Dr Skiba turned me on to this thread. I’m an 80:20 believer so some of the thoughts/data in this thread made me think really hard. Whichever way you think about it there was a lot of interesting stuff in there!
Could you sumise for those of us that deleted Twitter?
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And all his study links in order
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side note, Skiba’s new book is now available:
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Hmm, a lot of non-cycling studies in his links. I pulled them all up and only scanned the summaries. Some interesting conclusions in other sports that have a dominant or large contribution of upper body muscle (like kayaking). Found it hard to generalize the results of those studies to cycling.
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Aren’t a lot of the Seiler studies that are foundational to polarized plans non-cycling (Nordic skiing)? Obviously it requires a huge aerobic engine, but it sure isn’t riding a bike.
I think the last couple tweets in the thread are the key: it’s not black and white, and any effort to make it black and white is not likely to be useful off the shelf when it comes to individual training. I think most of the heated discussions on this forum stem from a misunderstanding/disagreement with those last couple points.
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In other words, different people respond differently to training. Individualize your training.
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Dr Seiler YouTube on 80/20 is interesting too.
Let me know when Strava, Training Peaks, TrainerRoad or my Garmin watch etc, show HR or Power Levels in the 3 Zone Model.
After reading the pro/elite thread with hundreds of files of pro cyclist, I don’t buy the 80/20 thing any more. Those guys and gals spend WAY too much time in the “grey zone” doing a bunch of stuff throughout their workouts. They don’t do 4 easy rides at 68% then bury themselves with Wynne -4 or Spanish Needle the other 2 days. Plus, as is pointed out often, all this POL talk is descriptive not prescriptive.
The retroactive studies rarely have majority cyclists, meh.
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You can set up TP and Garmin to show just 3 zones.
I sort of agree with the rest. Though several things are different with pros vs the avg person doing 6-12 hours per week.
They are supremely fit so they also recover much better than the average person (not discounting the fact that riding and recovering is their job).
They also do ride a TON of endurance. You look at that thread of pro rides and they do a ton of riding at <70%.
The average person is doing a bunch of <2 hour rides. So it makes more sense to separate the hard from the easy. So you do 2-3 hard 1 hour workouts and then 3-4 easier rides. If that person was going to do how the pros do (ride a lot with some stuff) on their rides then they’d be doing like 1 threshold interval per ride and never actually overloading in any particular instance. You can’t just scale everything down 50% when you go from 20hrs to 10hrs in a week.
Also, Seiler himself has said that his whole strict 80/20 thing was done A) for easy to interpret scientific studies and B) as a reaction to seeing too many athletes do the “go out and ride kinda hard” all the time and never actually doing endurance and never going hard enough. He’s even said that after going through a stricter polarized phase to retrain bad habits he would then transition to a more pyramidal approach with targeted time in the ‘gray zone’.
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BTW I think Dr Seiler is presenting at the 8020endurance event this saturday. I think you can get free tickets to his presentation but I’ll probably be on the bike at that time. 
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I think its 4pm GMT and Dr Seiler is up 2nd (4:30 GMT). I am usually back from my ride before then if I remember I’ll check it out. Cheers 