This is my point. People need to really educate themselves about the Seiler version of this type of training. As he says in many of his videos this method of training is highly individual due to the various HR measures he uses, min, max and HRReserve.
The sessions he describes are all limited by heart rate not power, even the high intensity work is governed by not going above a certain percent max heart rate,
If you want to know where your true aerobic zone is get yourself the HRV Logger app and a Polar H series strap and determine at what power your DFAalpha1 is always above 0.75.
Until recently this method has only been available in the lab but now anyone can do it.
I feel a lot of people are going to be doing their Z1 sessions at a HR which is too high if they blindly follow the new plans without doing some research.
Actually the hard days are supposed to be more effective since you are fresher, but you should be instituting intensity control if following seiler’s hierarchy of endurance needs. You should always live to fight another day, that is a trait for consistency. No hero workouts.
I am in agreement with you. I wasn’t trying to say you need to destroy yourself. I was paraphrasing Seiler who has said many times your hard days probably aren’t hard enough and your easy days aren’t easy enough. If you execute your easy days easy, then you are fresh to make your hard days hard and stimulate adaptation.
So that’s my first week of these intervals workouts done (still a long Z1 tomorrow to go though). I just did these by feel. Said to myself, go hard, but not so hard you can’t attempt the next interval. Hard thing to pace, but it was a good learning experience and confidence builder and now I have an idea roughly where to work at for these POL plans.
I am scared of the 4x16min workout over FTP. Definitely want to be able to do it so maybe it’s a case of repeating the 3x16min over and over with shorter rest each week and hoping that gets me there.
I’ve said in other threads I felt fresher making my weeks more polarised. That’s true, but today I was a bit middling feeling. Legs going out didn’t feel like they had a lot of power but weren’t heavy (done 11 hours on the bike from Tues to Fri alone) and was expecting the 3x16min to be a mess. Was even considering doing it at sweet spot or tempo if the power wasn’t there. It was though, and was actually enjoyable was I got started. Definitely a learning experience this POL stuff, not just seeing if there will be progress, but judging how you feel too, I think that’s different for me. You spend a LOT of time in Z1 so doing any amount of actual work at any intensity is pretty alien mentally but seems the legs and lungs are all systems go…
Early days though, proof is in the FTP results later.
Wednesday 4x4min (did a 5th to compensate for 7min break when going through a town)
Give it a go by all means but I would be subbing that one out, something like 6x 5m, IMO, 4x 16m fits more in a Pyramidal TiD as I think most that successfully complete it are going to do it around 95 - 100% and that is based on hour power.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, it is interesting.
What do you think of the 4x8min for the second workout weekly? It came out good in the original study, and I am keen on doing longer sort of intervals as that’s something I’d like to be good at. Ideally if I could have one attribute that was strong this summer it would be 5 to 15min power. That would let me dig deep on the climbs in my area.
Doing these outside so a bit easier too, heart rate also lower I bet compared to indoors.
So HV isn’t actually a polarized plan, and that is excellent news!
When I first saw the announcement, I basically said to myself well great, now TR has two bad training methodologies. But these are actually closer to a optimal pyramidal plan, and that is awesome. As someone who has been a TR subscriber for eons, to actually have a plan I can plug in to the calendar is very exciting. Still not covering early base and sharpening times, but this is a solid late base/build sequence and I’m pleasantly surprised.
Thanks for posting these. I’ve steered clear of the whole Polarized discussion (a little too polarizing for my taste). But from the look of these, the Base plans may do a better job of incorporating year-round fitness than the TB or SSB approaches. Perhaps I need to dig a bit deeper into this, as this is of interest to me.
One thing I note is a pretty sharp ramp rate of TSS - 278 to 497 over 6 weeks for the MV POL Base, versus 298 to 413 over 6 weeks for SSB MV.
