Polarized Training vs. Sweet Spot (Dylan Johnson video)

Training
437

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.

1 Like
438

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.

439

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

440

strength maintenance in the gym

1 Like
441

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.

6 Likes
442

@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?

1 Like
443

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.

6 Likes
444

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.

4 Likes
445

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.

1 Like
446

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…

11 Likes
447

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.

1 Like
448

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.

449

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.

20 Likes
450

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

451

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

452

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:

453

“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.)

454

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.

455

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:

1 Like
456

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).

1 Like