Polarized Training vs. Sweet Spot (Dylan Johnson video)

I’m pretty sure the training the pros do at “zone 2” as instructed by ISM is right at and around LT1, are done as intervals as a part of an overall high volume program. That is the impression I got from his TTS interview.

One thing to also take notice from the article tables is the raw CHO numbers. The lightly trained athletes at 165 watts were using as much cho as the pros at 240 watts. Also pretty telling was that the CHO oxidation rate at 300 watts for the lightly trained athletes was nearly identical to the CHO oxidation rate of the pros at 396 watts. So a novice riding at medio is still burning a decent amount of carbs, further stimulating those glycolytic pathways.

Improving fatmax comes through a combination of factors. I had long suspected that being in a calorie deficit has more benefits to an endurance athlete than just losing weight, as it also puts the body in to a system where fats are utilized more than CHO, when compared to equal energy balance or positive energy balance. This is also in the article as well, and was bringing back memories of general biochem from 25 years ago. CHO ingestion/utilization is going to have the major impact on fat oxidation. Intensities where CHO is necessary will blunt fat oxidation during exercise, and ideally longer distance athletes would favor fat over CHO. Lactate is also a signaling molecule, and higher lactate levels shut down beta oxidation and downregulate the other steps necessary for fat oxidation.

I think the influence on medio work, say compared to just doing a high volume is minimal. And people always seem to forget that you don’t need to do 20 hours to stimulate adaptions, you just need to do more work than before. If one is not very fit, that’s usually the first thing they should be attempting, how to fit in the time. The major contributing factors to success in endurance sport is volume and consistency. There are lots of threads on this site talking about failing workouts, which can lead to a huge negative feedback loop of repeated failed workouts if one isn’t careful and ego gets in the way.

I also think the benefits of training more at a lower intensity has had some initial unintended consequences, as people used to do it for necessity, but in the end, there definitely seems to be a key benefit in being able to do a large amount of work without overloading on stress as the Norwegians have been shifting to less zone 2 and more zone 1 for their endurance work.

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Ok so you’ve already built up to it. Awesome.

Or just call it TheBanditDistribution, because…well, I already went on and on about that earlier. You’re doing mostly low intensity by virtue of high(ish) volume. There, I just summarized most of Seiler’s presentations. (kidding…not kidding)

I agree. You know what they say about things that ain’t broke :smiley:

This is often how I get my intensity as well, at least during the warm season, if I don’t have an event. But just the one session that week (but I’m old, like I said).

Tues would be my “tempo” maintenance if I go hard on Saturday. In this case tempo just means at or just slightly above AeT. I don’t base it off of FTP, but that’s a different thread/story. Good high end aerobic work that leaves me good for endurance on Wed, Thurs. If I’m a bit tired, I may just do endurance or “intervalize” it instead of steady low tempo the whole ride. If I were going to change anything about my training based on this thread and the related ones, I would perhaps start riding this right at AeT. But right at LT1/AeT or 5-8bpm above might be splitting hairs on my kind of volume. I’m a bit more picky about that during periods when I’m not also doing intensity because that means I’m riding low-tempo 3 x week.

Finally! Someone on a bike racer’s forum that sounds like a bike racer. Good for you! Hahaha. Reading back through this it’s pretty clear what your limiter is.

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So here’s a thing. I had a brief chat with Stephen Seiler on twitter asking if the way I’m implementing his polarized approach is correct. He said it’s “100% the way I perceive polarized training”

So folks, you can stop worrying about doing endless 8min V02 intervals. Just simply do your favorite hard group ride and smash it the hell up. Then choose something else hard on a second day of the week. The rest of the time, get that quality ZZ in. Job done.

Kinda makes complicated training prescriptions seem a little convoluted…

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I’m currently doing 2 long sweetspot sessions and 1 long tempo (now 2 hours @ app. 83%FTP) and the rest more or less Z1. All the intensive sessions are fun. Whenever I’m at 90 min @ sweetspot ( now @ 50 minutes) I move on to FTP but I will keep the tempo session.
Then I will build up FTP to 60’ and move on to VO2max session. I think I then have to lower the intensity of the long tempo session, since vo2max is really killing my legs.
Total time in the week will be between 8 and 12 hours.

During holidays I had an 17 hours week mostly zone 1 (coggan model) and 2 tempo sessions (45 ‘ and 2 hours)That was more than enough for me.

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Nice! That’s exactly my plan for this year of experimenting with polarized training. Hope it pays off and keeps me fresh and motivated to train. It only took me one cycle of SSBMV1/2 → SusPB to completely burn out.

Yes, large volumes of repeated intensity really doesn’t suit some people. Some however, go great on that sort of training. One of my riding friends literally rides hard constantly. Clip in, 400w. Café stop, 400w. On the way to the toilet 400w… the crazy part, he’s always strong, never seems to burn out. However, we suspect, he’s actually a robot.

It’s quite amusing really. Years of research, thousands of studies. Billions of dollars. Net result. The meta study confirmed best training distribution yet discovered for endurance sport… lot’s of endurance.

The clue, is in the name…

  1. Do as much volume as possible.
  2. Do lots of Z2 endurance riding.
  3. Do one, or two, hard rides per week.
  4. Repeat.

When this stops working, increase volume and change up the hard ride stimulus. When you can no longer increase volume, begin the dangerous game of increasing intensity. I personally, would be very careful with this. Do everything possible to increase your endurance volume, before you start to add more hard days.

Obviously, I’m aware that this does get complex with nutrition, sleep, life stress, injury etc. However, the training prescription is very simple.

You can make the hard rides almost anything you like. A hard Zwift race, a hard group ride, a fast MTB ride, a track session. Basically, just a hard stimulus. In fact varying it regularly will probably help further adaptation. A rider named Mathieu Van Der Poel is a fine example of this.

Training in this manner means you could, never do another interval, the rest of your life. I do a few intervals myself, usually just 4 V02 sessions the 2 weeks leading up to a race. That’s it. Would I be faster doing structured intervals instead of my hard group ride? Well, that’s the million dollar question. Nobody knows. I suspect some would be faster, others wouldn’t.

I tell you what I do know, riding with my club this morning was hard as nails. It was also a stunning day, perfect weather, great company, lots of laughs and with the perfect café stop at the end. I also set the best 3min power of my life. Contested a full on sprint with 28 people. Freaking awesome. Hard day, done.

Hopefully, your polarized training goes well. I’d love to hear how you get on.

Remember, the hard days DO NOT have to be V02 intervals. They just need to be a hard stimulus. Pick the most fun way for you personally to get the intensity.

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I thought coggan zone 2 was “endurance” and zone 3 was “tempo”.

Correct. But i do 1 long tempo session (zone 3) in the weekend (because i really like it)

Where are you? I’m jealous! Haven’t been able to do anything like this since March last year. Currently allowed to ride with one other (and even that seems to cause the red mist to descend for some drivers), reckon we might be allowed back up to groups of 6 at some point in February or March and can’t wait. Big group rides and races seem a long way off :frowning:

“Billions”? Guess again. There is no real money backing sports science research. In fact, I doubt that someone like Seiler has brought in much more than 1/10,000th of that in his entire career. You’d need many thousand Seilers to get to “billions”.

(Same goes for pro cycling. People think there is lots of money involved, but it’s peanuts compared to sports like football or auto racing.)

There are more reasons than money, to back science. And he pointed out money invested, not money made, so how much money Seiler made is irrelevant.

So? The claim was that “billions” has been spent on sports science research, trying to determine the optimal way to train. That is simply false.

As for Seiler, obviously I wasn’t referring to his personal income. :roll_eyes:

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This was my training plan for racing 30 years ago. Ride a lot with team mates. Do a training crit on Wednesday. Do another race on Sat/Sun or do a 3 hour group ride if no race. This plan worked for 4-5 years as I progressively improved year over year.

Could have it been better? Sure. What would I have done differently? I would have placed more value on the long slow ride - extend that weekend ride to 4-5 hours instead of doing the group ride. I would have done more focused intervals in the spring before the racing season (build block). I would have rode the trainer more in the winter (gawd, I hated that Minoura mag turbo) doing structure (Z2, Z3 intervals).

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Thanks for this and your other posts above. I come from more of a running background and after training for a few years and following a variety of plans from 10k to the marathon, my conclusion was the same. 2 “hard” sessions/week, which could be shorter intervals (e.g. 800m repeats) a tempo run (usually 20 to 40 minutes long) or a very long run (90+ minutes). The rest was easy Z2 (out of 5 zones).

Also lines up with the whole 80/20 approach. Cycling training does seem to be more complex, but I doubt it needs to be. My best cycling season came when I wasn’t following a plan. I just rode a lot (commuting during the week and a long ride on the weekend) and then threw in a VO2max or threshold workout (or a Zwift race) in now and then when I was feeling frisky.

Thanks again.

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This is a very long thread with a lot of posts… Genuinely not trying to troll, but can someone TL;DR this:

Are SSB MV/HV I and II, General Build MV/HV, and Rolling Road Race MV/HV garbage? Or awesome?

I know that’s a “cheeky” (as the Brits would say) way to phrase it but I don’t see a definitive answer in all the posts above. It seems a surprising (to me) number of people are using TR workouts but creating their own plans for them…

You won’t see a definite answer because one doesn’t exist for training; as it doesn’t for diet, religion, politics, etc. TR plans will work for most and when it doesn’t, try something new (ie: polarization). If you read enough forums you’ll realize that the minority opinion is a small percentage but very vocal. So you could literally see a few people taking up the majority of comments. Don’t be swayed by appearance.

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2 hard days out of 7 is not 80:20.

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I’m sure more than a few of us have Minoura PTSD.

Yeah, I guess if one goes by sessions then you’ll have to do multiple of 5 workout session each week to always hit 80:20, but that was not my approach and I don’t think that’s seriously the intent of anyone.

I’m a simpleton and am not claiming to follow any particular plan/system/dogma. I’ve read where people use # of workouts, miles, or time to calculate their ratios. Seiler goes by sessions and it “should be used as a guideline rather than a strict rule” (see below).

Personally, just for example, if I was doing a 40 mile week I’d end up doing about 32 of those easy (Z2 out of 5) and the remainder would be faster/harder (intervals or tempo runs). My intention wasn’t to do 80/20, but that’s close to what it ended up being (mileage wise, not sessions) based on the training plans I had followed.

From an article on Runner’s World:

Seiler says the 80/20 split should be used as a guideline rather than a strict rule, so he “can live with training 85/15 or 75/25”. But he stresses that you shouldn’t veer too far away. And don’t overcomplicate things: “The 80/20 rule is based on categories,” he says. “I class a session as either hard or easy. If I do an interval session, even though the effort and heart rate will fluctuate, it’s hard. If you run four times a week, no matter the length, if one run is hard then that’s a 75/25 split.”

Seems pretty clear, hope that helps clarify what I was saying above vs. what Seiler describes.

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I also did not feel this was a dig at TR. He isn’t saying Sweet Spot intensity is BAD, he is saying TOO MUCH Sweet Spot per week is bad. Its the same as thinking doing 3-4 vo2 max sessions a week is good if you are a time-crunched athlete. It’s more about the distribution than intensity itself.

I recorded a podcast interview with Dylan last week where we talked on this topic. If anyone cares to listen and hear him talk on this topic.

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