A couple years ago I was told that TR desktop apps are the most popular. Not sure if that’s changed over last couple years.
That’s a matter of prioritization, isn’t it?
I will grant you that my guess that most athletes use TR on Android and iOS is a conjecture and TR knows the numbers. But even if the Windows and Mac app are more popular than I think, I don’t think the distribution is 80:20 in favor of the desktop apps.
What complicates usage statistics further is that I reckon many people use their smartphone for training and the desktop app for organization and the like. Although I reckon this is also because of the mobile apps lack many fundamental features (annotations and proper calendaring come to mind).
Well, I use the web interface for everything else, because I have to, not out of choice. I hate web apps with a passion. When TR rewrote its iOS app, the app lost quite a few features. One notable one was notes, which I use fastidiously to log my calorie and liquid intake as well as comment on how I felt. I also cannot simply move workouts in the iOS app’s calendar. Adding scheduled workouts is awkward, too.
From the outside I’m sure that looks like the web interface is very popular, but it is just that I am forced to do this by limits in their feature set.
Also, my iPad and iPhone have more than enough processing power to support the same feature set as the desktop apps. In fact, for a while my iPad was faster than my laptop. There is no technical reason to not have fully featured Android and iOS apps.
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I’ve been using the 8-week high POL plans for 16 weeks. Here are my experiences:
- AT doesn’t work with the POL plans well, if at all.
- The POL plans are canned. Each 8-week session is as if you’re starting over.
- The progression is WAY too fast. Nobody is going from a 4 to a 9 in 8 weeks.
- The workload is far more manageable than the traditional plan builder and mixing in races and group rides doesn’t force you to remap your next week’s workouts.
There are some easy workarounds to make these plans work for you. In the 8-week high plan, you have rides 6 days/week. 1 day of VO2, 1 day of Threshold, and 4 of endurance. It’s easy to feel like you need to load your legs up because they feel fresh in week 1 and 2. Don’t.
Change your workouts based on what you want to do. Keep your prescribed ride type (endurance/threshold/VO2), but change the workout to something you want and around the progression level that works for you. It took me about 6 weeks to figure out what I needed to do and when. This is how mine looks:
Mon: off
Tue: VO2 productive
Wed: end productive
Thu: end achievable mid
Fri: end achievable easy
Sat: Threshold productive (O/U) or group ride
Sun: end achievable (2hrs +)
This will change based on my sleep/recovery (Whoop) only in that I may adjust the progression level. However, this is the basic premise of how I have done it.
I did well with the traditional plans for 6 months and when I hit specialty phase, I tanked. That prompted the switch to POL and I am very glad I did (so far). I feel much better and now that I know my limitations and what I need to do, the POL plans are great for me.
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@velmersglue
Thanks for your first impressions. I’ve just started a six-week polarized block as a pre-season opener. I’m glad I have resisted the temptation to increase the difficulty of my endurance rides.
In addition to your observations, I’d also add that most workouts in the polarized plan are pretty bland. On the harder workouts even the off intervals are 50 % flat, period, even after you are done with the hard intervals. But it seems that this follows precisely the prescription of what polarized workouts should be.
What works for me is using what I have learnt training with AT for the last few months and adjusting my workouts if necessary. However, there are notably fewer alternate workouts available. But that’s fair for a plan that is explicitly labeled as beta. Still, it is a weakness at present.
I think that is a combination of two factors: you are not meant to repeat 8-week blocks. The recommendation is to use Plan Builder and then replace Base and Build with the 8- and 6-week polarized plans.
I think most people would get bored if they repeated the same 8-week block over-and-over.
I’m a bit worried about that, too. The Sweet Spot-based plans seem more gentle. But ask me again in a month.
Just one thing: polarized plans are not a substitute for the speciality phase as they lack specificity. During the speciality phase you are meant to train for the demands that you encounter during the races or rides you want to train for.
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I did the six week then the eight week Mid-Volume plans earlier this summer. I wrote up my impressions on the big Polarised Plans are here thread - https://www.trainerroad.com/forum/t/polarized-training-plans-are-here/55844/389 - I joined the AT closed beta about halfway through that block but chose not to turn it on just to see what the base plan did.
Remember that the 6 week plan is Base and the 8 week is Build. I didn’t find the progression too bad, the only one that caused a problem was going from Deseret to Bartlett Peak and that was because the rest periods became too short for the loop I was doing the workouts on (I did all the workouts outdoors and I live in a very hilly area so it’s a bit of a challenge finding 16min hills with 3min descents).
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Sweet! Thanks for the info!
I did my first set of hard intervals on the polarized plan. It did not feel hard. I am going to just make next weeks hard intervals one step harder.
Part of the problem is trying to build 6-8 week blocks that get linked together. There is no way to address TTE improvements. A big part of polarized is you can build duration at a certain intensity over time. That leads to very useful adaptations over longer periods of time Think 6-9-12 months not 6-8 weeks.
But TR is a bit “stuck” because they need training blocks that can be linked together (base-build-specialty) and they also stick mostly to 60-90 min workouts that are engaging and amenable to indoor training. So some aspect of gamification. Polarized training is pretty much the opposite.
I think the concept of “easy” is also not quite accurate. The Z2 work fundamental to “polarized” is certainly easier than SST or Threshold. But when I do easy or endurance rides I’m keeping it close to my LT1 point. That level of intensity is relatively easy, but when the hours stack up there is definitely fatigue.
I know it’s not Seilerized, but when I do “polarized” I make it 6-9 months. My two “hard days” are one day where I look for 60-90 min at 90% FTP or better, and a second day where I look for 20-45 min at 95-105%. Basically a time trial type effort. The rest of the time is LT1 +/- and try to accumulate 6-8 hours in that zone. I’d like to do more but still working full time!!
A focus for me when doing this type of training is not FTP gains on a ramp test, but seeing LT1 move up and increasing TTE.
Take home is when I do “polarized” it is a really boring program and it’s awful indoors. But it’s very effective training and the results are solid for me.
I think AT will be much more useful for folks following the typical TR blocks. But you don’t need it for “polarized”
$0.02
(on edit, cleaned up some phrasing)
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I recently switched my AT to the HV 8 week pol plan. It is providing proposed adaptations for me. The weekly plan includes one threshold w/o, 1 VO2M, and 4 endurance w/o’s. I’m considering trading out the threshold for second VO2M. Wouldn’t that be more consistent with polarized training?