Thanks for all the questions guys! We did the interview on Wednesday, and it will go live tomorrow Monday. A lot of the general questions (applicability for time-crunched athletes, the evidence against polarised training etc.) are covered, but as I should have expected, covering the most important, fundamental aspects of it basically lasted the entire interview. dr. Seiler tentatively agreed to do a follow-up podcast later, though, and also, I will do a solo episode just one week later where I’ll go into a lot of these questions myself, from the perspective of what I know of dr. Seiler’s opinions and research and my own perspectives of course.
As a teaser of my personal perspective, I think @sryke hit the nail on the head in saying that maybe it should be called High Low-Intensity Training rather than polarised training. The early research in POL was often done in rowers and cross-country skiers, where a more polarised approach seems to be working really well. As work was done in e.g. cycling and running, we started to see a more pyramidal approach, but not in the sense that a large amount was done in the mid-zone, but just a larger amount than above lactate threshold (e.g. 80% Z1, 15% Z2, 5% Z3).
This to me makes a lot of sense. There’s nothing magical about 80% low-intensity, but evidence indicates that the amount of LIT should be high. Maybe 70% might be ok for really time-crunched athletes (pure speculation…) but I don’t think 60%, for example, is going to give any better results than 70-80%, at least not long term.
However, how to use the rest of the training time depends a lot on various factors - athletic profile (VO2max/VLaMax balance), goal events, age, personal preference, etc.