True, perhaps not, if 50% is the estimate at 200 watts.
Reminds me of a recent podcast with J Morton: They [Froome & co] are natural high fat burners. Even without training they could go out for 4 hours w/o any carbs (or similar, may get the qoute not 100%)
nice tweet on all the LIT and pro and how easy easy is. And that it is not so easy to say how easy easy should be.
Really like the last response:
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Top 10 WC XCO biker, last week. Quite a package. This week was just riding around, however, offroad → he “dared” going above LT1 … consistently
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I’ve changed my race schedule a bit, first A-race will be Nationals on a very lumpy course. Having drawn a lot of inspiration from my extracts (I’d say most of my training follows the pro-principle) it’s time for some focus on classics specialists.
For example O Naesen
Super basic rule but so easy to break… did this to myself recently.
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@sryke – in all your pro data mining, are there any blatant outliers (other than Valverde)?
none
however, with Februar eveything changes. Now they race until October and this determines everthing. Racing, racing, racing.
I also found it interesting to see CX riders like MvdP’s brother. He shows everything on Strava. And how little volume he does in winter with all this CX racing.
always enjoy his insights:
- carb centric
- no fasted/low glycogen training (by intention)
- get in the calories !!
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Nice article. Thank you for sharing.
Impressive show by TP today. Like the other day as well. 423W on the last climb today, brought him a KOM
Let’s look at his training:
Dec was just zone 2 riding with some tempo efforts. Not much more, sometimes a little bit more.
Jan: went to Sierra Nevada, altitude. Seems to follow “sleep high, train low”. It is interesting to put the efforts in training in context to the effort today.
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I was thinking about this today at work…did olde timey riders of yore do “polarized” training simply because they had way more off-season time compared with modern riders? Have modern riders adopted training at higher intensities year-round because they are racing sooner and longer throughout the calendar? The other studied sports which seem to support a polarized approach, like CX skiing, don’t really happen 12 months out of the year like cycling does, so maybe that’s why polarized works for them but isn’t really seen within the pro ranks.
Just a thought. 
Why do you think they used to train ‘polarized’?
I think they just rode a lot.
It was just an observation at the lingering and seemingly baked-in notion that old school cyclist did a ton of LSD riding during the winter before ramping it up to big ring power. I guess when cycling was a seasonal sport, like other endurance sports, that would seem reasonable, but now that pro cyclists are somewhat required to be race-ready almost year-round…the old school method of ‘just riding a lot’ before hitting big ring power seems not applicable.
In the old days they wouldn’t ride at all until January. Perhaps with the exception of those few engaging in CX. I have Greg LeMond’s Trainingbook from 1987 or so in my book shelf. There he writes in detail of what a big negative change it was for him when he moved to Europe as neo pro with this practised winter hibernation. And he equally detested this small ring riding dogma advocated by USA Cycling in these days. And LeMond is my childhood hero, so he must be right …
Perhaps they just rode LSD because they were all fat and detrained from smoking and drinking throughout the entire winter.
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I think the understanding of training has just evolved. And also the sport has become much more professional. Money has also something to do with it, not everyone used to be a full-time pro, and they might have just needed the off season to work.
no less a rider than veerbeek delivered milk for several years – and not just in the off season.
we’ve thankfully come quite a long way with pro salaries.