Feedback Needed: Polarized Plan Questions for the Community

[ABG]

I would like to see recovery every 4th week doing HV.

[wirechild]

Those athletes are not doing only 3.5hr weeks though. I see no need for a recovery week unless you are doing 10+ hour weeks and 2 hard rides each week.

[onemanpeloton]

I have nothing to add here except - kudos to the TR team for being so open and direct with it’s customers!

[enki42]

I know this is sort of off topic in that its not directly dealing with getting polarized right but from the perspective of an end user. With the old plans, yes there is a volume issue in terms of how much time someone has to train but someone may pick a lower volume plan not cause they lack the time but cause they can’t handle the heavy load. After a hard workout its hard to go right back to doing other things. With a polarized workout won’t some of the days be easy so not much recovery is needed so doing the workout doesn’t require as much actual downtime?

I realize there is still the issue of how long the easy rides are so they may not be able to do the higher volume plan

[hurdle]

A lot of this debate washes over me, I just get lost in the white noise of it all.
I’ve mostly done low volume with an extra outdoor ride. 4 rides per week seems to be a “sweet spot” in terms of volume. A friend of mine who is on TR also does the same.
MV I can do but have no room to fit in S&C as I do early shifts and can’t train twice a day.

6 week block vs 8 week block
It comes down to your life and whether you can get through that time period without any interruptions. No point in having an efficient plan if you never finish it.

[Skilaxin1088]

This is almost exactly what I plan to do for my next build block.

[JPasdf]

Yes. And the easy ride should be easy enough that you could read or do email at the same time. I’ve done a lot of reading for work while doing polarized Z1 rides. However, after two hours of an easy ride you’re going to need some downtime.

[Bigpikle]

A couple of thoughts:

Recovery weeks are far less of an issue on these plans as the easier endurance work doesn’t build fatigue in anything like the way that Sweetspot, tempo and threshold work does. Even as a 50 year old I’m finding no need for an easy week anything more frequently than 4 or 5 weeks. Like others have said, the 3-5hr LV plan seems pointless and certainly wouldn’t require any recovery week at all IMHO.

The other point I find an issue with what you described is restricting the intervals to only 4, 8, 16 mins. Just because Seiler used these in a study it really doesn’t men its the only intervals that should be used. I don’t think you’d find anyone seriously following a polarised plan and only sing those interval lengths or the 103-106% intensity level used in all the workouts currently marked ‘POL’ on TR.

There needs to be a more periodised approach if the plans are going to cover a 14-20 week period as described in the intros to the ‘not the real plans’ everyone saw the other day. I cannot understand why any plan would only include a single range of intensity for that period of time.

Sincerely hoping that what we saw the other day is a long way from what gets released…

[Brennus]

@Nate_Pearson

Seiler has said that they have athletes do it every 4th week for the Polarized model.

Do you think he was talking about time-constrained athletes or athletes that were training (primarily) >=12hrs/wk?

[ABG]

Question for @Nate_Pearson

Are you rolling LV polarized to compare to the current LV plans?
If your doing that I understand to see which is the best product.

I don’t see the use of developing something LV where there is such minimal stress other then comparison.

[Nate_Pearson]

@tshortt

But he doesn’t do this in practice . He’s much more flexible with the HIIT sessions and I think you can be too. Somehow it became internet dogma that in order to “do polarized” you had to use these interval modalities from his experimental studies. Seiler races Zwift, does threshold work, and has his daughter incorporate tempo runs regularly (for the pure cyclists on the thread, “tempo runs” are at or just below threshold). If you stick to the 4min, 8min, 16min intervals, the plan is unnecessarily inflexible.

We want to go with what he’s said.

We know he currently does a lot of sweet spot in his own training.

[Jonathan]

Remember, these plans are going to be marked as “Experimental”, meaning that this is the first version of these plans. These plans are still in their beta phase of production and will be improved upon as more data is collected.

We want to get data on a lot of the traditionally “textbook” prescriptions and guard rails associated with Seiler’s recommendations for these first plans, but that doesn’t mean our plans would forever adhere to those same constraints.

The goal with all of this is to make cyclists faster, as always, so we plan to make adjustments as time goes on to make that happen

[Nate_Pearson]

@DaveWh

On what volume though?

In a LV plan of say, 4 hours a week, with 3 hrs in Seiler Z1, and one Z3 workout, I don’t think a recovery week is needed. That’s a lot less intensity than, say, SSB which has 2-3 days a week of intensity.

He does not specify volume for this stuff. He could do us all a favor and publish some hard core guidelines .

I’m personally leaning towards LV having a 5:1 and MV/HV having a 2:1 ratio (for the 6 week plan). The 8 week plan would have a 3:1 in both.

[hdas]

@Jonathan

Remember, these plans are going to be marked as “Experimental”, meaning that this is the first version of these plans. These plans are still in their beta phase of production and will be improved upon as more data is collected.

And what is the incentive for users to be the guinea pigs of this experiment?. The people who subscribe to your plans are the ones looking for guidance bcs they can’t/don’t want to do it themselves or with another resource. Ostensibly they trust TR to know what they are doing before spending their already limited hours.

[rkoswald]

Please let me know how it goes. I made them up a couple of weeks ago and am sticking with the Plan Builder pyramidal plan for now, but may switch to POL if I get run down again.

[Jonathan]

@hdas

And what is the incentive for users to be the guinea pigs of this experiment?. The people who subscribe to your plans are the ones looking for guidance bcs they can’t/don’t want to do it themselves or with another resource. Ostensibly they trust TR to know what they are doing before spending their already limited hours.

These plans are going to be available to athletes only through enabling an “Experimental Plans” role in the “Early Access” area of their TrainerRoad accounts, so these plans will be sought out by people that want to use them. In other words, the plans aren’t being forced on anybody and they aren’t even being presented at an equal level to the rest of our plans during their initial launch.

All of that said, we care about making these plans as awesome as possible, and this has involved a massive amount of research and testing on our end and will continue to do so.

[jkc]

Vote on 5:1.

My $0.02. For the weekly commitment, by picking polarized you are committing to 8-12 or more a week so the idea of low volume as anything less it’s just dumb. If that were the case use the sweet spot or maintenance plan.

[Nate_Pearson]

@enki42

I know this is sort of off topic in that its not directly dealing with getting polarized right but from the perspective of an end user. With the old plans, yes there is a volume issue in terms of how much time someone has to train but someone may pick a lower volume plan not cause they lack the time but cause they can’t handle the heavy load. After a hard workout its hard to go right back to doing other things. With a polarized workout won’t some of the days be easy so not much recovery is needed so doing the workout doesn’t require as much actual downtime?

I realize there is still the issue of how long the easy rides are so they may not be able to do the higher volume plan

For me, longer rides still require recovery time. I wouldn’t say that the long rides are “recovery free”. But hopefully we’ll see this in survey responses, progression rates, and workout compliance.

[bbarrera]

@Nate_Pearson

I’m personally leaning towards LV having a 5:1 and MV/HV having a 2:1 ratio (for the 6 week plan). The 8 week plan would have a 3:1 in both.

+1

[Bigpikle]

I totally understand that, but they need to be appealing enough that people use them and you gather data. I was surprised to see sessions starting at 4x4 @ 103% as I really don’t see that coming close to the min effective dose to do any good. Even a 50 yr old like me with an aversion to >FTP work can jump in at 5x6m or so, so starting right back there seems like a waste of weeks of work in a 6 week plan.

If you want feedback from people who’ve followed a few plans before, then I think these intervals need a serious re-working in order to attract people. I was really looking forward to these plans but frankly will pass if they are simply a stack of 103-105% progressions for the next 4 months. After so many podcast discussions about variety and the need for different stimulus I’m confused why you’d take this approach at all.