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While adaptations can and do happen to POL plan workouts, they are not fully supported or guaranteed to maintain the POL objective at this time. Depending on when you actually added your plan to the calendar, you may have just missed the “start point” where they began to support plans added manually to the calendar. That might explain your issue, but emailing support@trainerroad.com might be best.
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This can be highly personal, but depending on your recent experience with Endurance workouts, it’s very possible to experience notable fatigue and even DOMS in some cases. Assuming you did this inside, the potentially steady load from the trainer can lead to an overall experience for your body that is impactful.
This is really a coaching question. Think about it from two perspectives:
- upper and lower bounds of low-intensity (the article you linked) in order to have some positive or maintenance impact on endurance
- fatigue and avoiding an impact on future sessions
Without more info its hard to comment, and even then the forum doesn’t have a lot of experienced coaches dropping in and commenting. Thinking out loud (I’m not a coach), you might try rearranging your week and putting the 3 hour ride on a different day might resolve the issue. Or you may find reducing that ride to 2 hours helps. Or you may go into a lab and find the rough estimates in that article are too high, for you personally, and you can satisfy both bullet points above by dropping to 55% FTP.
I continue with my own plan. It turns out that 4 minutes at 110% FTP is quite hard. During the first interval I was trying to decide what my failure* survey excuse was going to be. Of course the fact that the rests in my custom workout were long (12 minutes) meant the workout as a whole was fine and I completed all the intervals.
Next Tuesday it’s 112% but otherwise the same. And the Tuesday after, 112% but 6 intervals instead of 4, so much less rest. I’m expecting that to be tough even if I do progress over the next couple of weeks.
(*) I recorded all-out on my Friday vo2, picked sickness, and then had the weekend off.
Been looking at these plans and have a question about it’s effectiveness when cutting up the individual workouts. I can do the 7/8ish hours in total required for the mid volume, but 2 hour sessions during the week is a bit much. 60/75min is usually fine. Longer rides in the weekend is less of a problem. How much would it hurt the plan if I keep the weekdays ride to something like 75mins but perhaps do 2 of these (thu +wed) instead of the one, 2 hour ride? How would just changing up the days affect the plan? Doing the, shorter, high intensity workouts during the week and the endurance back to back in the weekend.
I’m far from any kind of specialist, but from what i’ve been reading, listening to with seiler and other polarized proponent, if you’re doing easy rides you want to have that longer block rather than several shorter blocks. Although riding on the trainer will push more adaptations than say riding outside (as there is less coasting, more consistency in your zones, etc) riding 2x1.25 hours won’t equate to the same adaptations as riding 1x 2hour, as the fatigue you get from 2 hours won’t be replicated.
2x1.25 is still better than nothing for sure, but it won’t get you the same expected result. In the end do what you’re able to fit in your week while trying to stick as much as possible to the suggested workouts.
Obviously if we go according to weekly Time in Zone, you’d be nailing it. But say as an example, after 1.25 hours you might not get HR drift while at 2 hours you might get some. Getting used to that might make it so your body only starts driting at the 2.5-hour mark, or later for the same power level/effort.
You get the gist.
- a random cyclists who loves to geek out about training
I had a similar question. I have the low and mid volume plans open and this week started manually adjusting my plan to be a hybrid of the two. Today was the first day – the Vo2 workouts look really different than other plans (longer time at lower %, with long breaks vs. 30/30 on/offs). Then I am using the 1 hour endurance rides of the LV version, and using the weekend MV threshold and endurance workouts, which I will do outside as often as possible - tacking on 30-90 minutes to the Sunday rides.
Looking forward to giving it a try and to see what happens.
It looks like the plans have changed since I last looked. After drinking a lot of Seilers and Fast Talk Labs Kool-Aide, the updated plans looks much better.
I did both the 6 week and 8 week plans shortly after they were released. Looking at the Mid-Volume plans that I did the main changes seem to be in the VO2max workouts, the threshold workouts are almost the same with just one or two swapped out.
I quite liked them, suited me at the time.
How can i use the planconfigurator (with Event at the very end) together with polarized plans?
The plan configurator gives just sweet spot trainings, and these are pretty high stress for the body if i choose 5 or 6 times the week…
Since the polarised plans are experimental they aren’t part of the Plan Builder offerings when you create a plan. However you can swap them in afterwards. This sequence works on the desktop calendar, no idea about mobile.
Create a plan as per normal.
Add it to your calendar
In your calendar find the individual blocks - “Base 2” etc.
Click on the “Base 2” or whatever, this opens a dialog box
At the top of the right hand pane of the dialog is the actual name of the plan with a little down arrow to the right.
Click on that arrow and you will have the option to swap it for the Polarised plan.
Note you can only choose the 6wk polarised plans when changing Base and the 8wk ones when changing Build. There’s no Polarised option for Speciality, doesn’t make sense in that instance.
Thats great and working flawless 
You are the man !
Why does polarized not make sense for speciality btw?
Base and Build are about pushing your fitness, Speciality is about fine tuning that fitness for your event so tends to be slightly lower TSS along with a taper leading to your event.
No, I haven’t. I do think the 75% formula is suspect. I am not targeting any events that require sustained threshold efforts so that’s not such a big deal for me (focus for 2022 will be events from 200km-600km distance). I’ll be adding in SS work in January which will perhaps be enlightening in terms of where I am on longer events.
@IvyAudrain Any update when polarized plans will come out of beta and when AT will fully support polarized plans? Not sure if those are separate efforts or one in the same.
AT currently works with the POL plans. Steps to make it happen:
- Create a plan with Plan Builder and add it to your calendar.
- In the calendar, select the Base or Build icon at the start of those blocks.
- In the pop up window, select the drop down menu where you can change the block and choose the corresponding Polarized block.
- Initiate POL AT!
I’m doing this myself at the moment and it is working just fine.
Works fine for me too 
Did Saddle Mountain this morning, classed it as “Moderate” and got an adaptation for a workout later in the VO2max series.
While those methods do work, TR has stated several times that AT is not guaranteed to offer adaptations that will follow the POL direction.
This is essentially a two part system, where getting it to the calendar is only the first step.
All the adaptations I’ve been given (there have been many) have been workouts only within the TR POL model. As far as I can see it is working pretty smoothly. The only hiccup seems to be in the length of the endurance workouts AT gives. I have contacted support regarding this. Otherwise, all workouts given are within the 2, 4, 8, or 16 minute POL model.
That’s great to hear, but I just wanted to state that TR has said it may not follow that example in all cases.