Hard days in polarized training plans will still remain very hard. Replacing a short VO2max interval with a longer one at lower intensity isn’t going to make it any easier IMHO.
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How do you interpret what hard days are supposed to be like? My post was in response to @sproven’s post where he was writing he was fatigued. Perhaps I misunderstood him as to why he wanted to go to longer, lower % of FTP intervals, but I inferred that it was that the current sessions are too hard. Perhaps I misunderstood him.
(For the record, I think your suggestion to replace 2 minutes at 120 % with 10 minutes at 106 % will make the workout much harder … because you’ll have to repeat that 6+ times. 
)
I just did a 2 hour endurance ride and its a custom workout (synced from TrainingPeaks). The PL is 5.3 and aligns with TR workouts like Amadeo.
Hmm, but the 90 minute custom workout has an endurance PL of 4.5 and looks more like Andrews (PL 5.4) or Phoenix -3 (PL 5.5).
so yeah, a bit of hit or miss on those two custom workout’s PLs mapping to TR workouts.
Or not according to Seiler’s recent discussiin on FastTalk podcast. Hard days are just intensity days - threshold or above.
As far as I understand, polarized training is based on the same principles of other methods of periodized training, progressive overload followed by rest rest, just with a different intensity distribution.
That means successive Z1/3 rides become longer and Z3/3 will also become more difficult by e. g. making intervals longer (say, by doing 2 x 16 minutes at FTP rather than 4 x 8 minutes) or doing more of them (9 x 2 minutes at 120 % FTP rather than 6). How quickly you should ramp up the difficulty depends on the individual. If you set your FTP and ramp correctly, I reckon this will be hard.
In my very limited experience with polarized training, I can definitely feel that the difficulty of the workouts is polarized, too: I find long Z1/3 workouts very easy to do (if I have the time for them …), but at least TR’s flavor has a more pronounced ramp than the other TR training plans I have done so far. Up until now they have been doable, but better-bring-your-A-game-this-morning doable.
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. I’d say they are slightly below to right around my ventilatory threshold 1. Is that the default with polarized plans? Or should I up the ante to bring it in line with my progression levels?
Ok, first of all I blame the z2 days last week for my excess fatigue… That may be incorrect, but that’s my interpretation.
The intention is to drop the intensity of the z2 days a bit, and maintain the relative difficulty of the VO2 work. Every vo2 interval has been 2 minutes for a while now. I think I should mix in longer intervals, perhaps up to 4 minutes. To maintain a comparable training load these have to be lower %FTP.
I did workout such as Lamont earlier in the season. I moved away from those because at 106% FTP without a direct measurement of LT2, how do I really know I’m above it? I’d probably be looking for intervals around 110% to be sure I’m definitely in the target zone.
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Yeah, that’s the tricky thing with these slightly above FTP intervals. Even if you have a correct figure when you start a block, your training plan may actually work and your FTP increases over time
You’d also have to suffer much longer, and I think ultimately, if the purpose is to push you to the VO2max limit, you know the point where you start panting and count seconds rather than minutes, then 120 % seems like the better way to go.
Take a workout, clone it, make no changes, publish it:
Whether this is an issue with the WC app or the calculation of PLs for any new workout (do they need people to ride workouts before they can form a more accurate view?). Or maybe there’s some IP protection going on here i.e. the secret algorithm is not used for custom workouts. Whatever the reason, the lack of reproducibility of levels calculations harms the usability of the product.
There are big gaps in the workout library in terms of duration vs level. For instance, at 1:45 duration z2, there is no workout between Axis (2.0) and Virginia (5.3) - I’m ignoring Perkins -2 as that goes up to 80% FTP. At 2h duration there are plenty options. I’m using TSS and IF alone to decide what to do in z2 as a result, because these are reproducible (and also they work for outside rides).
Manually filling the holes would be a lot of work but a program could generate workouts to fill the gaps. A lot of the POL VO2 workouts look like they’re done this way already. You just need to read the “goals” section where it’s a cut and paste of the workout description. And the fact that there are 1:15 workouts with a 27 minute 50% cool down. It looks exactly like you’d expect: “computer, generate me a range of vo2 workouts which are 75 minutes long at various levels”. Computer goes ok, here’s a workout with 6x2m:3r, that takes us to 0:48, 75-48 = 27, job done.
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Thanks, and I just did this experiment on three 2-hour TR workouts by creating a copy using WorkoutCreator:
| TR Workout | PL of TR workout | PL of WC Copy |
|---|---|---|
| Boarstone -1 | 5.0 | 4.3 |
| Amadeo | 5.3 | 5.2 |
| Lachat | 5.6 | 5.6 |
Interesting how TR’s algorithm knocks down the PL of ‘Boarstone -1 Copy’ 
Here they are:
And my FasCat 2-hour endurance:
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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.
whatever you do, don’t let the aerobic endurance work impact your hard days. Matt Fitzgerald gives some tips for low intensity training here:
and using those guidelines I worked thru an example here:
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.
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I dunno, look at this:
vs
The only difference (ignoring workout notes) is warmup
- 4-min at 50% (both)
- 4-min at 70% (Round Bald -1) vs 72% (Seneca Rocks)
- 3-min at 90% (Round Bald -1) vs 96% (Seneca Rocks)
EDIT BEGIN (due to correction below):
and working sets:
- 5-min recovery at 40% (Round Bald -1) and 50% (Seneca Rocks)
which if you start studying things like difference in recovery intervals during sweet spot, then IMHO you’ve lost track of the story. Sweet spot progression is about increasing the duration of work intervals, and reducing the duration of rest intervals.
EDIT END
which causes PL to go from 3.5 to 3.8, which is debatable that such a distinction is even necessary given the purpose of the warm ups, cool downs, and main work sets. But it is slightly ‘harder’ so that goes back to my point that PLs are rating workout difficulty and that sometimes doesn’t always support the 0.3-0.7 per week progression concept - you can’t convince me that a 0.3 progression ramp target is satisfied by going from Round Bald -1 last week to Seneca Rocks this week.
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Thanks. Corrected above, along with commentary that for sweet spot I’d claim anyone wanting to build a case for 40% vs 50% recovery intervals has lost sight of the goal of progressing sweet spot work - increasing work interval duration and decreasing rest interval duration. Honestly I don’t think the recovery interval % FTP matters, personally I’d claim those % are functionally equivalent and would be surprised if there is a meta-review (not a single paper) claiming otherwise. In fact making those distinctions manually feels like a colossal waste of TR time, like recreating outdoor workouts rather than overhauling the library so inside/outside workouts are equivalent.
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I thought tonight’s workout felt harder than expected. After I got off the bike I realised I’d left the window closed. That’ll do it.
I think the %FTP for the recovery could make a difference, but below a certain level / % of FTP, the difference goes away.
Recovery at 60% vs. 50% could make a difference, but 45% vs. 35%? That feels like zero difference.
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Yeah, just trying to find out what polarized actually means is kinda tricky as a layperson. I have the feeling that Coach Frank’s statement that likely coaches are ahead of the research is true. The thing that made me skeptical about how some people presented it as was that it was a panacea.
Having done a bit more than half a block, I think there is utility for a polarized block in my training, because for right now, the pre-season it feels like a very good match: more focus on endurance with a bit of intensity mixed in seems like a sensible start to a new training block. I would probably exchange some of the workouts next time: the intensity workouts feel very robotic and clinical as they alternate between 50 % flat and 100 % or 120 % intensity. But that’s an implementation issue.
Thanks a bunch for the explainer, the links and your “non-coach” thoughts. In my case (RHR = 47 bpm, HRmax = 178 bpm) that translates to 106 bpm and 121 bpm. When I am well-trained, I recover back to around 125 bpm between intervals (provided I have at least 2 minutes of rest in between). Now it is more like 135 bpm. That seems to fit nicely in between 77–81 % of HRmax (137–144 bpm) and the lower threshold.
According to this reasoning, the intensity of the endurance workouts seems to be just right. (Of course, I can go close to 81 % during high cadence drills at 120–125 rpm and go a little lower during low cadence drills.)
Just sharing some personal anecdata here, 50 % FTP during recovery feels harder to me and increases my RPE. Some VO2max workouts have 3 x 3 x 3 blocks or so where in between the three blocks your recovery interval is longer but at a higher %age of FTP. I hate-love those. But I am not sure there is a physiological difference, which I think was your point.
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But isn’t a mental difference still a difference? In the survey after a failed workout, one of the options you can select is “mental” or “mindset” or something isn’t it? So if there are more than just physiological reasons why you can fail a TR workout, shouldn’t there be more than just physiological reasons why one workout is harder than another one (from a PL perspective)?
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Agreed, that was my point, too 
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Ah, clearly misread your post…sorry!
In that case I agree with you 
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