I’m about six weeks into shifting over to the polarized plans. At medium volume I’m riding between 4.5 to 7 hours per week in the base phase. I feel like the fitness gains are a bit slower than when I last did the SS base but my legs hurt a lot less and I feel less drained by the weekend. Not sure how much my on-the-road fitness has been affected yet. The one issue I’ve come across when doing the longer endurance rides (~2 hours) is that with so little pressure on the pedals and being in a static bike position, my sit bones are rear end are hurting a lot more than usual once it gets past the hour mark. Also, my knees start feeling achy. The bike setup hasn’t changed in a couple of years so doing the longer low intensity rides are what has changed. When I do a longer Zwift session where there’s more variations in resistance and I might get out of the saddle I feel less pain.
I’m only riding outside right now, when I go back to doing mostly indoor I might switch back to an SS plan. Last night I did an endurance ride for 1:45 and that would have been intolerable on the trainer.
Maybe a stupid question, but where do I enable polarized plans? I’m merely toying around with a plan for 2024 already and can’t seem to find the option anymore? I also think I remember some kind of announcement concerning the polarized plans, but I don’t remember the specifics. Can someone enlighten me?
They made them available to everyone. You can just go into the phases and pick the polarized version now.
I’ve just completed Mid Volume Base and Build after previously completing MV SS Base, MV SS Build, and MV Gran Fondo earlier this year. I went from 250 to 265 during that plan and I found that I could complete most of the training plan, but I did have trouble with some of the over unders. I never felt like I was headed to burning out which surprised me TBH, because I had experienced that previously several years back when I was on a MV plan on TR.
After that first A event I did a recovery week and one week of sweet spot before diving into the polarized plans with another A event 16 weeks out. My approach was to complete the Threshold and VO2 workouts as close possible when riding outside, and to try and nail them while inside on the trainer. I added Z2 hours to my rides as time permitted and usually went over volume by 1 -3.5 hours and once up to 5.5 hours, but I usually kept my rides to 4 times per week.
While I enjoyed fewer session per week, I noticed that more time off the bike didn’t necessarily make me feel fresher or snappier when on the bike. On intervals.icu I could see my fitness fall, and my form move out of the optimal zone into the fresh and transition zone and kind a settle around there.
The threshold workouts during build were hard - and I put a lot of effort into those workouts whether they were on the trainer or on the road. I had some very satisfying efforts while out on the road and set some nice power pr’s while doing so. However, I never felt that I was getting stronger during this course of time, and I couldn’t identify the needle moving that much in terms of being able to push higher watts for a sustained effort. I had pushed threshold for longer that before but at the same output.
Going into Build the first Threshold workout is swapped for VO2 max. I really busted my ass on these and they were damn difficult. I can honestly say I was breathing through my eyeballs for these and some I couldn’t complete as prescribed. Looking back and comparing this to my earlier build I was clearly able to put out more power during this second build’s VO2 max sessions and had a slight improvement over the course of the build block.
According to FTP detect and interval.icu I had nice little bump of 5 watts during the base block and ended up at 270, and after the build I just got another 2-watt bump which isn’t surprising because I don’t feel stronger at all. I actually thought that my ftp might not move at all, or it might even fall a point or two.
I am now three weeks out from my next A event and plan builder set me up with the Rolling Road Race Mid Volume Plan. At this point I won’t really follow that plan as I don’t think there’s any fitness to gain from those workouts although I’ll keep them on my calendar. What I plan to do is swap my Thursday VO2 max session for an actual gravel group ride where I can work on riding with a group, handling my bike, and riding as hard as possible to replicate a race effort. I’m going to modify my Sunday endurance and include a very hard group ride where once again I can try and replicate race type efforts.
After doing the MV Polarized plans I feel like I’m missing out on those tempo and sweet spot workouts. I think I really benefit from those types of workouts and that while it might add fatigue, that it may be the right type of fatigue and that I respond to it. While I can’t say it definitively, I will go back to that type of a training plan as I don’t think polarized is where it’s at for me.
Sorry if this has been covered above, but I’ve pretty much skimmed throgh it all without any luck.
I’m considering doing a pol-base this fall. If for nothing else, to try i tout and do somthing new. My main plan starts off with SSBaseMV in January.
But it’s been a long time since I did endurance on the trainer. I sprinkle my outdoor structured training with the odd long endurance ride so I can go pretty far at that pace/power/hr, given correct fueling. This has led to a PL of 2.6, only kept up by doing SS intervals. So going into a polarized plan, what would your suggest I do to “get my levels righ”? The way I see it I got some options:
- Don’t do anything, just answer the survey and the wo’s will adjust
- Change the wo’s the first week for something more demanding to “kick-start” the plan
- Do some “productive” wo’s in the weeks leading up to the start of the plan
- Associate a longer outside ride with a TR endurance wo
2 or 3 make sense to me. If you filter & review the TR Endurance workouts and pick a duration and intensity you feel you can complete, then do it and rate it appropriately, you will be set going forward. No need to do multiple ones in advance (3), so you can just pick one and do that reasonably close to the start of your plan (within 2 weeks), or just make a substitution at that first opportunity via 2.
Thanks. 2 and 3 was my most likely approach as well. Got a couple of months now with focus on running, mrb fun-rides and TN wo’s before hitting the trainer again 
I’m also thinking of giving the polarized plans a go once racing is finished, and a break (I don’t always feel the need). I’m interested how it would work for me - I think I’ve been ground down by all the forum posts pushing polarized 
To go back on an earlier point - any reason not to go straight to build? At my age VO2 max gains are hard got and hard retained, so I’d rather keep them in my plan. Seems a bit pointless to follow base and swap out one threshold for VO2 max?
I know 60 min Z2 sessions are worth doing generally but do the plan work with medium volume swapping the planned 90 min Z2 for 60 min version?
I’m wondering if that moves it too far from a 20/80 split.
I think the spirit of polarized is to have your endurance filling in the void for the amount of high intensity work that you are doing. I don’t think it’s meant to be an exact 80:20 split at all times. With that said, I’ve been getting it pounded into my head that 2, sometimes 3 high intensity session per week are the max sessions for most of us common athletes - so modifying our z2 hours seems like a reasonable course of action to fit the time that you have.
I have been doing some vo2 to prep for some short cross races during a base phase and I have just been replacing one threshold workout per week with vo2 manually.
If/when I start back on the TR POL Base, I will do the same since I think pure Thresh w/o VO2 is not what I need.
@mcneese.chad isn’t that what the polarised build plans look like. I was wondering the same as you as to whether I’d be better served with 1x threshold and 1x VO2 workout per week,
Yes, the current TR POL Build (MV & HV) is still the 1x Thresh and 1x VO2 template they used in the beginning. We are taking about the new Base here, since TR ditched the VO2 from that plan (now 2x Thresh) when they updated them a while ago.
I did the original TR POL Base (MV & HV) with the 1x Thresh and 1x VO2 template and like the overall feel. As an aging athlete (Five-Oh around the corner), I prefer to keep at least one VO2 workout per week to try and keep that from dropping too much.
I’m 56 so in a similar boat to you. As a matter of interest what kind of VO2 workouts would you be slotting in? Looking at the build plan again it looks like the VO2 workouts in there are more like high threshold/low VO2 with longer intervals i.e. not a huge amount of difference to the threshold workouts.
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Good question. I haven’t dug into it much at this point, but expect I’d aim for a progression starting at 1 minute intervals towards the 110-120% of FTP range and then stretch interval duration from week to week. May also be matched with a small drop in target intensity assuming I get to and beyond 3 minute intervals (aim towards 5 min’s at the end?).
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I’d leverage Progression Levels as one way to filter through the available options, but I like to aim for more of those “traditional” VO2 type workouts vs the short/short that TR defaults to in many plans.
Thanks @mcneese.chad that’s interesting. I’m getting back into it after a long layoff due to illness (5-6 months)… Lost quite a bit from FTP but by starting with a month of steady riding and then repeating pol base mv twice I’ve got just over half of the loss back. Have been pondering what to do next and I like your thinking as I’m feeling ready of a bit of VO2 now.
Touching back, I just had a look at the plan I ran in Oct 2022. Here is the list of VO2 workouts I did at that time. Note that was driven by TR initially with PL making typical changes.
- Lerket
- Saddle Mountain
- Gold Hill
- Black Pine (Swapped in this WO instead of 3x3 with shorter rest. I wanted more work, not shorter breaks.)
- Cazadero
Looks like I got the longer intervals by default in all but one, as noted above.