What does consistency in training look like? It depends on who you ask.
For example, one coach might tell their athletes to run on the track several times a week, while another coach might plan intervals after a race.
Both coaches may believe they’re acting in the best interest of their athletes, but the via negativa approach suggests the latter is more aligned with true consistency.
By focusing on what to remove rather than what to add, the via negativa approach helps coaches prioritize consistent training while reducing the risk of burnout and injury.
What Is the Via Negativa Approach?
The phrase via negativa comes from philosophy and refers to understanding something by identifying what it is not, rather than what it is.Applied to training, it means improving performance by subtracting the factors that limit adaptation.
So instead of trying to add in more workouts, intensity, or volume, coaches can focus on eliminating the common causes of disruption:
- Injury
- Excess fatigue
- Poor recovery
- Inconsistent training weeks
- Overly aggressive progression
When these factors are removed, athletes can train consistently over long periods of time. And in endurance sports, consistency is the real driver of improvement.
The Real Goal: Long-Term Consistency
It’s easy to get caught up in maximizing individual workouts or weeks of training. But a single perfect week rarely determines an athlete’s success.
What matters far more is how many uninterrupted weeks of training an athlete can accumulate.
Consider two athletes:
Athlete A
- Trains 70 miles per week
- Pushes intensity frequently
- Gets injured after three months
Athlete B
- Trains 55 miles per week
- Manages intensity carefully
- Trains uninterrupted for a full year
Athlete B will almost always see greater long-term progress. The via negativa approach prioritizes removing the factors that threaten consistency.
Getting Athlete Buy-In
Prioritizing long-term adaptations means focusing on progress year over year instead of from session to session or week to week.
This makes athlete buy-in crucial, requiring patience from all parties.
Running is a primary example, as reducing intensity or weekly volume can increase long-term volume and intensity accumulation.
A Simple Via Negativa Framework for Coaches
When an athlete struggles, resist the instinct to immediately add more work. Instead, work through a simple three-step process.
1. Identify the Point of Failure
Ask: What is most likely to disrupt this athlete’s training?
Common examples include:
- Too many high-intensity sessions
- Rapid increases in weekly volume
- Poor fueling or energy availability
- Sleep deficits
- High life stress
- Previous injury history
The goal is to identify the fragile element in the training system.
2. Remove the Fragile Element
Once identified, adjust the program by reducing or eliminating the stressor.
Examples include:
Too Much Intensity
- Replace one interval session with aerobic work
Aggressive Ramp Rate
- Hold weekly volume steady instead of increasing
Recurring Injury
- Reduce impact load and add cross training
Poor Recovery
- Add rest days or reduce intensity
The key idea here is to remove the instability before adding more load.
3. Replace It With Sustainable Training
Removing a problematic element doesn’t mean reducing training altogether. Instead, replace it with training that supports consistency.
Examples:
- Replace VO₂ max intervals with threshold work
- Replace extra intensity with aerobic volume
- Replace forced runs with cycling or swimming
- Replace aggressive progression with gradual loading
These adjustments maintain stimulus while lowering injury and burnout risk.
Examples of Via Negativa Application
If external events frequently disrupt your athlete’s consistency, consider removing the following items from their programming. This isn’t to say you should never do these things, but eliminating them can reduce the fragility of your athlete.
Reduce Fasted Training
Short-term carbohydrate restriction can impair bone formation. Additionally, carbohydrate-restricted training (like the low-carb, high-fat diet) might not offer enough benefits to justify the potential risk they pose to athletes.
For example, studies show that carbohydrate availability affects hormones in female athletes. This includes:
- luteinizing hormone, which helps control the menstrual cycle,
- T3, which plays a crucial role in controlling metabolism, and
- leptin, which regulates the long-term balance between food intake and energy expenditure.
These hormones are associated with the female athlete triad, a subset of relative energy deficiency (RED-S).
Reduce Volume, Intensity, or Both
Energy availability is a key determinant in the likelihood of an athlete developing symptoms of overtraining syndrome.
While training, energy expenditure is driven by volume and intensity. Simply put, you burn more calories by going harder or going longer.
A simple fix to overtraining is to reduce training energy expenditure. Remember, your athlete needs enough energy to train, recover, and adapt.
Limit Late Nights and Early Mornings
Sleep is essentially a legal performance enhancer, and thousands of studies back this claim.
For example, a study published in the Current Sports Medicine Reports showed that consistently sleeping less than seven hours per night for 14 days increases the risk of injury by 70% compared to those who sleep more than seven hours.
Prioritizing sleep – even at the expense of some training – can reduce the chances of your athlete getting injured.
Case Study: Improving a Triathlete’s Run
Below is an example of a triathlete whose running is an identified area of weakness.
Initial Challenge
In 2022, they ran a 5k PB of 15:51 with an average run volume of 2 hours and 4 minutes per week (around 25km – or 14 miles – per week).
Both the coach and the athlete agreed to increase training volume. As shown in the graph below, the athlete struggled to stay healthy.
Throughout 2022 and 2023, the athlete had several periods of disruption due to injury. While a light increase in long-term training load was achieved, it wasn’t significant.
Applying the Via Negativa Approach
In the winter of 2023, one hard session was removed from the athlete’s training program and a longer run containing ‘steady’ work (around LT1) was added.
So far, the athlete has managed a sustainable increase in average run volume to about 2 hours and 44 minutes per week (around 33-35km – or 21-23 miles – per week). This increase (about 22% annually since 2022) aided the athlete’s running performance.
In a recent 70.3, the athlete improved their run by about 4 minutes, a big improvement for an athlete of this level. (They’ve yet to do another open 5k.)
The athlete was also struggling with bone stress and soft tissue injuries during training. To combat these, we reduced high-velocity run workouts in favor of threshold running.
We also focused on fuelling long and hard runs with 90g of carbohydrates per hour, as glycogen availability is correlated with bone health.
Finally, we scheduled downtime, with an occasional full week or half-week off from running. We replaced these sessions with elliptical training to allow the bone to repair itself before we reached tissue failure.
While these changes reduced short-term fitness, the athlete accumulated more load in the long run.
A Quick Consistency Audit for Coaches
Beyond athlete buy-in and coaching patience, the cornerstone of ‘via negativa’ coaching is to remove the aspects of an athlete’s training and life that cause inconsistency. So before adding more training, consider running a simple audit of an athlete’s program. If one of these areas is failing, the solution is often removal rather than addition.
Training Structure
- Are there more than two high-intensity sessions per week?
- Is weekly training load increasing rapidly?
- Are there large fluctuations in weekly volume?
Recovery
- Is the athlete sleeping at least 7–8 hours per night?
- Are they fueling workouts adequately?
Life Stress
- Is the athlete navigating work, travel, or family stress?
Injury Signals
- Recurring soreness or niggles
- Rising heart rate drift in steady sessions
- Declining durability late in long workouts
As a coach, you must think years into the future, moving away from the short-term ‘race to race’ mentality that often leads to injury. Done correctly, this approach fosters long-term success.
References:
Charest, J., et al. (2023, February 25). Sleep and Athletic Performance: Impacts on Physical Performance, Mental Performance, Injury Risk and Recovery, and Mental Health. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9960533/
Fensham, N., et al. (2022, July 23). Short-Term Carbohydrate Restriction Impairs Bone Formation at Rest and During Prolonged Exercise to a Greater Degree than Low Energy Availability. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.4658
Lodge, M., et al. (2023, October 13). Considerations of Low Carbohydrate Availability (LCA) to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) in Female Endurance Athletes: A Narrative Review. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10609849/
Waschenfelder, T. (2023, July 9). Via Negativa: Improvement By Subtraction. Retrieved from https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa
