nods head in full agreement 
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Lol. As usual, @mcneese.chad beat me to it!
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Yes. They talked about their approach when the plans first came out. Don’t remember if it was in a blog or podcast. I believe they said they took the Time in Zone approach. As @mcneese.chad mentioned the whole polarized thing is poorly defined and a bit controversial. But the TIZ approach is pretty much the only way to make the numbers work in a low volume plan (also controversial).
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I did the medium volume Polarised Plans in summer and I’ll do the same after Christmas. Unlikely that I’ll do two hours Z2 on the trainer and will prefer to head outside for those which will mean doing say three to four hours of Z2 thus making the plans much more polarised in distribution.
They’ll be on an MTB so no power meter but I just did a recovery week workout (Brasstown) today which appears several times in the Polarised Plans, just a case of sitting and spinning away, my HR only got out of Z1 for a few minutes in two hours of riding.
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It was a lengthy Podcast episode. #299
A link to the YouTube recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKbrGCT8UI
My $0.02…
Polarized as a concept makes a lot of sense for building robust base fitness. Go hard a couple days a week and get in some long endurance rides too. Or long rides with some purposeful “stuff”.
Exactly how one schedules that training, or how to periodize using polarized, is not defined well. It’s one of those things where the observation might be interesting but translating it to a prescription per rider, is harder than it looks. It’s easy to say “hard” but defining hard requires more information. It’s easy to say “stuff” but what is “stuff” and how much “stuff” should I do?
One thing we learned is “stuff” is not 4x8 twice a week plus noodling around at Z2 (laughingly throws can of worms down rabbit hole)
And with that I shall wish everyone best of luck, an enjoyable holiday season, and run away post haste as I’m going for a bike ride!!
-Darth
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HEY!!! Round deez parts… we call dat kind O ridin’ Zown Won.
Dis iz all ‘bout POL train’ ain’t it? 
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Agree. I wasn’t after the big “P” polarized (avoid middle zone) when hiring a coach 16 months ago. I’m working on some data that IMHO justifies getting help, as compared to two other approaches (CTS 2016-2017, and TR 2018-2019).
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Nailed it.
The way I understand it is that TR tried their hardest to stick to what they thought Seiler’s prescription was. That’s why the workouts are extremely bare and always feature lots of time at 50 % in between sets.
I hope that in the future TR iterates on these plans and gives them their own spin. It seems to me that the current iteration does not prepare well for the specialty phase. (And AFAIK it makes no sense to make the specialty phase polarized, here you are asked to do discipline-specific efforts and get better at them.) It seems a lot of people here had the same idea I had and used it as a pre-season base plan (doubling up on base). For that polarized works very well in my limited experience.
I hope that TR’s experience with polarized plans will lead to the development of other, “more polarized” plans that exchange Z2 work for some higher-intensity workouts. Perhaps a future version of AT could create such training plans dynamically. I’m not saying this is necessarily right for everyone, but I think some people would like and could benefit from such plans. They should take some liberty and not be constrained by Polarized™ Plans, but rather just use it for inspiration.
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Chad, you can not be wrong, because you are reading all the posts and this can be considered as machine learning with an adaptive outcome 
You are also sharing the BIG CHAD name
Thank you a lot for bringing up valuable points and summarizing posts, great job.
Mary Christmas!
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Actually, much of the adaptation which comes from polarized training involves fat preference (and capilirasation), so ANY effort above VO2 is unproductive as your body switches to carb preference for as long as 15 to 20 min. Most people who struggle to see gains from polarized training have lots of time above VO2 in their long zone 2 rides. Check out rides of some pros on strava (Florian Vermeersch posts every ride and usually power data) - they often ride 4 hours or more with less than 5 minutes above FTP/zone 5 - and its all from little 5 or 10 second efforts (such as stop signs or in traffic).
Well trained amatures generally burn around 4 fat calories per minute while pros and those with lots of looong zone 2 rides can move up to 7 calories per minute or even a bit higher. Each calorie you shift is effectively 16.6 watts to FTP.
I think TR got their polarized plans just right - but few people WANT to ride these types of plans even though they can be massively productive. In the summer they can be fun - and give you opportunities to ride with the BF/GF - but indoors in the winter…
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Something that i am finding frustrating with some of the workouts are the crazy long 50% of FTP sections at the end. Not really sure pedalling at 50% is doing much and as a lot of people are time crunched I can’t help but think that time should be better spent.
Log In to TrainerRoad (3 x 4 112% then 23 minutes at 50%)
Log In to TrainerRoad (6x2 at 124% then27 minutes at the end)
That’s two examples coming up on my plan (MV POL). Yes I could recover from the intervals and then bump up the % but my question is really about what is the thinking? That is a lot of time that I would imagine is doing very little.
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My assumption was it related to HR zones. My HR @ 0.5 is much higher after 4x8@VO2 than when fresh. There is much talk about the z2 work in a polarized model being targeted to HR to ensure you are targeting the right adaptions.
When I come across those post interval long and low sections, I’ve just targeted them to around my LT1 heart rate. That may mean a power of 0.5FTP, or something in z2 power.
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Ha, thanks so much for the kind words, @Evermen. 
I hope you and everyone else have a fun & safe holiday season as well.
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The graphs you show seem very interesting, may I ask what is the source? Also, I wonder if I am interpreting them correctly: do they mean that after all out efforts subsequent endurance riding results in much higher fat burning than a steady (non fasted) endurance effort?
Great graphs! Are the fat/carb consumption metrics based on direct measurement? They appear surprisingly smooth and seem to anticipate the hard efforts, so im guessing they are, but were taken at 5 to 10 minute intervals and smoothed to look good in the graphic (not a criticism, most studies smooth data in graphics). Also, do you know the FTP of the rider? Based on the hard effort it appears around 350 watts, but the FTP matters as to what the energy mix is utilized during the 200 watt effort. It appears the rider is riding a bit too hard to hit a good zone 1/2 effort and thus reducing fat preference over the duration of the hour. Would have been great to get HR data.
And I really wish the charts had gone out to two hours to show the shift over duration!
Regardless, the charts don’t disagree with my point: High efforts lead to carb preference for 15 or so minutes. The resulting depletion of readily-available carbs then leads to higher fat preference for a period after, which also happens when carbs are depleted toward the end of the hour in the charts above. The body adapts by working to increase the available store of carbs, which is exactly the opposite of what polarized training tries to accomplish.
Put differently, the point of polarized training isn’t to maximize total fat consumption, it is to provide a ‘nudge’ to the body to learn to have a higher fat preference when riding through a slow, steady and long (over two hour) effort which allows adaptation without overwhelming stress or fatigue. The same concept applies to all training (which is why TR works so well versus self-training) - the most productive training programs aren’t the all-out efforts to exhaustion which recreational cyclists love to call hard training. Studies show productive effects re generally comprised of segments 5% or 10% under or over FTP. Nudges!
If we want to nerd out we can look through some studies of normalized training (or as I mentioned before examine the training data of pros), but most normalized training studies come from other sports still as cyclists are addicted to their power meters and the ability to hit exact zones and efforts.
One thing I’ve noticed with these polarised plans is that TR’s z2 workouts are all extremely monotonous when done indoors.
It’s possible to still have intervals within a z2 workout which (for me at least) makes the time go faster as you mentally split the workout into chunks of effort.
Example workouts from non-TR plans to explain what I prefer:
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If you look really closely you can see the raw data points as a finer line. The thick yellow and blue lines appear to be drawn on roughly by hand afterwards. If you look at the raw data for example, it doesn’t show any change until the hard efforts start.
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Take it out of Erg, or do them in sim mode on RGT/Zwift/etc.
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Those intervals must be a mistake surely?