The couplings of the electroweak e ective theory contain information on the heavy-mass scales which are no-longer present in the low-energy Lagrangian. We build a general e ective Lagrangian, implementing the electroweak chiral symmetry breaking SU(2)L SU(2)R ! SU(2)L+R, which couples the known particle elds to heavier states with bosonic quantum numbers JP = 0 and 1 . We consider colour-singlet heavy elds that are in singlet or triplet representations of the electroweak group. Integrating out these heavy scales, we analyze the pattern of low-energy couplings among the light elds which are generated by the massive states. We adopt a generic non-linear realization of the electroweak symmetry breaking with a singlet Higgs, without making any assumption about its possible doublet structure. Special attention is given to the di erent possible descriptions of massive spin-1 elds and the di erences arising from naive implementations of these formalisms, showing their full equivalence once a proper short-distance behaviour is required.