I try to be mindful of all of the work I’ve done over the last 22 years and am certainly aware I’ve had success essentially doing every way of training you can think of. Friel periodIzed, reverse periodization, sweet spot heavy through TR several years back, threshold, now what appears to be more polarized, etc. They definitely all build on each other.
I’m with you though, over the past 18 months I really started to have some physical troubles and as I noted earlier I’m just short of 40. I started thinking about how awful 50 would look if I kept this up and decided a change was needed. The fact that I’ve seen drastic improvements is just a plus to the fact that I don’t feel like absolute hell every morning anymore. My feeling is lots of easy and just a little bit hard is definitely right if you’re playing the long game.