Abstract: The couplings of the electroweak effective theory contain information on the heavy-mass scales which are no-longer present in the low-energy Lagrangian. We build a general effective Lagrangian, implementing the electroweak chiral symmetry breaking SU(2)(L) circle times SU(2)(R) -> SU(2)(L+R), which couples the known particle fields to heavier states with bosonic quantum numbers J(P) = 0(+/-) and 1(+/-). We consider colour-singlet heavy fields 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 fields 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 different possible descriptions of massive spin-1 fields and the differences arising from naive implementations of these formalisms, showing their full equivalence once a proper short-distance behaviour is required.