Polarized Training vs. Sweet Spot (Dylan Johnson video)

Training
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@Bioteknik Ok could be (starts to high), but I think the reason I latched on to that being LT1 is that in the Pro riders table in the same paper a) it is ~275W, b) that is roughly what ISM coached athletes train at (with variability of course), and c) ISM has stated he uses LT1. It’s also possible I have not triangulated all the info from verbal snippets and figures to come to a valid conclusion.

The reason I pointed that one out was that I thought the power numbers would be closer to @Skeggis numbers, and I’m trying to make the point that you don’t have to stay away from tempo (medio in the INSCYD world) to “train FatMax”, and that if he strictly stays at that fairly low intensity I don’t see the FatMax needle moving without significant volume and time. Of course others made the point that any intensity leads to better FATox but I’m not convinced. I favor endurance and low-mid tempo near AeT.

Whether or not you buy in to the INSCYD model (and I know there are shortcomings), it is an attempt to provide a more accessible way to get at information we see in that paper (or any sports lab testing). Because you really only get power from INSCYD and the expression “max” is used, it’s easy to get fooled into thinking that fat oxidation at an INSCYD-derived FatMax of 190W (for example) is significantly different than fat oxidation would be at mid-Medio of 235W (.79-.82 IF). After all, they are 45W apart and a different “zone”.

But, it is not. It’s practically identical. The way to demonstrate that is to look at those ISM paper tables. The values 0.38 - 0.31 could be the end of the baseline. :man_shrugging: Even if it isn’t you’re not going to get the message from INSCYD. You’re gonna think: “riding at 190W isn’t the same as riding at 235W…so I should ride at the FatMax zone wattage to improve FatMax”.

I argue that this is good for @Skeggis because he doesn’t have to soft pedal around at low Zone 2 (Coggan) and not get fast and wonder what happened. If you believe (enough of) their model, what’s nice is that you could see FatMax value move independently of “base” and “medio” zones on subsequent tests, so it’s potentially useful. But it comes across as a “train here to reduce fat ox” message and that’s simply not the case.

Is this the tweet you’re talking about?

I don’t think that what you’re referring to, but I’m old and the internet is hard :joy: :rofl: :joy: JK, guys!

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This is where alan rt that conversation with the figure that shows the lactate curves for the three populations.

I’ll try to write up a longer post tomorrow, but i can’t really compose good posts on mobile, and that is even with swipe. Dang thing spells so many words wrong… but remember weber suggests avoiding certain intensities is a great way to reduce vlamax. Old school training said to avoid anaerobic intervals in the winter, but maybe we should think of glycolytic intervals as the ones to avoid until general prep.

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Hi, wondering what was/is your distribution of training impact scores? How many of each are you shooting for each week?

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Cheers for the reply.

I’m un-sure of exact goal currently. Be stronger than last year… I’m basically building the biggest base possible, then getting specific once I’ve decided on events. I’ve got a potential road race on Feb 13th. I live in New Zealand, we’re basically back to full normal here, apart from international travel. Racing is back to full operation.

My issue is, that is right in the middle of this supposed ‘base’ period. I think I’ll do the race with a micro sharpen and taper, then get back to mega base building.

I had dramatic improvements last year from switching to a different training philosophy. In fact, it very much mirrors the results you had. I’ve since pondered a slightly different take on it, I call it Hybrid Polarized.

Basically, it’s the same huge percentage of Zone 2 (Coggan) training with one or two high intensity days, based on how I feel. I simply do Zone 2 everyday, sometimes I throw in a sprint (I’m a sprinter) then on my high intensity day or days, I join or lead a fast group ride and do every damn zone in the universe.

So it’s ‘polarized’ by session, but the high intensity ride could be a big sweetspot, threshold ride, a group ride, a fast XC lap. Basically, just a hard day. This method improved my riding a huge amount last year. All without doing virtually any prescribed intervals. The big takeaway, the volume increase and polarized training distribution crushed my previous, hard most of the time, sweet spot approach. It wasn’t even close.

This year I’m thinking of very carefully upping the power of my Z2 rides to more of what we seem to be calling this ‘San Milan’ VT1 zone. This seems to be a tad harder for me. More like the very edge of tempo or even tempo. I’m thinking of doing one day normal Z2, one day San Milan. Obviously, being damn careful not to over train, which is very easy to do on 20hrs a week.

That’s my current outlook.

Oh, and I stake ownership of ‘Hybrid Polarized’. I’ll have a book out soon :sweat_smile:

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The 2-week average was 8.6 aerobic and 1.6 anaerobic; mostly 9s, a few 10s…a few “bad day” 7s…

When I chop the long Z2s down to 2/week (Sat/Sun), I’ll shoot for 9s.
I’m in a ‘rest & test’ week right now that’s shaping up to be very interesting…for me at least.

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Having those two hard sessions and the in between stuff that was previously mid coggan zone 2 / base inscyd is what I previously did before upping that to more like ISM zone 2 (which we propose is low / mid tempo).
It was ok for a week or two but then it started to cook me.

My thoughts / questions are

  1. ISM zone 2 is fine if you do that predominately and only a little bit of higher zone work
  2. if you are doing 2/ 3 hard days (60-90 mins sweetspot for example) then you are better off doing coggan mid zone 2 for the other training
  3. dot mix the hard 2/3 days with ISM zone 2 between
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I would disagree with this statement. For me capped at LT1. And looking at McN’s power distribution this seems to align with how ISM prescribes it. Of course, there is no erg mode on the road.

However, IMHO this is still quite intense (when done several times a week), adding intensity on top of it can be too much. In the end the art lies in figuring out what an athlete can tolerate. That’s probably what makes a good coach.

The Norwegeans have been very anal about documenting work load/response for over 30 years. Further the document this for each developing athletes. This allows them to tailor precisely training plans for their athletes, they have a very well defined toolbox available. This nuance gets often lost when looking at pure TIDs.

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Agree and that is where I’m at with maintenance strength work and cycling. Just had a conversation with my coach on Monday, doing twice a week strength maintenance started accumulating fatigue over 2-3 months of progressive low-intensity work.

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Just to clarify, you’re talking resistance training here (gym work), or something on the bike (low cadence, etc)?

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strength maintenance in the gym

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Cheers for the reply.

I run it a little more dynamic than that. I’ll try to explain. I base the two hard days on every possible metric I can find. Meaning, not much. HRV, resting HR. The most important factor being, how I feel. Even this, is all over the show. It’s definitely art not science.

I simply don’t do the Tuesday hard session if I feel remotely off. Same with the Saturday ride. I base it on my overall feelings. Often, I only do a single hard day a week. In regards to slightly upping the Z2, it’s because I don’t really want to go longer. I’m already doing 3hrs a day. It’s a mental game to keep this up, day in day out. It’s a knife edge I know, but that’s the game. Just about ruin yourself every week, without actually doing it too successfully. Repeat this year round.

My current opinion, which could change an hour from now… is that blindly following some cookie cutter training plan is so far from ideal, I’m stunned it even exists. The same goes for coaching, to a degree. I get it, one is paying for expertise etc, but the communication would need to be truly incredible.

I feel that after a few years doing this, while carefully monitoring all of your data and subjective feelings, only you can truly know how or when you should go harder or hold back. I say this with huge caveats, I personally often fail to get it right, as it’s incredibly complex with sleep, nutrition and other life factors.

What I now know, for me and for me only. Volume is incredibly important. I would guess it’s the single most important factor. Next, and running it close, is intensity distribution. It’s incredibly important to control this daily, weekly and yearly. Forget the actual prescription, but the general principal that Dr Seiler gives, easy days easy, hard days hard, is very much a vital consideration. At least, it is in my experience.

Finally, and I know I have said it before, but I’ll repeat it for those that haven’t heard it. If you are a fast twitch athlete, which I am. Threshold and endless sweet spot training is not the best solution to improving as a cyclist. Yes, it works. Particularly if you are on limited time. However, you will plateau rapidly, and risk burn out. Please take it in context, I’m talking about fast twitch athletes. For TTers, all rounders, triathletes etc, then I’d ignore this advice and find your own path.

With the recent breakthroughs in fiber type testing in Gent, I think we are close to a kind of revolution in training. We’ll be able to easily get our exact fiber type tested and follow a program best suited to us, not the general population.

Exciting times ahead.

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@TheBandit To your earlier question/request, have you already built up to 20hrs / week? What is your current weekly volume?

I routinely now ride 12hrs / week so I don’t feel qualified to lay out some hypothetical plan for someone at almost double the hours.

I will say two things:

  1. I’ve been cycling seriously for 5 years. On 12 hrs I only ever do a single quality session a week. Five years is not a long time and I’m in my late-40s. So that’s likely it, but I’m 4.1 w/kg on those hours and that single session. There have been stretches where I did only tempo and endurance.

  2. I don’t hear this much in cycling (likely because were time-crunched), but when I was a competitive runner and we were building mileage, it was “conversational pace” and strides. That’s it. If you could not get up to 100 mpw on basic/easy/conversational (now known as zone 2) pace then you had no business introducing intensity.

Why wouldn’t you establish 20 hrs of endurance riding first? How do you know you can even do that?

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I’m hovering around 15-20hrs a week.

It varies with intensity etc. I built it up from 8-10hrs starting in March last year, basically during our lockdown. This obviously required more intensity discipline and an eventual restructure to what I call, Hybrid Polarized. Hell, it’s probably just pyramidal, but that doesn’t sound new and exciting.

It’s now quite steady. I still seem to be improving with this load, so I may not need to change things too much just yet.

The only real item on my supposed ‘program’ is my weekly Saturday group ride. It’s a club I run, so I virtually always ride it. I make that one of, or my single hard day. Usually 3 V02 efforts in there, or a long threshold effort, depending on the route. Basically, the usual group ride antics.

I actually experimented with a hard 3hr effort this Tuesday, on our most popular route. I was testing if I was physically capable of leading the group at the usual sort of pace for the whole ride. Turns out I could do it, but it nearly killed me. I’m still not recovered days later…

The volume and distribution moved me up from 3w/kg to 4.2w/kg. Long efforts are certainly not my strong suit. My most competitive time is approx 15sec. I’m at about 15w/kg, hoping to bump that to 16w/kg this year. Funnily enough, that time frame is both the perfect Zwift winning sprint and IRL.

I’m hoping this semi polarized approach will steadily increase my durability and to a small degree my FTP. I just have to get to the finish of a race. If I’m there, I usually win or place. That’s not arrogance, just how it rolls. Often I’m not there. Shelled on any climb that’s too long for my weak threshold.

The amusing part of this whole journey is that based on my size 5’6 (168cm) and weight 60Kgs, I and everyone else, said climber. Given my sporting background, 100m sprinter, I really should have known better.

It is funny at the end of races, nobody expects me to be competitive. I’m basically an old, weaker and slower version of Caleb Ewan. I changed my training after listening to Caleb’s actual coach explain how he now trains him. His coach admitted he was doing it all wrong for some time too.

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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.

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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”.