Adaptive Training and the Polarized Plans

I can confirm that. TR has added a whole host of polarized workouts. You can recognize them as all of them have the same warm-up. I have completed several polarized blocks (2 or 3, don’t remember), only the first one was without AT.

I think @Jonathan is referring to what happens when you are at the edges of your performance levels (PLs). I think then AT may pick workouts that haven’t been specifically designed for polarized training. If your PL is too low, you may not spend enough time-in-zone, if it is too high, your only choice is to exceed the recommended time-in-zone.

In practice, though, this has been completely irrelevant for me. @LiveSimply, I recommend you have a look at this thread. There are of course plenty of others, but many of them are super long and contain a lot of back-and-forth. The one I linked to is relatively short and focusses on people with experience, especially within the first 30 posts or so. My post that I linked to was relatively popular, so I hope it contains useful info.

Lastly, if I were you, I’d advise against asking the question whether the plan is “truly polarized”, and to be overly strict about the numbers. What is much more important are the basics, which are shared: polarized plans are also polarized in terms of difficulty, i. e. easy workouts are EASY and hard workouts are HARD. That is, if you picked a polarized plan, because sweet spot base was too difficult, you may not do better with a polarized plan.

You will also spend more time riding easy, which means you will emphasize base fitness (the breadth of your power tower/power pyramid) rather than increasing e. g. your FTP. That has been my experience at least. Note that this does not mean you are not getting fitter, it just means you are emphasizing a different dimension of your fitness. And when you judge how well you did, be sure to include measures other than FTP.

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