How to Do Triathlon Brick Workouts Properly

A brick workout joins two disciplines with very little gap, usually cycling followed by running. Its value is specific: it lets you practise the transition and answer a question about pacing, fuelling or movement under accumulated load.

The best brick is not the longest one. It is the one that gives you a useful answer at a recovery cost you can absorb.

Why the Legs Feel Wrong

Worth understanding before you decide which session to do, because it explains why the different versions exist.

Cycling and running ask for different movement patterns and loading. The change can feel awkward, but the response varies between athletes. A 2022 systematic review found that many studies observed worse run performance after cycling, while biomechanical findings and the effects of cadence or intensity manipulation were mixed.

That uncertainty is useful. Do not treat one cadence trick as a universal answer. Rehearse the transition that your own race and current limiter require.

The Five, and What Each Trains

The starter brick. Forty minutes on the bike, ten minutes running, easy throughout. Its only job is to make the sensation familiar so it is not a shock. This is where beginners start and it does exactly what it says.

The cadence experiment. Change cadence late in the ride, then observe the first minutes of the run. Research does not establish one best cadence for every athlete, so treat this as a controlled test rather than a prescription.

The race pace brick. This is the one people avoid and the one that matters most. Ride at your intended race power, for a meaningful chunk of time, then run at your intended race pace. Not jog. Race pace. This is the only session that answers the actual race day question, which is whether your bike plan leaves you able to run your run plan.

The high-intensity brick. A short demanding bike section followed by controlled fast running. Use it sparingly and only when both the training phase and recovery support it. It is one demanding session, not two easy ones.

And the long durability brick. A long ride into a moderate run of thirty to forty five minutes, for half and full distance athletes. This one is about fuelling and fatigue resistance more than mechanics, and it is where you find out whether your nutrition plan survives contact with the run.

The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes

Doing the long one every time.

It is the most obviously race-like, it feels the most virtuous, and it costs the most to recover from. So athletes do it fortnightly, recover from it for four days, and never do the sessions that would actually change anything.

A shorter race-specific brick can answer a pacing question with less recovery cost than a long ride and run.

The other mistake is treating the run as an afterthought. If the run portion is always so short and so slow that it cannot go badly, you never learn anything from it. The run is the part you are testing.

How I Programme Them

Frequency depends on experience, race distance, the wider week and how well you recover. A short transition run can appear regularly. Long or high-intensity bricks need more space and should not displace the key standalone training you still need.

Race-specific bricks become more useful closer to the event, but there is no universal weekly or fortnightly rule. Progress one variable at a time so you can interpret what happened.

And I put them on days the readiness supports. A brick is a hard session dressed up as two easy ones, and athletes routinely underestimate what it costs them.

Do the Transition Too

If you are doing a brick anyway, spend the ninety seconds doing the transition properly. Bike racked, helmet off, shoes changed, running. It costs you nothing and it means transition gets rehearsed thirty times a season instead of never.

Most athletes ride into the driveway, take five minutes to sort themselves out, and then start running. That is not a brick, that is two sessions with a gap.

The Bottom Line

Pick the brick that trains the thing you actually need. If your first kilometre is ugly, do cadence bricks. If your race pace collapses off the bike, do race pace bricks, at race pace, and find out now.

Use the result to adjust the next week. If the run deteriorates, the answer may be bike pacing, fuelling, heat, accumulated load or recovery. Do not assume the solution is simply another longer brick.