Richard Laidlow: Consistency, Load, and the role of Collagen in training for Elite Athletes
I’m an endurance coach working with elite long-distance triathletes, focused on building performance over time without breaking the athlete down. Most of what we do comes back to managing load, staying consistent, and making sure the body can handle what we’re asking of it.
In endurance sport, it’s not usually one big session that makes the difference. It’s what you can repeat, week after week, without breaking down. You can build fitness quite quickly if you push it. But it’s not always your engine that limits you. It’s everything around it — tendons, ligaments, joints. That’s what takes longer to adapt, and that’s usually where problems show up if you’re not careful.
A lot of what we do in training is built around managing that. Not just how hard you go, but what your body can actually handle over time. That’s something I’ve spent a lot of time around, and it’s also why I’m involved with Core Collagen. What made sense to me was that the thinking behind it is quite straightforward. It’s built around consistency, but also around making sure what you’re taking is actually useful in practice.
One thing I see quite often is athletes looking for ways to optimise before they’ve really locked in the basics. New supplements, new routines, new ideas. But the biggest difference usually comes from what you’re actually able to stick to. Most people don’t get it wrong because they’re doing the wrong thing. They get it wrong because they don’t do it consistently enough.
Collagen is a good example of that. It’s widely used, especially in endurance sport, but it’s often treated like something you take now and then, or in amounts that don’t really match how people are training. Sometimes products also try to do too much, with long ingredient lists and things added more for marketing than for any real reason.
For serious athletes, that usually isn’t what you want. You want a product that does its job, gives you a meaningful amount, and doesn’t come with a load of unnecessary extras.
In reality, if you’re not taking collagen regularly, and in a significant daily amount, it’s hard to see how it has a real role. The issue is usually practical. Powders need mixing, doses vary, you forget them, or you just don’t have time. Over a few weeks that inconsistency adds up, and once that happens, it doesn’t really matter what you’re taking.
But it’s not just about convenience. The amount matters as well, and so does what’s around it. If the dose is too low, or the product is full of ingredients you don’t really need, it becomes harder to see the point. The best products are usually the simplest ones — clear purpose, solid dose, no unnecessary stacking, and nothing artificial thrown in just to make it taste sweeter or sound better on paper.
That’s why I think both the format and the formulation of Core Collagen matters. It needs to be easy enough to take every day, and the 15g daily dose of collagen is enough to be meaningful, and the formula clean enough that athletes actually want to use it as part of their routine.
Collagen isn’t going to replace good training, or sleep, or nutrition. It’s not a shortcut. But if it’s used properly — consistently, in a solid daily amount, and without overcomplicating things — it can sit alongside everything else you’re doing.
That’s how I look at it. Not as something superhuman, but part of the structure of training At the end of the day, the biggest gains in endurance sport don’t come from one-off efforts. They come from what you can keep doing without breaking the routine.
And that applies to everything around training as well.
