Don’t think I’d recognise one of those…
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OBNYD: so what is the basis for your opinion? Just personal experience? I’m interested in this question, as I’ve been trying to shift towards 4-5 days riding per week, by increasing the length of workouts. For example: putting an hour or two of endurance at the end of SS or over-threshold workouts, with weekly TSS likely in the 700-800 range.
Personal experience and observation of my competitors - no more but no less.
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I think we’re getting into language semantics.
I put volume as in, total time, assuming frequency and all other criteria are met. I agree, frequency is obviously the most important for most amateur’s, and probably a better term to describe the structure than consistency.
So, attempt 2
- Total volume
- Frequency
- Nutrition
- Recovery
- Training distribution
- Overall training philosophy
- Exact interval prescription
I’m thinking that total volume and frequency are probably equally important. However, if rider 1 rides 6 days per week, 1 hour per day vs rider 2 who rides 5 days per week, 5hrs per day. Rider 2 smashes rider 1. It wouldn’t even be a contest, assuming both train at the ideal distribution per week.
I guess, in short. There’s just no shortcut, to be the best cyclist you can be, you need to train often, effectively and for as much time as physically possible. Whatever you do, someone is doing more, someone is doing it better. You can never ‘win’ training.
What you can do is whoop last years version of yourself. My Bandit 2020 dude would crush the life outta Bandit 2019 guy. Hopefully, 2021 Bandit smashes last years washed up has been 
21 days into 2021 and I’ve banked 53hrs of training. All better than last year, better power, better distribution, better recovery. I’m already 11hrs up on last years wimp. He’s toast…
How’s everybody doing compared to themselves last year?
Fantastic article on volume and load.
https://www.alancouzens.com/blog/volume-vs-intensity.php
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Basically this. When I read TR forums, I can’t help but feel like everyone spends too much time focusing on details instead of putting in the work and trying to progress week to week, month to month. So many debates only become relevant when you get to a really top level, and I don’t think many TR users are at that level.
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Can tell you have decent time to train. For me I’m thinking in 3 days vs 4-5 ranges of frequency. I know I’d prefer to ride 4 or 5 days a week than 3 with same volume. But you’re right, debating minutiae and case by case stuff at this point, but can’t help myself…
For fun, what many of the cyclists I encounter think will make them faster…
Bike
Weight of said bike
Kind of lube
Number of Strava KOMs
A million other utterly pointless minute gains
Volume
i’m in this post and i don’t like it
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Some interesting perspectives given by this study. It’s not just volume, “even” in a polarised model (if we consider 90-5-5 time as polarised … )
In the present study, maintaining the same training intensity distribution, and only increase total training volume was not sufficient to further improve aerobic capacity and cross-country skiing performance significantly throughout 6 months of training. This suggests that training programs with the same training intensity distribution, only differing in training volume, may not ensure optimal development of each individual skier independent of age and sex
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That’s a weird paragraph. Earlier in the study they say:
The 6 months of training from May to October led to no significant improvements in physiological and performance variables for the skiers in the present study. Since the training volume and intensity distribution was almost constant throughout the study period, this was no surprise
They didn’t test a volume increase, as far as I can tell. So the concluding paragraph you quoted makes little sense to me. Maybe a translation issue?
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who needs progression?!
Polarized year round for the win 
For the individual well trained athlete, substantial changes in training volume and training intensity distribution could be necessary to facilitate further improvements, as observed in earlier studies (Gaskill et al., 1999; Støren et al., 2012; Bratland-Sanda et al., 2020). This is important knowledge for trainers of talented cross-country skiers that have faced stagnation.
err, polarized for the stagnation! 
Only skimmed the article - did I interpret it correctly?
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They didn’t test a change in volume or TID, so this (only changing volume doesn’t help, to paraphrase the passage @sryke quoted) is a strange conclusion. They kept training the same way, and didn’t get fitter. No shit.
The only conclusion I can draw is if your training isn’t progressive you won’t get better. We all know that. Had they added volume I’m sure they would have gotten fitter. Had they changed TID but kept the same volume, who knows?
If you read the section titled Practical Implications this may explain it better.
Practical Implications
In the present study, maintaining the same training intensity distribution, and only increase total training volume was not sufficient to further improve aerobic capacity and cross-country skiing performance significantly throughout 6 months of training. This suggests that training programs with the same training intensity distribution, only differing in training volume, may not ensure optimal development of each individual skier independent of age and sex (Gaskill et al., 1999). For the individual well trained athlete, substantial changes in training volume and training intensity distribution could be necessary to facilitate further improvements, as observed in earlier studies (Gaskill et al., 1999; Støren et al., 2012; Bratland-Sanda et al., 2020). This is important knowledge for trainers of talented cross-country skiers that have faced stagnation.
That makes sense, except in another place they also said the skiers didn’t increase volume by any substantial amount. So I don’t see how they drew this conclusion.
Edit: I’m wrong, just found this:
Total training volume and ski-specific training increased significantly ( p < 0.05) throughout the study period for the whole group
I guess this is statistically significant:
The mean total training volume in P 1 was 701.5 ± 169.8 min⋅week–1 and increased significantly to 753.2 ± 137.6 min⋅week–1 in P 2 ( p < 0.05)
But I for one wouldn’t consider a 7% volume increase over six months very significant in terms of my training progression.
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7% over six months is a large increase. TR coaches recommend 5% increase year over year if everything is stable and there is stagnation.
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To be fair, the TR recommendation isn’t very useful. After all there is a big difference in increasing 7% on 300 hours and 7% on 600 hours. Also, their plans are all low volume in terms of time commitment.*
Other coaches and athletes like Kílian Jornet Burgada, Scott Johnston, and Steve House recommend increasing 10% year over year until you are in the 500+ hour range.
So yeah, perspective matters.
*7% on the average mid volume plan (6ish hours) is less than 30 minutes extra per week.
One also has to note that a large portion of the volume increase in the study was due to more strength training. Overall endurance time did not really increase significantly, only skiing specific training time.
However, this is not really why I find this study interesting. It offers interesting perspectives in the discussion (I know many people just read abstracts and may look up a results table … and that’s it). Some very interesting studies are mentioned in the in context setting. How the polarised system evolved in xc skiing.
The study itself touches a common challenge with polarised systems: how to progress when time is a limiter. I find it remarkable that such a young population as in the study showed zero improvement at that volume. Even the very young ones. The study could be an interesting complement to intervention studies where a polarised system is usually introduced the first time to study subjects. But what happens after this initial bump due to a system change? The guys here have already trained for a long time. As pointed out by the Russian sport scientist’s analysis of the NOR training system (Pro training thread), tough HIT training already in early pre-season seems to be necessary to induce further progress. This is also disussed in the study here. What is different with the non-elites (well, they are quite good as well) here? Not enough volume/time in the bodies to absorb so much HIT? Or they can’t push themselves enough? Who knows but interesting questions.
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… just adding, I don’t want to downplay the volume increase due to strength training. It is considered as the second success factor of NOR xc skiing (besides early pre-season HIT).
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Drat.
So many studies contradicting each other.
I finally thought I’d figured out a strategy, then wham, here’s a study saying it doesn’t work…
Obviously, these results will vary from person to person, but it seems clear that we all make gains with new stimulus. I guess the takeaway is, if you start seeing signs of stagnation. Make a change. To what and in what order?
Who knows, that varies from person to person. One things for certain, once you’ve upped the hours to big numbers and that stops working. It’s going to get harder to make gains. Not impossible, just complex.
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Being a bit cheeky here but I’m replying to post 445 by TheBandit.
I’ve read a lot of this this thread as I find the subject interesting. The Polarized model pretty closely describes how I train/ride by default. I love riding even in the depths of winter or during torrential rain. Most of the time I’m out for a few hours, visiting my favourite places, but sometimes I go out and rag it around on my cx bike or mtb. In season we run a cx training evening every Thursday where we knock 7 bells out of each other. I race pretty often in normal times.
So when I read this thread it does flabergast me somewhat, how bogged down in the minutiae a lot of the contributers have become.
It was with joy that I came to TheBandit’s post. Yes! I thought. THAT captures the spirit of the model.
I won’t detail it here but please go back and refresh yourselves if you like.
Otherwise, keep on analysing it. I do enjoy the level of discussions on here, and its always fun to really disect a topic. Just wanted to remind myself and others that the beauty of the model is in its simplicity.
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