automatically mean better movement. A study on runners (the “Run Clever” trial) found no higher injury rate for those doing high-intensity training vs high-volume training – implying that intensity per se wasn’t the boogeyman, and lots of slow miles weren’t inherently safer. The determining factor was how load was managed and how the body could handle it. We interpret that as: it’s the quality of movement and appropriate progression that matter most, not just how much work you log or how “easy” you keep it. An athlete with great form can handle more of any kind of training (fast or slow) with lower risk. Conversely, an athlete with poor form will eventually break down even at easy paces if the volume is high enough. High fitness might let you survive longer in that fragile state, but it’s a precarious place to be.
To break out of this false security, you have to accept a tough pill: Doing more of the same training won’t necessarily yield improvement, especially if a technical issue is the bottleneck. It might just yield more fatigue or injury.
Why ‘More Training’ Won’t Solve It
By now it’s clear that blindly adding training load is a flawed approach when technical skills are the real limiter. Let’s drive this point home: more training won’t solve a technique problem; it will likely exacerbate it. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. Piling extra mileage or intensity on top of dysfunctional movement is like turning up the volume on a distorted speaker – it doesn’t make the music clearer; it just makes the distortion louder (and eventually blows the speaker).
One major reason more training fails in this scenario is diminishing returns. Early on, when you’re less trained, almost any extra volume or intensity makes you fitter. You improve even with imperfect form because the aerobic and muscular gains are huge. But as you get closer to your fitness ceiling, the gains per unit of training shrink. That’s when efficiency becomes the make-or-break factor. Two athletes with identical VO₂max or threshold power can have very different race results based on how efficiently they can use that engine. So if you plateau, doubling down on fitness gives you maybe a 1-2% improvement (if any), whereas improving your movement economy could give you 5% or more. It’s simply a better return on investment at that stage of development. We routinely see athletes who stagnated for years drop significant time from their races after focusing on form, skills, or smarter pacing – without increasing training load. It feels like magic, but it’s really just addressing the right problem.
Another reason is cumulative fatigue and injury risk. More training has a cost – recovery debt, wear and tear – and if it’s not yielding proportional benefits, you’re essentially beating up your body for little gain. As mentioned, repeating a poor movement over and over is what causes overuse injuries. If an athlete has, say, an inefficient hip drop in their run gait, adding 20 km more per week is 20 km more of that hip drop smashing their joints. The body might hold up for a while thanks to fitness, but eventually the bill comes due (often in the form of a sidelining injury). On the flip side, if that athlete took a block of time to correct their hip stability and form (even if it meant running less mileage temporarily), they could then safely handle more running later with much lower injury risk. In essence, fixing technique can expand your capacity for training, whereas trying to bulldoze through with more training can actually shrink your capacity (when you get injured).
It’s also worth noting the mental aspect: doing more and more without results is demoralising. It feeds a cycle of frustration – you work harder, still don’t improve, perhaps even feel worse. This sometimes leads athletes to an even more destructive idea: If more training doesn’t work, then much more will. That’s a quick route to overtraining. We want to intervene long before an athlete hits that point, by showing them a smarter path. Their narrative must shift from “no pain, no gain” to “train smarter, then harder.”
A classic example is the frustrated swimmer: He’s stuck at 2:00/100m pace. So he ups his swim volume to five days a week, total 15k meters. Months later – no change, maybe 1:55/100m on a good day. He’s exhausted and shoulders ache. Then he finally goes to a swim technique clinic or invests in a programme (like our Swim Fixer programme) to overhaul his stroke. Within weeks, he’s swimming 1:50/100m feeling easier, on three days a week. His fitness didn’t magically leap; he simply removed the braking forces and wasted effort from his stroke. Suddenly the training he was already doing became more effective, and he didn’t need to bury himself in more laps. This story repeats across disciplines. More training wasn’t the answer – better training was.
To be clear, this isn’t to demonise training load. You do need a lot of work to build an endurance base and achieve your potential. But the point is that beyond a certain threshold, quality beats quantity. Especially the quality of movement. The most impressive performances come from the synergy of a big engine and a slick chassis. If you’re missing the latter, trying to compensate with an even bigger engine is inefficient at best and self-defeating at worst.
So, if “more miles” or “more watts” won’t fix your stagnation, what will? The obvious answer, and the theme of this article, is targeted technical training. But how does one actually do that in a triathlon context? Let’s turn to that: practical ways to train your skills alongside your fitness.
How to Actually Train Technical Skill in a Triathlon Context
Training technical skills isn’t as straightforward as logging miles – but it’s not an arcane art, either. It just requires a shift in focus and a willingness to incorporate deliberate practice into your routine. Here are concrete strategies for each discipline, and overall, to build those movement skills that make you faster and more efficient:
Slow Down to Drill Down: Shift your mindset to technical improvements that are not about speed or endurance at all. For swimming, this might mean a not watching the clock or your watch if you swim a 20x50 metre, but solely paying close attention to one specific element of the stroke you wish to improve. On the bike, it could be a cadence drill ride – for instance, doing sets of very high cadence (100+ rpm) and low cadence (50–60 rpm) to improve pedalling fluidity and force application. For running, devote time to hills and strides, broken down into very short intervals with plenty of recovery. If possible, you can also rely on the treadmill for specific sets to improve your biomechanics.. These sessions might not feel like “real training” to a volume junkie, but they pay dividends by hard-wiring better mechanics. Remember, practice doesn’t make perfect – perfect practice makes permanent. So focus on doing the drills correctly over doing them hard or long.
Integrate Skills into Existing Workouts: You can add a technique element to your regular training. For example, start each run with an activation and form reminder: 5×20 seconds strides at race pace, focusing on quick cadence and good posture, to set the tone before an easy run. During long rides, periodically include a 5-minute segment where you concentrate on one aspect (say, riding in aero position with a still upper body, or smooth pedalling at 60rpm) – treat it as a “check-in” drill. In swim workouts, you might do the first 200m of every 1000m focusing on form cues (distance per stroke, a relaxed recovery, a good arm swing, etc.) then carry that feeling into the remaining intervals. By weaving skill practice into your normal sets, you ensure that technique isn’t isolated from fitness – you learn to hold form during fatigue, not just when fresh.
Brick and Race-Specific Skills: Triathlon has unique technical demands, especially around transitions and mixed discipline stress. To train these, include brick workouts that emphasise form maintenance. For instance, a bike-to-run brick where the goal in the first 2 km of the run is not hitting a target pace but rather hitting a target cadence and upright posture coming off the bike. This could be as simple as doing 10 minutes easy bike, then a 5-minute transition run focusing on short, quick steps – repeat that cycle a few times as a drill. Likewise, practice swim-to-bike by doing a hard 300m swim, then immediately simulating T1 (wetsuit off, hop on the trainer or a stationary bike for a few minutes). The aim is to adapt to that wobbly feeling and learn to get your bike cadence and breathing under control after swimming. These bricks don’t need to be long; they need to be specific. They teach your body how to coordinate and move efficiently across the discipline changes. Come race day, you’ll waste less energy in the chaos of transition and the awkward first miles of each leg.
Use Technology and Feedback: Leverage tools that give you feedback on technique. Swim video analysis is hugely eye-opening – a single underwater filming session can reveal exactly what stroke flaw to work on (our Swim Fixer programme does this by providing weekly expert feedback on your swim videos). Many watches track your run form proxies. For example, if you know your cadence drops from 178 to 160 by the end of long runs, you have a concrete cue to work on (“hold my cadence up as I tire”). The point is, treat technique with the same curiosity and data-driven mindset that you treat fitness – test, measure, get feedback, and adjust.
Strength and Mobility for Skill: Sometimes the technical issue isn’t just neuromuscular coordination but a lack of strength or mobility in key areas. Integrating targeted strength training (especially core and functional strength) and mobility work will underpin your skill development. A well-designed strength programme (which we at Sense Endurance strongly encourage for our athletes) builds the chassis that lets you express better form. It also has the side benefit of injury resistance, since a stronger, more balanced body withstands training stress better.
Finally, be patient and consistent. Technical gains often come in subtle increments. You might spend weeks doing drills before it “clicks” and you suddenly feel the water better or notice your run stride has changed. Many athletes experience a temporary dip in performance when they make a significant technique change – don’t panic. It’s like upgrading software: initially, things run slow as you integrate the new movement pattern, then once it’s bedded in, you jump forward. Stick with the process and celebrate small wins (like “hey, I held form through 15km of the run before slouching, instead of only 10km”). One day you’ll realize that what used to be hard is now easier – that’s efficiency in action, and it’s the surest sign you’re on the right track.
The Mindset Shift — Efficiency Over Ego
All the technical advice in the world won’t help if you don’t embrace the mindset to prioritise it. In our coaching practice, we often have to help athletes “unlearn” the notion that grinding = greatness. The new mantra becomes “Efficiency over ego.” What does this mean in practice?
Be Willing to Be a Beginner Again: Having the humility to admit your technique needs work is step one. This can be hard for experienced triathletes who’ve been in the sport a long time. But remember, even Olympic champions have coaches tweaking their form – it’s not an admission of weakness, it’s a hallmark of a growth mindset. Drop the ego that says I’m above drills or I can’t change at my age. Ironically, clinging to ego makes you slower; embracing a learner’s mindset makes you faster.
Redefine “Hard Work”: Start valuing precision and quality as much as volume and intensity. In your training log, note not just what you did, but how you did it. Did you hold good form? That’s a win. Did you back off the pace in order to maintain technique in a workout? That’s not a failure – that’s smart training. It takes discipline to hold back and focus on skill when every part of you wants to chase the split or drop your training partner. Remind yourself that every time you reinforce good mechanics, you’re making a long-term investment in speed that will compound. The toughest athletes aren’t those who flog themselves blindly; they’re the ones who can pay attention to detail under pressure.
Detach Self-Worth from Pace: This is a psychological aspect. Many athletes get emotionally attached to numbers – they feel like a “failure” if they run a slow time in training, even if that was for a purpose. To shift to an efficiency mindset, you sometimes have to check your pride. If doing some runs 20 seconds per km slower (so you can consciously work on form or because you’re recovering) is prescribed, resist the urge to push just to feel fast. Remind yourself that races are where you unleash fitness; training is where you build it – and technique is now part of your building. You might even find new enjoyment in the process. There’s a certain satisfaction in executing a skilful session that is different from the buzz of a hard sufferfest. It’s more cerebral, and it builds confidence in a quiet way.
Make Efficiency a Core Goal: Set goals around technique the same way you set time or power goals. This gives you a target that isn’t just “get fitter.” When you achieve them, celebrate them as much as a PR. If you’re working with a coach, expect (or ask) to receive feedback on form regularly, not just on your split times. When efficiency is a clear objective, you’ll give it the attention it deserves.
Remember the Why: The ultimate point of improving technique is to make speed feel easier. Think back to perhaps when you first started – maybe running a 5:30/km pace felt like death, and now it’s an easy jog. That didn’t only happen because your VO₂max improved; a lot of it was neuromuscular adaptation – essentially, skill. We’re trying to replicate that jump in economy again and again. By keeping the mindset of “make it easier, don’t just make me tougher”, you align your efforts with the end goal of a faster, smoother, more injury-resistant you. Efficiency over ego is about the long game: you trade the immediate gratification of saying “I smashed myself today” for the deeper satisfaction of consistent progress and peak performances when it counts.
Ultimately, this mindset shift can be liberating. It’s not a call to train less seriously – it’s a call to train more intelligently. You still work hard, but you direct that hard work in ways that yield actual improvement, not just exhaustion. You also become a student of the sport, which rekindles passion and curiosity. Triathlon stops being just a slog of sessions and becomes more of a skill challenge to master. When our athletes make this shift, they often report a renewed excitement and sense of purpose. It’s fun to chase skill gains because it adds a layer of depth to training beyond just numbers. And ironically, when the ego takes a back seat, you often get the ego-boosting results you were after all along – faster times, podiums, personal bests.
Conclusion — Make Speed Easy Again
Triathletes are no strangers to hard work. But working hard on the wrong things (or to overcome the wrong things) is like trying to push a square wheel faster – you’re better off stopping to fix the wheel. The forgotten role of technical skills in triathlon is exactly that wheel. It’s not as immediately obvious as fitness, but it’s the missing piece that can transform your performance when you give it its due.
The bottom line is that speed should be earned through smart training, not sheer struggle. If you improve your efficiency, you’re essentially raising your ceiling – you’re able to go faster without it feeling harder. This concept might seem foreign if you’ve always equated faster with more pain. But think of those moments when everything clicked in a race: you felt smooth, light, in control. That’s speed feeling easy – that’s what effective technique can do. We want to make more of your racing feel like that, rather than a fight against your own form.
Take a moment to assess your own training. Have you been stuck on a plateau despite big volumes? Do you suspect (or know deep down) that your swim stroke is inefficient, your bike fit or handling could improve, or your run form degrades late in races? If yes, then congratulations – you’ve just identified where your next breakthroughs lie. Embrace it. Shift your mindset to efficiency over ego, and reorient your training to address those areas. You’ll likely find it’s a breath of fresh air in your routine and a source of renewed progress.
If you’re unsure how to start, seek guidance. At Sense Endurance, we offer coaching that “cuts through the noise” – and much of that is focusing athletes on the right things at the right time, including skill development. Consider reaching out for a consultation to get expert feedback on your technique. Sometimes an outside eye and a structured approach can accelerate the improvements and keep you accountable to the process. Our coaching philosophy is rooted in making athletes faster and more resilient by marrying fitness with form – turning you into a complete athlete who doesn’t just survive the race, but executes it with precision.
Remember, technical skill isn’t a one-time fix; it’s an ongoing journey. But every bit of improvement you make is a gift that keeps on giving – every race, every season. Unlike fitness, which can fade if you take a break, skills once learned tend to stick (and even if they dull, you can get them back quicker). You’re investing in lifetime speed. So the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll reap the benefits.
In triathlon, the winners aren’t the ones who suffer the most – they’re the ones who make it look almost effortless. That ease is deceptive, because it’s born from thousands of hours of honing technique under fatigue, focusing on detail, and training intelligently. You have the opportunity to do the same. Make your speed easy again. You’ll enjoy the sport more when you do, and the results will speak for themselves on the clock.
Learn more about integrating skill and fitness: We dive deeper into related topics in our articles “Stop Treating Swim, Bike, and Run Like Separate Sports”, “How Fitness Actually Builds: Recovery, Adaptation, and Timing in Triathlon Training”, and “Slow Doesn’t Mean Safe: Why Conservative Training Can Still Get You Injured”. Check them out for a fuller picture – and as always, if you’re ready to take the next step, our coaching team is here to help you every step (and stroke and pedal) of the way. Here’s to training smarter and racing faster, with technique as your secret weapon.