My Norwegian Method Training Week: Real Lactate Zones and Lifting Numbers

What my week actually looks like

This is the template I run, week in week out. Two sessions on most days, easy work dominant, two threshold days, one hill day, and a long run on Sunday. The hard days land on Tuesday or Thursday so I never stack two threshold days back to back. Order of sessions within a day does not matter to me — what matters is keeping easy days easy and not bleeding intensity into them.

Two threshold days, one hill day, one long day, and the rest sits below LT1. The shape is mostly easy work with quality bookmarked into two predictable slots a week.

A point worth flagging: the strength sessions land on Tuesday and Friday in my template — one paired with threshold, one paired with an easy day. The Friday lift is the one most people get wrong. It is paired with the lightest run day of the week (15 km plus 9 km easy) for a reason. By Saturday's hill workout the legs need to be ready to push, and Friday's easy mileage plus a heavy session is what gets them there without leaving residual fatigue.

Why I run two sessions a day, sometimes two disciplines

Two sessions a day is the part most people balk at, and it is the part I will not give up. Splitting volume across two shorter sessions keeps the average intensity of each session lower than a single long block would be. I get the aerobic minutes without grinding myself into the deck.

Same day, different disciplines is fine — and I find it preferable. A run in the morning and a bike in the evening, or a swim and a run, hit overlapping aerobic systems without piling the same impact on the same tissues. Order does not matter to me. I do not try to manufacture a "key session first" rule on top of the protocol.

On the intensity itself, I run intervals rather than continuous threshold blocks. Intervals let me hold lactate in the 3.5–4.0 mmol/L window for longer total time without overshooting the ceiling. And every interval session ends with about two reps still in the tank. The moment I feel I am scraping to finish the last rep, I stop. The cost of one more rep is rarely worth the recovery debt it creates for Wednesday's easy day.

LT1 and LT2 in lactate numbers, not FTP

The Norwegian Method does not run on FTP. FTP is, under this model, largely an ego metric — a one-hour power test that does not tell me where my aerobic ceiling actually sits on the day. What I care about is power at 2.5 mmol/L, and where my LT1 and LT2 heart rates land each block.

LT1 is the heart rate at which my lactate reading hits 2.0 mmol/L. Eighty percent of my training — every easy day on the table above — sits 5 beats below that LT1 heart rate. Not "around" LT1. Five beats below. That margin is what keeps an easy day actually easy, especially when fatigue has crept in and the same effort produces a higher reading than it did the week before.

LT2 is the red line. I anchor it at 3.5–4.0 mmol/L. On threshold days, the heart rate I tested at that lactate window is a strict ceiling. I do not chase higher numbers in the moment because the watt or pace felt fine — the meter sets the boundary, not the legs.

To anchor any of this, I need a lactate meter. I draw a fingertip sample at the end of an interval, log the reading, and rebuild my heart-rate zones from the readings rather than from a textbook percentage of max HR.

The practical consequence is that my LT1 and LT2 heart rates drift across a block. After three weeks of consistent volume, the heart rate at 2.0 mmol/L is usually a handful of beats lower than it was at the start of the block. Without the meter I would not see that — I would just keep running the "easy" zone I had memorised and quietly drift into upper aerobic on every easy day. The 5-beats-below-LT1 rule only works because the LT1 itself is re-measured, not assumed.

My lifting numbers

The strength side of the week is low rep and high weight, twice a week, on top of either a threshold day or an easy day. The pattern is squat plus deadlift, both at roughly 80–85 percent of 1RM.

• Squat: 1RM 125 kg. Working sets at 80–85 percent = 100–105 kg for 3 sets of 4–5 reps.
• Deadlift: 1RM 155 kg. Working sets at 80–85 percent = 125–130 kg for 3 sets of 3–4 reps.

Low rep, high weight is deliberate. I am not chasing a hypertrophy stimulus. I am chasing neural recruitment and tendon stiffness without bulking up — both useful for a triathlete who has to carry every extra kilogram up Saturday's hill workout. The same two-reps-in-the-tank rule from intervals applies on the bar: if rep four feels like a grinder, rep five does not happen.

What this is NOT

This is my training week, written down. It is not a coaching plan for you. The lactate anchors, the LT1 ceiling, the lifting percentages — all of those are calibrated to my own readings and my own 1RMs. Copying the kilometres without testing your own LT1 and LT2 just gets you the volume without the protection that the lactate ceiling provides.

If you want to test your own LT1 and LT2 properly, the sibling post on this site covers the protocol I use: my lactate-threshold testing protocol. The original framework I work from is Marius Bakken's published Norwegian Model write-up at mariusbakken.com/the-norwegian-model.html. I have not invented anything here — I have logged how I have adapted it for an age-group long-course triathlete with a job, an LT1 reading, and a squat rack.