Rest days, no work out, count towards the 80/20 distribution? The whole thing is kind of twisted!
The outdoor versions of some of the endurance workouts are wrong. For example Perkins -1 is 2hr both inside and outside. And some workouts don’t have any outside options so cannot be pushed to a head unit.
Seilers not selling anything. He merely reported on observations of high level athletes that were successful and noticed a trend.
We’ll get this fixed.
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Maybe not in his initial dissertation, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2004.00418.x, but those that follows sound like a sell or at least a strong option.
What is Best Practice for Training Intensity and Duration Distribution in Endurance Athletes? https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.5.3.276
Abstract:
“Successful endurance training involves the manipulation of training intensity, duration, and frequency, with the implicit goals of maximizing performance, minimizing risk of negative training outcomes, and timing peak fitness and performances to be achieved when they matter most. Numerous descriptive studies of the training characteristics of nationally or internationally competitive endurance athletes training 10 to 13 times per week seem to converge on a typical intensity distribution in which about 80% of training sessions are performed at low intensity (2 mM blood lactate), with about 20% dominated by periods of high-intensity work, such as interval training at approx. 90% VO2max. Endurance athletes appear to self-organize toward a high-volume training approach with careful application of high-intensity training incorporated throughout the training cycle. Training intensification studies performed on already well-trained athletes do not provide any convincing evidence that a greater emphasis on high-intensity interval training in this highly trained athlete population gives long-term performance gains. The predominance of low-intensity, long-duration training, in combination with fewer, highly intensive bouts may be complementary in terms of optimizing adaptive signaling and technical mastery at an acceptable level of stress.”
Thanks for so quickly adding in the new plans! Are there going to be outdoor versions available of the new workouts that were created for the plan?
Yup! We’re working on this now! Jonathan touched on this in the launch post:
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I will say we are all different. Age 61…never really needed much of a warmup whether it was running or cycling.
Did you?
Conclusion, first sentence:
“There is reasonably strong evidence for concluding that an approximate 80-to-20 ratio of LIT to ThT/HIT intensity training gives excellent long-term results among endurance athletes.”
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So why color it different in the conclusion? So back to question, what is he selling?
Ummm…his ideas? 
Let’s play the game this way: what do YOU think he’s selling, @jkc? I know you want to tell all of us.
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Edit: Already did. Ignoring the obvious?
Apparently the previous response was too direct and to the point that it was hurting a few feelings.
Interesting example but isn’t that just a collection of journal articles/research being sold?
I can see what you’re saying though in how it might be taken as a “sell” if you see Seilers name and think he’s trying to market something. I hadn’t looked at it from your perspective before.
Well this thread has gotten quite lengthy and I no doubt contributed to some dilution of it. Going to see myself out and let you guys chat.
Skål
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This convo is getting off topic imo. Would you guys mind moving it to DMs? I don’t see how it is helping to provide feedback to the Polarized Plans that Nate and his team are experimenting with.
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I can’t help but be surprised that the TR team and the commenters seem to be turning this into a grudge match between what they see as the TR proprietary model and Seiler. I felt this especially keenly on the long podcast, where Amber was picking apart everyone else’s polarized training research. TR has an incredible advantage—and opportunity—in having far more data than Seiler could ever lay his hands on. They can slice and dice data for thousands of users, dividing it by things Seiler isn’t really interested in: age, FTP’s below 300, fewer than 10 hrs of training/week, etc. Instead of attacking others’ work as inadequate, TR should focus on the research opportunity it has. Welcome a series of polarized models, and see what works for whom. Use a wide variety of plans to drive ML. As a 56 year old rider, the TR sweet spot plans don’t give me enough recovery. I’m keen for another option. Maybe Seiler’s model is it, and maybe a revised TR model is it. Be the best by being the best, not by putting others down.
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Interesting … that isn’t how it came across to me at all. What I heard from the podcast is that there are widely varying definitions of what polarised means to different people, and because TR is introducing POL plans they wanted to explain the basis for what they consider the main factors in building a plan around that approach. The podcast did review different styles of plan (including pyramidal) as background. If by “picking apart” the research you mean “critically examining” it, then yes I agree … but isn’t that what research is for ?
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I think before everyone complains any more let’s appreciate these are the first steps into a establishing a training method and it’s highly unlikely to be perfect from the start, so sign up to a plan and create some usable data!!
One @Nate_Pearson - would love an accompanying podcast to cover:
- how should athletes think about adapting if a change of circumstances occurs (e.g can only train twice in a given week. Do you suggest we hit the 2 key workouts, keep it polarised, have a rest week etc)
- is there any impact on nutrition timing compared with a higher intensity SST plan - especially interested w/respect to sports drinks during Z2 & fasted workouts
- if you have limited time for a Z2 workout, is there a minimum time recommendation (I.e is it even worth doing if you have 30 mins)
- anything else that people have asked
Thanks and look fwd to see how this progresses over the coming months 
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It feels to me that the way this unfolded, the team was being a little defensive. There were a bunch of attacks on TR for pushing programs with too much stress and not enough recovery. Their response seems to have been to record a rebuttal that they decided not to air, and then to try again the next week with that unusual format of Nate and Amber.
I read a bunch of social science research for work (not real science, but still), and the review articles are pretty tightly focused on two goals: establishing what we know, and suggesting a pathway to learn what we don’t. It might be me, but I took a lot of the discussion to be “we know less than people think about polarized training.” Full stop.
As I said initially, TR has a unique ability to advance research on training. I am sure they will want to keep some of this proprietary, but I would hope they will actively engage with researchers (and contribute some of their own research) to the field, given the remarkable database that they are using for ML. It seems to me the goal of their public scientific work should be to advance hypotheses then prove or disprove them. I didn’t see the show doing that, and I was disappointed.
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When I add the high volume 6 week POL plan and select outside workouts most of them show an IF of 0…
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I think they mentioned in the thread announcing the release of them that they were still working on the outdoor versions of them. So I’m assuming that missing IF is simply that they aren’t 100% ready yet or that they indicate a bug.
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