It’s almost as if this clickbaiting money hungry YouTube attention seeking 20 something inexperienced TR hating kid knows what he’s doing 
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5 months in the one study, 10 weeks in the other.
FWIW, I’ve always thought that there must be a relationship between the human gestational period and how long folks are willing to keep their nose to the grindstone. Either that, it is the turning of the seasons that make even most elite athletes dial back periodically. (OTOH, you have roadies who go straight into racing 'cross or indoor track all winter, then straight into the Spring Classics, so is any off-season really needed?)
In any case, unless you are unusually fragile, you’re not going to become physically overtrained in just a few months, much less a few weeks.
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Before I joined TR, that’s the way I trained for 3 months when I got back into racing.
5 days/wk: 3x 5x5min VO2 + 2x 2x20 O/U
Made me pretty fast.
But did it make you faster than if you had only done 2/3 HIT/week? If I’m so bold as to assume you were coming back from a hiatus or period of unstructured riding, then adherence to any plan could be assumed to make you faster.
(that sounds brutal, btw, I would have cracked)
This.
TR talks about ‘minimum effective dosage’ a lot, so it’s hard to believe that they believe 5 days/8hrs per wk of intensity is the minimum required to create adaptations.
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No idea (cuz I really had no idea what I was doing!). But compared to my 2020 “polarised” training…definitely not.
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For the nth time — it’s not a “vs” condition. Both are utilised at different times for different goals.
To make it out that pros do POL 12 months of the year for their entire career is to not understand the construct of POL.
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Nate states his FTP went from 275 to 345 doing only SS. Gotta ask why only SS? Was it because he had no time? Was it to keep inline with TR’s brand?
I raised and extended my entire power curve, breaking all my lifetime power PR’s, and pushing my highest ever FTP…on extremely little SS…but a lot of “POL”. So who’s more right?
SS = less time, more stress
POL = more time, less stress
Fixed it.
You can build workouts in TrainingPeaks, track metrics, and export those workouts to zwift or your Garmin//Wahoo head unit which will then control your trainer or do the workouts outside.
I think you have made a ton of valid points - but this feels like a real strawman. SSBHV is explicitly not the minimum effective dosage - it’s the plan for people who really want to push the envelope. The advice with minimum effective dosage I’ve always seen them make, and have to think they believe, is low volume.
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This kid should build his training business the old fashioned way: by acting as a beard for American sport’s most notorious doper.
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Then what’s TR’s logic behind SSBHV? If gains aren’t linear then what’s the “science” behind HV? How much SS before diminishing returns?
Their plans are not really about “developing” riders. Just peaking them. IOW, the macro gets lost (meaning year on year improvement). From the issue of sustainability alone these plans are just not going to hold up over the long term and these plans have the potential to eventually cause deterioration of the lactate profile due to increased lactate production stemming from so much intensity work without commensurate levels of Z2 to compensate (keeping a balance between fat and glycolytic metabolism).
It really is too much intensity but those who are heavily invested in these plans it will fall on deaf ears mostly. No one likes to be told that there training methodology may be flawed.
As far Nate, Chad, Jonathan and others, I do think they have good podcasts and genuinely want to help riders improve. I enjoy their content…particularly Chad’s deep-dives. But saying that…I have to be blunt. I think they all know that these plans are problematic (especially Chad who is most erudite) and I don’t think for one second that any of them would follow such plans long-term. Just my take.
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@chidlow Not taking into account any genetic differences, just look at how much elite athletes train. Training up to 13 times a week is different than training say 4 times a week. It’s a lot more training, that is the difference. So maybe a 4 times a week person could benefit from more zone 2 (3 zone model) than a 13 times a week person would (Seiler et al. classify anything over zone 1 as high intensity). From the abstract of the study referenced, it looked at these well-trained athletes who train a lot. Therefore, you can’t take the conclusion from it and say that it absolutely applies to everyone. It might but from that study you don’t know.
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Mike Poulton thinks otherwise 
The Neal study that DJ cites with much excitement is seriously flawed.
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Only 12 people, 6 per group. That’s a start - not enough to build an entire argument.
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The Zone 3 workouts of the Polarized group were 6 x 4 minutes at ~110% FTP with 2-min rest of not pedaling or pedaling backwards.
Hmm. The zone 2 sessions of the Threshold group were 60 minute rides at tempo pace (~78% FTP). Numbers are approximate of course. Note that the Threshold group still spent ~60% of training time in Zone 1.
No wonder some in the Threshold group lost fitness if the MOST they did in a 6-week block was 78% FTP. No interval training whatsoever. That is a very silly study design. The Threshold group has no resemblance to TR plans (except maybe traditional base).
That study actually offers nothing productive to the discussion. If anything it confirms that interval training is better than a vague mix of endurance/tempo pace riding.
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Ah, sorry to clarify, “easy” in this case was still above threshold. It’s the kind of climb you can’t avoid going into the red. On a Hard day I would go all out for a pr. The accumulated fatigue was immense after 2 weeks. Eventually I had to stop. My point is that there are many ways to crack a nut. There is a lot of pseudo science out there. And just thinking of all the good riders in my area, every single one trains completely differently. At the end of the day, you are going to find what works for you naturally.
Totally setting aside the rest of your post, which makes sense, and more as an FYI - nearly every fitness study has incredibly small sample sizes. Calling this out as a weakness of this study in particular isn’t too meaningful since they all (or nearly all) suffer from this weakness
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IDK, but maybe a non-elite who is only training 4 days a week for an hour each time could handle all of those sessions being over zone 1 (3 zone model). From what I’ve heard and read from Seiler, he considers anything above zone 1 as intensity. So a non-elite performing a total of 4 sessions a week and all of those sessions being 2 x 20 at 85% of FTP would have done 4 sessions of intensity according to him. That’s more than the 2 or 3 times a week as concluded from the study. I don’t think training as the hypothetical non-elite I’ve described is going to lead to over training. It probably won’t lead to the best performances either.
It is meaningful to call out sample size because it’s poor research and the field allows mediocre research to perpetuate. As someone with a background in public health research I’d have a hard time seeing such small sample sizes as being routinely accepted in peer review publications due to lack of generalizability
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