How to benchmark your off-season fitness

Once you’re into the winter mode, off-season triathlon fitness testing is a great way to benchmark your shape, dial in your training zones and identify strengths and weakness.

Getting regular information on how things are going performance-wise rarely contradicts what your training diary and intuitive hunch would already suggest.

But it’s still good practice to get a measure of how unfit you are, how much you’ve progressed or how on track you are.

Data either proves you’re doing things correctly or will show that things must change.

How to test your fitness in the off-season

The gold-standard way for triathletes to gauge their shape is lactate-threshold testing.

But because it’s done in a lab or in a facility with lab-grade equipment, you’re looking at a bill of several hundred dollars or pounds.

The field-based methods of measuring threshold we’ll suggest do a good enough job for age-groupers at next to no cost.

Swimming fitness test

A nice and simple to measure your shape in the pool is to swim 1,000m as fast as you can.

Use your average time per 100m as your Threshold Swim Pace.

This will determine how fast you perform intervals in a swimming training plan.

It’s recommended to repeat this test every four to eight weeks.

Cycling fitness test

The standard fitness test for cyclists is the traditional Functional Threshold Power (FTP) test.

Ideally done on an uninterrupted stretch of road or a turbo trainer, it involves riding a 20 minute time-trial at a consistent, maximal effort.

In general, use 95% of your average power for the 20 minutes as your threshold power.

Many coaches recomend doing a shorter preparatory effort before to deplete your anaerobic reserves.

Running fitness test

A 30-minute, flat-out time trial is the standard way to measure running threshold.

Use your average heart rate or pace for the last 20 minutes as your threshold.

Alternatively, you can input your time for a recent 5k or 10k into TrainingPeaks’ calculator.

What are the benefits of off-season triathlon fitness testing?

The psychological benefit of coming back from a benchmark test happy in the knowledge you’re fitter-for-purpose should not be underestimated.

But moving forwards shouldn’t nurture complacency, rather it gives you a tentative thumbs-up and a wink.

Progress in your test metrics shows that you’re doing things right and are therefore tweaking things correctly (e.g. training quantity, number of days off, sleep habits, nutrition intake, etc.).

This is incredibly tricky though.

Elements out of your control such as your work level, family/relationship commitments, life events and health mean you probably can’t simply start in December, or most likely earlier, and follow a constantly upward-trending training programme of further, faster and fitter.

How to use your fitness test data

The benchmark tests each have a number that you can measure (e.g. swim pace per 100m) that will stay the same, improve or worsen.

This is you, being honest with yourself about where you are.

If you’re good at kidding yourself then perhaps employ a coach or friend to test and assess where you’re at.

There are only so many times when the result from your test is actually ‘outlier’ data.

Be honest and it will make you train smarter in order to see improvements.

That said, never ever imagine that your competitors are always getting faster and never ignore/deny setbacks or being below par.

Good times only happen if you acknowledge when you have bad ones.

The tests may be customised to your own preference, but it’s a planned session – it’s not just hammering training mates when you feel good (and they feel bad).

Training, testing and racing are all distinctly different. Start now and use the information gleaned wisely.

We have lots more free triathlon training plans including sprint distance, Olympic distance and Ironman.