Sport science has provided detailed quantitative information about what successful athletes across multiple endurance sports do in their training to develop sport-specific physiological capacities and performance.1-4 Accordingly, our knowledge regarding the interplay of training-load factors such as duration, intensity, and frequency to stimulate the best possible adaptive responses has improved substantially. However, when coaches and athletes describe key factors leading to success, they often highlight how they work and why training practices are performed, indicating that the quality of the training process and execution of training sessions are key factors separating the best from the rest.3 In contrast to the large amount of research focusing on varying loading factors, the concept of training quality including definition, underpinning factors, and strategies to improve training quality, has been sparsely addressed. In their pioneering work 3 decades ago, Ericsson et al5 suggested that accumulated and domain-specific deliberate practice accounts for the acquisition of expert performance in sports and comparable domains. However, their approach is closely associated with training load, and a later meta-analysis demonstrated that only 18% of the variation in sports performance was explained by accumulated deliberated practice.6 This implies that complementary and multifaceted insights on the quality of the training process and execution of training sessions are required. The aims of this commentary are to (1) propose a practice-oriented framework to describe training quality and its general and context-dependent characteristics and (2) discuss how athletes and coaches can work to improve training quality. Due to the limited scientific literature within this topic, this commentary is mainly based on the present authors` interpretations of best practice literature and personal communications with world-leading athletes and coaches across multiple sports.
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