Is there anymore feedback on the effectiveness of these plans?
I’m going into week 2 but have just seen the new SSB plans and they look good! I’m tempted to stick to the polarised MV because it gives more room to weight train i.e. on the Monday and then cycle on wed/thurs and sat/sun
Finished the 8 week Medium Volume plan last week and did a ramp test Today. Here are some notes. When referring to zones in the notes (Z1,Z2,Z3), I mean polarized zones.
Overall thoughts and results:
Differences between plan and execution, plus other confounding factors:
Thoughts about the different workouts:
in any case, those are my thoughts
Great feedback. Very helpfull for someone contemplating doing the POL plan
good job, it is really good plan for time crunched cyclist during the week, haven’t tested but went approximately from 270 to 290+ on 6week pol HV plan,race then straight into 2nd month of 8week hv pol plan, 1h14min at @290W+ outdoor Withington adapted plan,next race in 1 month.I really lacked those endurance rides in z2,and yes cooling is a problem even with fans , failed those 104% ftp from 3rd interval indoor.
How did the ramp test go? Did you get any gains with the plans?
I did the first 4 weeks of the 8 week mid volume build. I was added to the AT beta so then swapped to a different plan (nothing to do with the fact that the 2nd 4-weeks scared the hell out of me 
). I got an 8W or ~2% bump in my FTP.
BTW - I did notice that using AT if you let Plan Builder drop in a Build Phase you can subsequently change it to Polarised and the workouts do seem to be adapted. This isn’t officially supported so it may be that the progressions aren’t as intended. For the other plans standard progressions seem to be around 0.5 but for polarised around 1.0 so it may be that the adapatations are assuming that there is more than 2 intensity days a week and choosing lower progressions accordingly.
unfortunately i got sidelined with a bad saddle sore that kept me off the bike for structured training. i tried to come back too early and it flared up again. i ended up losing approx a month of structured training and i took the ramp test today to find myself down ~5% from when i last tested at the beginning of the polarized base block mid volume. pretty disappointing, but no one to blame but myself for not caring for the saddle sore early and proactively.
Not sure it is a functional work around, but someone mentioned hacking a POL plan but using Plan Builder to add a full plan. Then editing the individual phase from the calendar annotation, which allows you to change the precise plan applied. They were able to swap to a POL one in that case.
However, we don’t know if it will actually work with AT for Progression Levels & Adaptations at this time. Could be worth a test for anyone willing to play around.
It might work, but it almost certainly won’t work as intended. There wouldn’t have been enough POL data available to train the AT model.
I’ll bet if you start feeding AT “POL” data from a program the machine will either not know how to adapt your POL program or will try to convert you to SST/Threshold profile.
A fun speculation for Monday 
Which tool is that you’re using?
He is using https://intervals.icu/
Thought I’d post as I’ve still got bike stoke from completing my workout today. I did Hueco which is the last threshold ride in High Volume Polorised Base. Was dreading it and had to do it outside for motivation. Glad I exceeded my target, but 4X16mins at 104% is tough with only 3min recoveries. I had to extend some of the recoveries and on one interval I came across some road works, but hay ho. Pretty much took today as completing base, tomorrow is a chill endurance ride. Keen to get rest week done and see what the ramp test. I’ll update this page with some feedback notes on the plan, should anyone take anything from my ramblings!
Sorry if it has been answered, but I don’t really want to go through near 400 replies 
Is it feasible to continuously cycle through the 6 or 8 wk plans? If not, how would you go about building on these plans, or is it just the FTP gain that builds them? I.e. 250w for 6wk plan, re test at 270w, do that for 6 weeks then retest at 310w etc, etc, etc.
i.e. never moving into “build” or “specialty” phases?
The information I have heard about polarised training is that it typically forgoes any sort of build or specialty phase and just gets more polarised towards the A race. For the events I am doing, they all rely on 3+ hour power, so I don’t care so much for build or specialty phase.
I’m not sure how TR would answer, but in the description the 6-week plan is called “base” and the 8-week plan is called “build”. I’m guessing you could just keep cycling (pun intended!) between them right up to your event. You might want to modify the last couple weeks to give more of a taper.
I have also seen someone recommend doing them as base/build and then picking the specialty that fits your event.
Well don’t I look the fool. For however many times I’ve looked at the plan, the “base” and “build” parts of the blurb never stood out to me!
I think the 8 week would be more akin to what I want to achieve so I’ll likely stick to that for a while, or just flip flop between them depending on results.
Thanks.
Cool plans and workouts. I wish I had more time right now to train but I’ve been workng a lot now
To follow up on this: I’ve done both the base and build POL plans and am about to take a ramp test next week before diving back into base. I’ve used plan builder and then manually changed sweet spot to polarized.
AT has worked on the POL plans but man it’s incredibly difficult. I’m thinking it’s all going to crash and burn after I update my FTP.
Just did 4x16 at 110% of threshold so I know my threshold is way off. I’ll follow up with how it adapts after an FTP increase.
OK, here’s my thoughts on the Polarised Plans. They just happened to come along before I finished my last Plan Builder assigned progression. I was starting to get a little jaded with that if truth be told, after all I’d been doing some variation of Low Volume Sweet Spot Base and various Build plans since October 2019 (all hail the Covid lockdowns!) so something new would be of help.
I went with the Mid Volume plans, six week then eight week. The reason for “stepping up” from LV wasn’t so much that I was fitter (I was) but that my LV plans invariably included longer weekend rides so I was really swapping LV + unstructured/un-associated rides with an endurance ride associated with a workout.
I set all workouts to be outdoors. I began the plans in the first week of April just as the weather here in the UK was becoming drier if not warmer - we’ve had one of the coldest springs in recent years. This raised its own problems in that I live in a hilly area, even the “flat” roads are anything but, “rolling” would be a better description. Not a problem with the endurance workouts but a bit of Strava detective work, i.e. looking at my times on various potential hills and I reckoned I could map workouts onto some of those. It’s surprising just how far you can go, even uphill, in sixteen minutes! Also the hills aren’t a steady grade, the one I chose for threshold intervals had 150m @ 20%, 200m @ 10%, 100m @25%, 800m @ 5%, etc. Pacing is a nightmare!
I haven’t done an FTP test in a while - I don’t seem to get on with the Ramp Test - but I have a good idea of how various workouts should feel and, yes, let’s be honest, I’d probably stagnated. The eFTP from intervals.icu was 5W lower than that obtained via one of the few good Ramp Tests I’ve done: 267W vs 272W. (When I started on TR back in Oct 2019, my FTP was 244W) Because of this I’ll use eFTP as a proxy since there were updates during the plans and it’s the one figure I have to compare over the period plus it’s always been within 5W of the TR figure.
One last point: I signed up for AT shortly after the announcement but only got added to the Closed Beta when I was one week into the eight week build plan. Since I’d added the plans manually rather than doing the use Plan Builder then swap out the plans method I decided to keep on with the Polarised Plan and ignore AT for the duration. I knew I wouldn’t get any adaptations but I wasn’t looking at going along that road at this time.
I found the endurance workouts very easy, in fact the hardest part was keeping the power down, this was in part due to the aforementioned rolling roads - keeping to 70% of FTP is rather tricky when you are faced with a 16% grade! Most of the time I just went for a ride and didn’t bother about the duration so a 2hr workout often ended up as a four hour ride. I often did these on my mountain bike which doesn’t have a power meter so I went by HR instead - I’ve a good idea of what pace/HR to do for 70% and Strava’s estimated power isn’t far off.
The threshold and VO2max workouts meant hill work. The first threshold workout, San Pedro, called for eight minute efforts - easy enough. My PB on the segment I used for the 16min threshold was 13;30 so slightly short of the duration required but pacing and using the next bit of road meant I was never much more than a minute short. The plan called for two repeats, then three the next week and four the week after that. After the last of these Intervals.icu bumped my eFTP to 272W, i.e. the same as from the Ramp Test. Here’s my notes from that workout (Bartlett Peak):
Pretty consistent with times and power on each lap/climb. A slight decline over the first three then a bigger drop to the fourth one. I think a fifth would have been really hard work so just right for where I’m at. The power levels were actually: 105%, 106%, 105%, 103%, so pushing into the bottom of VO2max territory - this is born out in intervals.icu which shows 24mins in that zone, so probably the intervals were really a set of over-unders. Looking at the power trace, they do look very over-under in nature, albeit with the overs at 117% and the unders at 90%, obviously dictated by the gradients and ramps of the climb.
VO2max is one of my weak points on the trainer - I possibly move the bike a lot and the fixed nature of the trainer means I can’t do that. Outside I’m a bit freer. My chosen hill for these varied between flat and maybe 5% but long enough that I could choose “flat then climb” or “climb then flat”. Again these worked well and I hit or exceeded the power targets repeatedly and consistently though 12 efforts over the same bit of road do tire somewhat!
I didn’t see any further improvements during the Base phase and the start of the Build phase was delayed slightly by a four day bikepacking trip in the south of England.
Build.
There’s a few common workouts in Base and Build and one of these, Mount Grant, saw my next increase in eFTP to 276W. The week after this saw a significant rise in eFTP to 291W. Here’s my ride notes:
“Got an email from intervals.icu that my eFTP had risen to 291W because of this ride! It could well be right, my average power for the four climbs was 316W, 294W, 294W & 302W. The middle two definitely felt repeatable, with an FTP of 272W they would be at 108% whereas with a 291W they are at 101% - much more likely. Also I shouldn’t be able to ride for 15mins at 116% as with the first interval, again with a 291W FTP that drops to 108%.”
There haven’t been any further improvements. The two plans though designated Base and Build are pretty much of a muchness so there’s not a lot to say about Build that hasn’t already been said about Base.
Overall the plans fitted in with work and the weather surprisingly well. I felt that targeting just two hard workouts a week was much easier than the three called for in the Sweet Spot LV plans and I could really focus on them.
One thing I have noticed: I suffer from cramps quite a lot but following the Polarised Plans I’ve been getting much fewer attacks. Not sure if it’s entirely related or just coincidence.
I’ve not manually bumped my FTP within TR but workouts on my latest plan do feel “easy” - I could have done another couple of sets of Ritter with no problem and Tunnabora’s Sweet Spot could have been twice as long without worrying me.
In conclusion. Do they work? A qualified yes from me. It’s a bit hard to tell if the improvements were because of the plans themselves or just that I needed a change. Certainly for summer they make a lot of sense with only short sessions of hard work with the rest of the time really being “just riding”.
Did you increase the amount of hours you ride or/and your TSS per week when using the polarised plans compared with the year before?
Daily TSS was about 9 higher from the year before. However this year I’ve done three big weekend bikepacking trips which bump things up quite a bit so without those I’d reckon TSS would have been quite similar.
Hours/km ridden is very variable but given that the equivalent period last year the UK was in full lockdown so most of my outdoor rides were very local - I didn’t go more than 10km from the house for nearly two months - they are two awkward years to compare. Also I broke my collarbone in Jan 2020 and only got the all clear ten days before lockdown started so there was a low rolling base there.
Typically I’ve been riding 10,000km a year, in 2020 I rode 4,000km, this year I’m just short of that and will probably end up doing around 7,000km.
