Any progression assumes you are gaining fitness over time, which include increases in FTP. That’s why most approaches have regular assessments of your FTP (with TR that happens once per training block). I don’t see how this is at odds with the principles of polarized training.
I find your description of polarized training spot on: easy days are really easy (sans getting up super early, of course), but hard days are very hard. They are also polarized in this sense. The other TR plans are more varied in terms of difficulty.
But IMHO that means if 3 x 4 minutes at 106 % is really hard for someone that’d qualify as being the correct workout for them? Because in my experience failure can stem either from physical or mental exhaustion. When I did my polarized block, the threshold progression really pushed me mentally, for example. And I did have to repeat one workout after I failed it and lower my FTP a little.
The 8-week polarized plan replaces sweet spot base 1 + 2 and the 6-week plan build.
If you want to use it with Adaptive Training and as part of a training plan, create your training plan with Plan Builder, but don’t look for polarized anywhere. You’ll get sweet spot base 1 + 2 and one of the build plans (e. g. general build) instead. Then in the calendar, you must select the first week of each block, and there you have an option to swap out e. g. sweet spot base for the polarized plan.
But in case of POL plans, does it even make sense to distinguish base and build phase? To my untrained eye they look same (HV): Tue is VO2max, Fri is Threshold, rest is Endurance. Only difference is how long block you want and/or how frequent recovery week
Same goes about SSB1 and SSB2. With personal PL changes, these blocks can be really similar.
A quick skim between the current Pol Base & Builds (Mid is what I am checking) shows some notable differences, especially in the Sunday workouts (super long at the 2nd half of Build), but elsewhere too.
They are similar in many ways (most of the ‘hard’ days from what I see), but different in just enough (including the 6 vs 8 week timing & Sundays mentioned above) that I think there is at least a reasonable cause to label them differently. I can’t speak to whether those differences are right or wrong in the context of POL specifically, but they are not the same or swappable in my eyes.
That seems quite an assumption that PL will somehow balance both phases.
Presumably, they have specific goals in mind with each SSB phase, and have that essence programmed into the adaptations. The default plans are unique, and I expect they aim to keep the intended benefits and loading similar even with adaptations applied.
Yes, speculation on my part, but unless someone is having a really bad time and AT is somehow not working well for them, I can’t see the two SSB blocks being “the same” unless something is really off the rails.
I think those differences you see are personal to you i.e. even before adding to calendar, those plans are already adapted to you. I’m at last loading week of POL6HV and looking at both POLHV plans, first 3 weeks are exactly same for me. Although, you’re probably right about Sunday’s long Z2, I have always done 5hr+ rides so AT simply can’t go much higher for me.
Anyway, what made me think that with AT it does not matter was actually SSB1 block before POL6: as SS PL increase was quite fast, in the end SSB1 looked basically same as another iteration of SSB1 or SSB2.
Maybe, but until you actually proceed through SSB2 and see how AT handles it, we simply don’t know if it would mimic SSB1 or be a unique version of SSB2, tailored to your PL’s.
OT: Sorry for the MV > HV swap after posting. I tend to look at MV for most of my reviews, but noticed you mention HV and made the swap to align with that.
Back on track:
Very interesting, indeed. I did not expect to see differences there. But it seems that they may well be “tweaking” the default plans displayed for more “current state” viewing.
About a month or two ago I noticed that workouts were adapted to current PLs when putting a plan on the calendar. Noticed because it was surprising to see .8 IF ‘sweet spot’ workouts in SSB, because I had been receiving no PL credit from riding outside. Doing that makes sense, but has some implications if your PLs are not accurate.
Yeah, it is nice in the sense that a person gets a more accurate and up to date expectation of what they will get if they apply a plan to their calendar. Probably better than what I expected (and was the case at least for part of the ‘old days’ of AT) where you saw a default setup, applied to the calendar, and then AT triggered adaptations immediately to give something that might be very different.
As you mention, this would all drive from PL’s, so that will have a certain impact when looking at different use cases. New users with default (or reset) 1.0 for all would see one thing, while others with higher PL’s for whatever reason (no recent FTP change in particular) could see something quite different.
Presumably it would all get adjusted as each user proceeds through the plan, gets their performance and sets their survey response, but it is interesting none the less.
Yeah, no matter which phase is going on, I always switch Sunday rides with Z2 progression (4h → 6h, with weekly 30min increments). Those are always outdoors indeed. If weather turns too bad, max that I can do indoor is 3hr.
With ramp test PL reset, Z2 does not go down too much. If I remember correctly, with 3% FTP bump it went down to ~7. It’s decay is also slower compared to other zones
