Might want to consider approaching it from another direction… pick a TrainerRoad low volume plan and add 3 days of z2 riding. Or try the Stoggle/Sperlich 9-week intervention if you have a lot of time.
My personal opinion is that a polarized approach makes the most sense as a build block or two. For base I’m definitely a strong responder to sweet spot work plus long z2/tempo rides on the weekends (pyramidal distribution).
Stoggl/Sperlich 9-week intervention:
2 loading weeks that look like this:
That is a minimum of 10 hours a week, and as high as 14 hours a week of Wed/Sat are 240-min low-intensity sessions.
I think even with no work to interrupt the day, I’ll pass on 4 hours on the turbo on a Wednesday!
There were plans for longer outdoor rides on Sundays, but they might not happen either…
I’ve swapped it up a bit, added in some sweet spot etc…it’s probably ‘pyramidal’ now but I have more faith I’ll be able to make good progress - we’ll see in a few months!
only thing i would say is that wednesday ride might be too long for someone who is just starting out with this and probably doesn’t have that great of low-end aerobic fitness (what we all call "base’ for shorthand). They might quickly work up to it, but at first be tired and have it impact the quality of the hard session the next day. I’d think the guide for how long to go–and apologies that this is somewhat circular–is, as long as you can without being too tired to really burn some matches the next day.
yup, I agree. A rule of thumb is to add 5-10% a week, so if you are starting at 6 hours and target 6.5 hours next week, and 7 hours the week after that, etc, etc. Don’t be afraid of trial and error. Be conservative. Listen to your body. Without enough “base” in my legs/body the day after a hard vo2max workout I’ve done 90 trainer minutes of zone1 (45% of FTP) and it was too much! Know thyself if you are going to coach yourself.
You can buy an SMO2 monitor from Moxy or similar that serves as a proxy for lactate. I picked up the old model used on Ebay and I am building up data points vs. Power output and HR. I probably should do a couple of lactate tests to correlate SMO2 with that + power as well.
Reviving this as I have a wee questions.
I am looking to purchase a lactate analyser myself, namely the lactate pro.
Does anyone know where this best purchased in europe without spending a fortune? Thanks in advance.
Curious to know how you went with this approach @alexgold123? 2 VO2 sessions, 1 SS session and a few Endurance sessions. Did you track the results with this approach by any chance?
Had to check back on calendar…it led to my best ever FTP test around a month in, then I got a crippling back/hip injury that I worked through, but was struggling*****. FTP test another month later I barely made it past 10 minutes of the Kollie Moore test so manually dropped my FTP to basically where I started, then swapped to SSBHV instead.
My conclusion was…too hard. If I were doing it again along similar lines I’d just do one ‘hard’ session per week, doing the 5x5 / 4x6 type workout and over/unders in the same week just fried me, I rarely made it through the whole O/U workout. I’m still undecided if the long VO2 work is better for me or if I’d be better with the short/short Rattlesnake-like workouts. As it is I’m on General Build Low Volume now and just trying to do as much ‘zone 1’ on top of that as I can.
Hope that helps although I can’t imagine it will much, all I really learnt was I can’t handle too much intensity! 
*****I highly correlate this with doing too much too hard on the bike, rather than a random occurence.
Thanks heaps for your feedback @alexgold123! Always good to hear others experiences with different training methods. I hope your back and hip are back to full form.
I read that first line and I was like wowee he’s smashed it and got great results! Then I read on and quickly realised that perhaps the load of 2 x VO2 and 1 x SS Over/Under session + 2 Endurance sessions a week is too much. It would also be tough to recover during the week? You’d almost have to go:
Endurance session
Rest day
VO2 session
Endurance session
VO2 session
Endurance session
Sweet spot over/under session
Even with that you’d have to have super low intensity endurance sessions to be able to get the body up for the harder session the next day. And fueling? Gosh, you’d have to eat a whole supermarket worth of food each week.
Maybe 1 VO2 and 1 SS coupled with 3-4 Zone 1 Endurance rides is much more manageable.
I wonder why it led to the best ever FTP result? Obviously this came at the expense of an injury in the process like you mention, but I’m really curious as to the physiology of what happened to result in that increase.
Perhaps raising your VO2 ceiling and then coupling that with mitochondrial biogenesis through the endurance rides as well as becoming more efficient at processing lactate in the over/unders = bigger FTP result?
Yeah it was tough, the week was:
Mon: Off
Tue: Long VO2 (example - Red Lake +8)
Wed: 90-120 minutes Zone 1
Thur: Over Unders (4x 9,10,11,12 minutes progression)
Friday: 45-60 minutes Zone 1
Saturday: 2 hours Sweet Spot (example - Tray Mountain +3
Sunday: Long Ride - at least 2 hours, up to 3 on the trainer and longer outside.
I think the best ever test result was from doing consistent VO2 work, and the resulting big/short term bump that gives. I’d also just come off SSB2 Mid Volume, which I’d been adding loads of Zone 1 work too so I think I had a good base to push the ceiling with the VO2 work. I know comparing how I felt then to now, I was more ‘durable’ and didn’t fade later in workouts, even the longer ones.
You have to wonder how so many amateur racers regularly do 4-5 hard days and 15+ hours per week…maybe they’re all on the sauce?!?
Not sure where to post this so it’s going here.
Can someone give me an explanation around intensity distribution in a polarized model as it relates to an annual training plan? A common theme from polarized proponets is that they all favor it to a sweet spot or threshold based approach. However, I haven’t heard anyone talk about how they approach an entire annual training plan with regards to polarized training.
Example: https://www.wattkg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/The-Polarized-Training-Plan-Structure-1.5.pdf
9-week Polarized plan. Cool, what are you (looking at the POL folks) doing the other 40+ weeks of a season?
Should we be doing 30/15’s and 4x8’s with the rest Z1 (Seiler) year-round? If not, for those who are pro-Polarized, show me how an entire season looks. Are you ever doing sweet spot work? If so, when.
This is something I wish those polarized folks would talk more about.
What I do:
Determine tempo intensity cap primarily based on lactate (1.5 - 2.0 mmol/L). Just do a little non-maximal step test to get that intensity (about 2-3 times per year). I get HR and power from that assessment because obviously I can’t (and don’t need to) use lactate on the road. My FTP is fairly unchanged over periods of weeks and months so no reason to specifically test that very often. Also, no reason to use lactate to measure that. Use one of the longer duration FTP tests, but not the full hour.
HR at or near 2mmol/L minus 10bpm is Tempo range
HR at or near 2mmol/L minus 20bpm is bottom of Endurance
(for example, if my 2 mmol/L is 135bpm, I work Tempo intervals or entire sessions starting at 125bpm and watch it gradually move up to 135bpm if the interval is long enough. If it doesn’t move up (because fitness or only 60min interval, for example), I know I can handle more. Occasionally I’m in upper 130s because any more precision than that is not really necessary)
This is key: everything I just described becomes my Zone 1 (Seiler). Tempo + Endurance.
Similar to what you would do for SST or Threshold, I gradually progress the TiZ for Tempo. I do multiple consecutive days until muscle soreness tells me: you need to work endurance or full rest day (see schedule below).
From time to time, I will do a max 3min or 5min effort to see if it has changed. When it goes up, awesome, tempo + endurance can drive top-end. Great, I feel smug. If it goes down, I do 2-3 weeks of slamming intervals, then a rest week. Then back to tempo + endurance. If my power at the top of tempo starts to approach my FTP, I will slam intervals at that time too (has only happened twice in 18 months, but those were massive breakthroughs).
If I have an event coming up (this is hypothetical since events for me didn’t come up this year), I will do 2-3 weeks of peaking. Peaking = slamming intervals + taper.
Sun - Endurance (longish)
Mon - Rest
Tues - Tempo
Wed - Tempo
Thurs - Tempo
Fri - Rest
Saturday - Long Ride (mostly Endurance, but Tempo creeps in)
Any of those weekday rides could go from Tempo to Endurance based on muscular fatigue. You can call that “Fatigue Dependent” if you were trying to sell a training plan. The fitter I become, the fewer of those tempo days I can do consecutively. Those are often 2 hr sessions (2 x 45mins tempo). If HR doesn’t go over Tempo cap, muscles feel ok, why stop? Do 1 x 90min or the whole session.
Caveats:
Slamming intervals (2-3 weeks)
When I need to work intervals (peaking or just to bump 3-5min power back up), I get a bit more experimental, but still limit it to 2 sessions per week. I don’t do any tempo during that time. I consider TR SST intensity to be a threshold interval session, and I’m not afraid to do it. Classic VO2max sessions as well. I used Tues and Sat for interval sessions, and “protect them” with Endurance all other days. I shorten my Long Ride. I do not religiously stick to Seilers lab intervals because A) I like to mix it up, and B) even he doesn’t stick to his lab intervals, it was a study, not a training plan.
Other than when peaking or a 2-3week diversion to bump 3-5min power back up, I’m really never not doing base. So I don’t think of it as base. It’s just fitness. I don’t set a certain date for when to switch over to intensity. The numbers drive that. If I still raced, I would get plenty of intensity in a race when the time comes.
Also, if you want to see how Seiler himself implements some of his own ideas (not sure how useful that is, but if nothing else it will hopefully head-off any “tempo is gray area” misunderstandings), he interviews his daughter on youtube. You can scrub through the videos and see how he handles an annual cycle. There are periods of time when it’s 100% / 0. But that doesn’t mean you’re dilly-dallying around in Coggan Zone 2.
So am I correct then that your Endurance zone is from 115 to 125 then?
@carytb Yes. On trainer It can be more targeted/narrow. 120bpm 
On the road I tend to use the whole range, and will even get up into 130s on hills.
This is exactly what I’ve evolved my training plan to look like. You need a decent idea your power and HR for each zone. Use RPE, too as a guide. I don’t do rest weeks but I’m disciplined enough to back off when necessary.
@Berggeiss Forgot the RPE part. Good call. For me that’s basically just being honest with myself about muscular fatigue, which is what you want the limiter to be in this type of training.
I too rarely need rest weeks (except those diversions into intensity). I’ve yet to need two consecutive days off. A few endurance days combined with a single full rest day, and I’m ready to rock.
@anthonylane FWIW, and I don’t think it’s worth much, I looked up my distro. I’m at about 89% | 11%. (11% includes both Zone 2 + Zone 3) over the last 12 months.
Seiler himself is also just an amateur out to have fun. AFAIK, he is not even competing. His research is on elites that have all the time and resources in the world to train.