If you’ve spent any time reading about endurance training, you’ve probably come across the debates. Polarised versus pyramidal. Heart rate versus power. Zone 2. Threshold. High volume. High intensity.

It can feel like you need to pick a side. We don’t.

Not because we haven’t thought about these questions. We have. A lot.

But we’ve found that asking which training system is best is usually the wrong question. It’s like asking which tool is best without knowing what you’re trying to build.

The answer depends entirely on the job in front of you. Our starting point is much simpler: physiology. How does the body adapt to training? What does the target event actually demand? And where is the gap between those two things for this athlete, at this point in time? That’s the question that matters.

Two athletes preparing for the same race might need completely different training programs. One may have a strong aerobic engine but struggle to maintain form late in the race. Another may move efficiently all day but have their nutrition fall apart after six hours. Same race. Different limiting factors.

Training works best when it targets what’s actually holding the athlete back. Get that wrong and you can spend months improving things that were never the problem in the first place.

That’s why we don’t start with a system. We start with the athlete. We look at the race, the athlete, and the gap between them. The goal isn’t to identify everything that could be improved. It’s to identify the things most likely to move the result and focus on those first.

From there, we build a plan using whatever methods best fit the problem we’re trying to solve. Sometimes that plan looks polarised. Sometimes it looks pyramidal. Sometimes it doesn’t fit neatly into any label at all. The method is never the goal.

The goal is helping the athlete perform better. Everything else is simply a tool.