Stephen Seiler (StephenSeiler) - his results

Sorry I don’t know how to copy this as text see attached images ( hope this comes out right)

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So basiclally he does this no go zone :slight_smile: and we sit there in are purists about polarized distribution.

And his response about high and low stress sessions is more in line how he defines polarizes approach, rather than strict zones.

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I find the whole thing fascinating. Pretty impressive results for a 55 year old. Seems he is still sticking to 2 high intensity sessions per week and not doing a bunch of mid intensity minus the “surges” he puts in some of his LIT rides. Those 3x53’ rides look tempoish overall to me, but he says they are harder stochastic rides? TAN? He also talks about LT1 and LT2 a little bit in the thread. Just wanted to share

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Yes, the results are impressive. And what is fascinting to me, and I am listening a lot of Seiler, as he is very charismatic guy, he is not strict with his polarized approach in terms of zones and workouts. I have a feeling that many people are trying to compartmentalise this as easy and suprathreshold/vo2 max when Seiler himself thinks in a more general way of intensity distribution rather than strict workout types or zones. And I agree with this more broader approach because then you basically end up with more pyramidal distribution that touches a lot of elements but do not cause overburn by too much intensity. But this is only my personal interpetation of things he says and I am sorry if I harm polarized purists.

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agree 1000%

That’s 22% of his entire week… in one session…at TiZ in the grey zone :exploding_head:

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Another general take-away is that no one does, or should, train “Polarized” year round.

Some high level coaches utilise POL blocks for base, others for race readiness; it’s one training theory w/ multiple applications.

Addendum: also not that POL distribution is the result of high volume HIIT training, and not a training prescription.

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I don’t hear this being talked about much, if at all. I like the idea of using it for a ‘peak’ phase

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I’ve done only one true block of POL and it made me waaay faster than any SS/Threshold block (raised & extended my entire all-time power curve). Other forum participants have had similar experiences.

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What %ftp did you use for easy rides?

Did you use it in the base phase? How did you determine LT1? I’ve heard people estimating it from 70-80%, which seems a wide band.

Forgive my ignorance, but when I hear ‘hard days hard, easy days easy’, I don’t think of 80% or even really 70% as easy. Did I miss something? I’m digging through some FastTalk podcasts, who are big Seiler fans, so maybe I just haven’t got there yet.

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It does seem that some of his work fits into the definition of “sweetspot”, and are not in the polarized model.

I am quite keen of the simplicity of the polarized model and it gave me good results at the start of the 2019 season. Pre-season I was doing plenty of easy riding (just getting on with it, not riding to a target, but IF ended up around 0.65 -0.7), running(5k) and swimming (30 mins) once a week, and only did 3 interval sessions before my first timetrial. I felt really strong in my first timetrial despite not having done any race efforts beforehand, and knocked out some really good power numbers.

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Seiler usually talks about 60-70% of hrmax.

Funny, this also seems even more anti-polarized than what Keegan said he did on the podcast last week which received some grief about TR promoting their own time saving plans. Seems like its all in semantics.

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How much does he weigh?

What is TAN?

I think we love to have strict rules in terms of training (do this, do that at given % or better to the single watt, never do the other thing etc.) And I was a lot about this approach. The more I read and listen (and hopefully understand) over-classifing things causes more damage than good. I like the idea behind polarized training as overall view - so distribution between intensity and endurance. But discussion between polarized and pyramidal is a little bit pointless in my opinion (even Seiler classifies Zwift race, and he does them a lot, as a simple hard day so other days will be easy, and from literature we know that pyramidal leads to similar improvements).

Like you said - it is all about the semantic but in the end everything has its place and time. I have seen some sort of gains from anything I have done on the bike - not ftp gain but some sort of improvement in a small thing, and sum of these things leads to bigger gains. I have overreacted, been in a plateau and I train only for a second year :slight_smile: But now at least I know what seems to work for me in certain times and what does not.

I think people that are the most open-minded and ready to experiment are the people we are considering “gurus and oracles” :slight_smile:

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tough as nails tempo rides - rides referenced by Andy Coggan / Tim Cusick. from memory they were tempo rides of about 2 hours where you ride as hard as you can ( sprinting out of corners, over small climbs etc).

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Interesting. Ive been talking to a coach this week and his rough hypothetical ‘prescription’ for me for the next 6-8 weeks would be 5 sessions a week, with 2 relatively short, very focused interval sessions at/near threshold, with 3 longer low intensity rides - ‘but don’t worry about going hard up the odd hill’. Then evaluate, and consider whether to go again, or move to more sweetspot dominant work, because ‘everything works, but nothing works forever’.

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