🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 Polarized Training Plans Are Here! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

[bbarrera]

@OreoCookie

As far as I understand, polarized training is based on the same principles of other methods of periodized training

Remember how ‘polarized’ became a thing… Seiler looked at the training intensity distribution from athletes in a bunch of different sports (XC skiing, rowing, running, cycling). And then using a simplified 3 zone classification scheme declared coaches were having athletes train ‘polarized’ (almost no z2 time) which for cycling wasn’t true they were training pyramidal (more time in z2 than z3). And then he went on podcasts and said cyclists were training too hard in z2 and y’all don’t have any control over intensity so simplify and train polarized. Then he got backlash and now the story has evolved and I lost interest a longtime ago and stopped paying attention to most of the things he said. IMHO better to ask a coach than an exercise physiologist.

@OreoCookie

Just a quick question since you have experience with polarized plans: I find the endurance workouts in the vanilla polarized plan very, very easy. It seems TR wants me to stay in low Z2/7.

whatever you do, don’t let the aerobic endurance work impact your hard days. Matt Fitzgerald gives some tips for low intensity training here:

Race Faster With Low-Intensity (Zone 2) Training

and using those guidelines I worked thru an example here:

Endurance workouts, heart rate and progression levels

Going to side step the progression level question, although I agree with the comment above. The TR crew tends to focus on intensity, and so for low-intensity endurance base work one article that I’ll bring up is this one: which makes the case that an average trained athlete should stay above 45% vo2 reserve, which is roughly 68% HRmax. 190 * .68 = 129bpm So if you are trained and fall into that average then stay above 129bpm. So thats the bottom and what’s the upper boundary for low-inte…

With respect to the 45% VO2max reserve, a rough estimate is to use your cycling HRmax and resting HR:

• (HRmax - RHR) x .45 + RHR

Example: Cycling HRmax of 175bpm, a RHR of 60bpm. Rough estimate of 45% VO2max = (115*.45+60) = 112bpm. Using this rough estimate sets a guideline of not dropping below 112bpm during low-intensity training. And Matt’s other guideline was 68% HRmax = 119bpm. Looking at those two estimates, without any lab data, personally I would set floor for general (not day before hard workout) low-intensity training at 120bpm. Also, looking at TR 8-week High Volume polarized, I’d also change the Thursday workout to 30-45 minutes and possibly drop floor to 115bpm depending on how I felt or responded to last week’s hard Friday training.

Those are my “I’m not a coach” thoughts.

My coach has me progressively doing zone2 workouts, progressing both duration and intensity. Its definitely pyramidal by “my” polarized HR zones, for example last year’s base:

is not polarized. But those HR zones aren’t based on lab data, although I have good ‘all-day’ data on 100+ mile rides lasting 5.5-16 hours, and used that as the basis for my polarized-z1 HR.