The model stops being simple once you plateau. Like any model. The basic concept of every model is quite simple, not really rocket science or brain surgery. However, adjusting a model to an individual is the complex task. And this is something the Norwegians have perfected over the years. Drawing from a meticulous documentation of what has worked and hasn’t worked for athletes over years. Now they have a toolbox that they can apply.
I don’t really see it this way. I find the total body of data quite consistent. Each study offers another perspective. No study is the alike, boundary conditions are always different. However, we see quite clearly why certain models have evolved in certain disciplines.
Thing is I reckon that 99% of us aren’t even close to plateauing and there are so many things that can be improved off the bike before needing to change the training.
Yeah, it looks like that, at least in the details. Or maybe the conclusion may be, that there is not just one best way to train.
When reading the studies, I always come down to the point like in many sciences.
For the foundation of knowledge it is helpful to invest time to graduate in university/college.
At least in my special field this is really helpful to understand and classify the newest studies in the great whole.
Nevertheless I absolutely enjoy as a layman to look for the most effective way to train for me, read books, listen to podcasts, reading studies and the forum and learn more and more to listen to my body…
Trying to find a strategy that is superior for everyone all the time is folly. It’s folly to try finding a strategy that works for even a single person all the time. Riders on this thread who have had bad results with too-frequent high intensity workouts have taken a different tack that will not work for everyone.
You can find studies to support or refute any strategy you wish. What you will find on these forums are groups or people who take these studies and interpret them based on their own personal experience. My personal opinion is that most of the disagreement on this thread is due to poster’s inability to tolerate anyone else’s varying experience, i.e. “it can’t be true for you because it’s not true for me.” When a post begins and ends with someone telling someone else “Oh you’re feeling stronger than ever? Let me tell you how you are wasting your time,” you aren’t going to be convincing anyone.
So…finding a training strategy that allows a rider to rack up a lot of hours with a high degree of consistency and some time above threshold (95/5 or 90/10 or pyramidal or Sweet Spot or whatever) is a good place to start, but inherent in this process is, beyond Your Mileage Might Vary, it’s a fact that Your Mileage Will Vary
Here is my interpretation of polarized training. I’m 69 and my goals are to enjoy my group rides more, i.e. ride comfortably at the front instead of struggling to keep up, and to age gracefully. I’m self coached. I do two LSD rides, i.e. 2-3 hours in Polarized zone 1, one 2-3 hour group ride which includes all zones, and two HIIT sessions. 2 rest days with the HIIT days after the rests. 1 HIIT is short intervals at max effort, e.g. 3 sets of 8 x :30:/:15 with 10 minute recovery between sets. The other is the only ride I do indoors, a 4x6 at 105% of threshold. it’s difficult to maintain a steady power output outdoors where I live as there are no steady climbs or flat sections that are long enough. There are 6 minute steady climbs but i wouldn’t be able to get back to the start within 2 minutes. I would need a 32 minute steady climb.
How lovely and sensible this thread seems.
If I ride for 4hrs in Z1 (Seiler) but go hard on about 8 hills which are 3-8min efforts round here then I’ll be inclined to log the ride as separate Z1 and Z3 sessions.
Seems like the most genuine way to keep track of my work load.
I log the tss of my rides rather than time so will do an approximation of how I think the ride was divided up.
Maybe not the 'correct ’ way of doing things but feels right to me.
That is a Z3 session in my book and IMO counts as such (Seiler has also said so.) You’ve still completed an average of 8x 6 minutes ~48 minutes, hills near all out? (I assume over FTP anyway.) That Z3 stress is there the same as it would be in a shorter session, just you have added Z1 (which after the hills and closer to the end of 4 hour might feel more like Z2.
I look at it this if you done that in a 60 - 90 minute session you would unquestionable call it Z3, adding Z1 is irrelevant. To me spliting a session in to chuncks at different levels doesnt make sense.
Yes but if I logged the whole 4hr ride as z3 then I’d be recording something like 180tss @ Z3 which it isn’t. It’d actually only be around 80tss of Z3 and 100 tss of Z1.
Anyway it works for me. It’s just a record of roughly what I’ve done. My body doesn’t care what I wrote down.
I’m colour coding my rides green, yellow or red. It’s really easy to then check you’re just getting the odd splash of colour amongst a sea of green. Overall this system is working nicely for me. Things like tss etc are a distraction.
TSS isn’t useful in this context. You can look at it to get a sense of a macro trend over the course of a season, but optimizing individual sessions day to do based on it isn’t effective.
Recording tss helps me visualise what I did that day better than just time.
When I’m feeling unexpectedly tired it’s nice to look back over the preceding week or two and see that I’d done more work than I remembered.
I totally train on how I feel day to day. Just doing what I fancy which turns out matches the periodized model very nicely.
