after all this POL stuff, back to good old road cycling. Different demands, different training style. A 2019 paper on Polish elite riders (vo2max ~70):
vo2lt → at LT determined with D-Max method
Athlete A - Tobias Angerer - retired in 2014. All these comparisons could be countered by other observations. Northug changed the game by acting like a sprinter in road cycling, but on the other side you had a skier like Martin Johnsrud Sundby who was infamous for his volume and tempo riding (and very successful as well). Especially the Norwegians always followed different routes to success: Daehlie vs Ulvang, etc.
What is even more important and the reason why you should read these studies with a grain of salt: a lot of the top level athletes in Scandinavia do not train under national programs for the entire season. They are usually looked after by their personal coaches (comparable to national XCO programs in cycling; you wouldn’t take these programs serious because athletes don’t follow these regimes in the real world).
Interesting points. Would also be interesting to hear if the German team also considered trying to change race dynamics back to more steady as a possibility (instead of adopting their training philosophy)…
Elite kayakers, 1000m distance (~3.5min race duration). First year in the Olympic cycle.
First of all please note the slightly different zoning:
Quite uniform TID
Why do you think they move from a zone 3/tempo focussed stage 1 to a zone 1 focussed stage 3 during preparation? I can see in stage 2 of prep they drastically increase the amount of hours so just to not tax the athletes too much, likely a lot more zone 1 is used to fill in the hours while the amount of time in zone 2/3 stays mostly the same. Is the shift to a more zone 1 focussed stage 3 because of a sort of taper towards competition after a big build?
I can see why they would maintain that plan during competition because they get their intensity from racing and try to maintain a good base.
@sryke any gym/strength specific info out there?
I’ve signed up for a webinar for this Friday with AZUM where Sebastian Weber will be talking about strength training for endurance athletes. Will stick it on whilst I’m working.
https://azum.ch/azum-sports-coaching-know-how-krafttraining-im-ausdauersport/
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Sounds very plausible.
On their zones. Zone 3 is not tempo. 3-5mmol La. This is threshold territory.Their zone 2 goes to 3 mmol. However, as highly glycolytic athletes we can assume their overall La levels are higher
There sure is … but this is not really a topic that I have a strong interest in. I don’t really look for this. Sorry.
Ok, no worries. Too bad!
From:
In the running context, critical speed seems to be the better way of predicting marathon performance, as the recent data dump from Nike’s Breaking2 project suggested. But when I was reporting on Breaking2, the scientific team in charge was also interested in lactate threshold. The gap between lactate threshold and critical speed, they told me, gives you additional information about a runner’s strengths and weaknesses. Great marathoners have the two thresholds close together: they accumulate no lactate at all until they’re very close to their critical speed.
Middle-distance runners, on the other hand, tend to have a wide gap between thresholds: they start generating lactate at comparatively low intensities, but it doesn’t start shooting up out of control until a much higher intensity. Zersenay Tadese, the half-marathon world record holder at the time of the Breaking2 attempt, had a high critical speed but a relatively low lactate threshold, like a middle-distance runner. That may be one of the reasons he never managed to run a great marathon.
Conclusion: great marathoners train/run only polarised with strict avoidance of no man’s land … because they don’t have a no man’s land 
On a more serious note, I’ve often wondered about this gap between LT1/AeT/VT1 and LT2/MLSS/VT2/CP/FTP, is this rather fixed or does it change with training and speciality? First time I read something about this.
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Holy cow, 30 elite U23 road cyclists:
and this is heart rate based, there must be plenty of coasting/descending in the t<VT1 figure.
This is really the first time I see such a TID in elite cyclists, this is odd.
And of course, the paper concludes they should actually train polarised. Successful endurance athletes train polarised.
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Yeah that paragraph was funny 
Here are the percentages if anybody’s interested:
The average distribution across the entire season was 17.4–19.4% in Time<VT1, 50.8–62.5% in TimeVT1–2 and 8.0–9.3% in Time > VT2 and could thus be classified as a threshold training intensity distribution.
I’m actually not that surprised; I mean all those nice hilly training areas + group rides invite you to just go a bit above VT1 when going uphill and coasting/drafting otherwise…
Right? I guess those U23 Elites will be downgraded to cat2 because they aren’t training polarized 
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But if you look at the total hours per year, its around 700h… I would have expected much more.
Maybe it`s all the threshold work that keeps the hours low (for an U23 elite)?
Riders are quite young, 19-21yr. 700h is a reasonable figure. Crosstraining in winter is not accounted for. Look at this for comparision:
And I don’t think they did all this time at VT1-2 at threshold. I know, in polarised circles everything between vt1 and vt2 is threshold but I would beg to differ low tempo and close to Vt2/FTP. However, they always cite this Seiler study where they measured “stress”. They always say that everything above vt1 is sooo stressful. They always fail to mention that they tested 3 intensities in this study: 1) far below vt1, 2) at vt2/FTP, 3) quite above vt2. Of course, 2) and 3) are more stressful. Therefore, they conclude, especiall 2) is to be avoided. But what about “slightly above vt1” ? This is really what bothers my quite a lot with all these polarised is superior discussions in papers.
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I guess that’s an important point. As far as I know, many of these riders live in an area in Austria where riding outdoors during winter isn’t really feasible. So it’s likely that they do a fair amount of crosstraining or turbo.
Roger roger. That would explain it.
It`s just when you compare to xc skiers, one would assume that these guys would train a lot more…
Am i lazy person if i think this is a lot? Like A LOT? Personally i have never had this kind of distribution. Yeah im not pro, so… Also they probably do lot of climbing in austria so kinda stupid to compare that to what i do on indoor trainer. Still seems a lot for me.
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from Olympiatoppen, the NOR training manual for xc skiiing. Bars represent min max of typical annual hours depending on age
