IIRC, he also says the the 80/20 split is really around intensity/not instensity. In terms of your body’s stress response, SS elicits a lot of stress.
I think Dave is raising a very key question here. But many replies are trying to get around it.
Is TR about supplying a wide range of workouts and blocks that an individual can then put together how they ‘feel’ works for them: that seems to be the summation of this thread so far?
Or is TR about providing Training Plans, using AI to modify them. The latter being an endeavour to refine your plan in a similar manner that a one on one coach might do?
I think it is the latter. We are not our own DIY coaches, we are athletes being coached by TR.
Every aerobic sport in these days uses periodisation to create a Training Plan (TP).
So my question then becomes: Is polarised training actually an alternative periodisation approach, at all? If it is then it applies to the entire TP - Base, Build, Speciality? I say this because it seems all the threads on this topic, not just this one, tend to end up saying it has benefit for some blocks, in other words it isn’t a periodisation approach.
If it isn’t a TP periodisation approach then TR ought to be telling us in some detail their model for its use. I don’t think it is just TR, it seems every application of polarised seems to evade its place in a full periodised TP?
Does Polarised training fulfill the training needs of all types of cycling events? Triathlons for example, the basic Tri is Sprint distance, ie, a 20km TT; road TT are also short 20-40km, criteriums, different again, all of those being very different to more typical endurance events 2-5 hours. Surely in the specialised blocks, the workouts include sessions that are more closely related to the actual events? Maybe it works? Maybe one never needs to train at the intensity one will need to do in an event?
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Remember “polarized” training is based on cross-country skiing. In cycling, you spend a lot of time in that tempo/SST/threshold zone and the guy who coined the term even acknowledges that cyclists need to train there.
So don’t worry about it. Polarized training isn’t a new thing. Keep your easy/endurance days easy so your hard days can really be hard, whether threshold or VO2s or whatever. That’s all “polarized training” is.
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Periodiziation and polarized are different things. Periodization means you structure your training into blocks of various lengths. Polarized training is a way to decide how much intensity you do for a given volume.
Polarized training is one way to skin the cat, you trade frequency for difficulty: you have fewer hard days and more easy days, but hard days tend to be harder. I need to bring my A game to Monday (= Tuesday) morning polarized workout.
To my understanding, polarized training only applies to base and build phase, but not to the specialty phase. That is because your specialty phase is supposed to prepare you for efforts that you encounter in your events, and those need not look like what you’d prescribe during polarized training.
There are plenty of examples where a podium is occupied by three athletes who employed different training methodologies, including ones that included little or no race specific intensity or duration work.
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If anything it’s the opposite for most racers (not ultra athletes). Peak/Speciliazation should be more “polarized” than anything else because you’re either going really hard (anaerobic or VO2/MAP work) or you’re chilling.
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It’s both. I see TR as a toolkit that you use as you want. You can fully embrace it and just follow the plans. You can use your experience of what works for you to modify the plans. You can have a coach do your planning and prescribe you TR workouts. You can pick your own TR workouts and put your own plan together. You can skip the planning and just use TrainNow.
That depends on what you mean by polarized: if you just mean that you ought to reduce the time at intensity, then yes. Others have a different conception of polarized, though. Personally, I don’t find it helpful to think of the specialty phase in those terms, they are different ideas in my mind.
No, I still mean you should be going really hard or really easy, whereas in Base, you’ll do more “polarized gray zone” (which is nonsense) threshold/SST/tempo stuff.