I’d like a piece of that action! Hard to race as much as pros do and only go hard 2 sessions out of 10, or avoid Seiler’s “grey zone”.
I’m stealing this gif. 
I think Dr. Seiler did himself a disservice when he started becoming (overly) prescriptive. Like the initial insights were great: during at least part of the year pros train in this polarized manner (that can be replicated by amateur athletes for some purposes and at certain times), and at least some cyclists who have stagnated on threshold can improve by eliminating much of the threshold rather than increasing it.
That’s a distinct difference between pros and non-pros – the entertainment factor.
Non-pros want per session entertainment – tv, video game, interval variety, et al.
Pros train “with the longer term goals in mind” before entertainment considerations.
I would guess that’s also the reason non-pros rarely ever go easy or hard enough – it’s no fun going too easy or too hard.
This has been my issue with the polarized “plan” since the beginning. Great for building aerobic endurance and capacity, muscular endurance???
On Lorang/Frodeno:
Swim:
“The key to Ironman preparation isn’t to lose all your speed. It’s not all about doing long repetitions or long intervals. I have some sprint work in every session, especially in the warm-up.
“It’s in the winter that I’ll actually do proper speed work with other swimmers,” Jan adds. “I swim five times most weeks. And probably two of these are really hard, but there’s intensity in all of
them as well.”
On his transition from Olympic to Ironman distance, Frodeno says he’s been doing more “short rest intervals where you don’t focus as much on the high intensity or quality, but it’s about short repetitions and a lot of work done at race pace, which is slower. And I do quite a bit of work at race pace”.
Bike
For me, riding is about five to six times a week. In these six times, there’s one easy session, and always some kind of interval. Twice a week I do some VO2 max work, which is short and hard stuff, with a short rest, where you go 30secs hard and 10secs easy, or you go 90secs really hard and 30secs easy. They’re generally short intervals with not enough rest to recover fully. So you do a set of 10 to 15mins and repeat that several times. That for me is high intensity if you want ‘sprint work’ – it’s not really a sprint, but it’s still high intensity.
“The biggest change [from the ITU years] is the amount of km on the bike and the volume of long intervals.”
Run
Depending on the time of the year, Frodeno still runs one hour at a steady pace — mostly on trails around Girona, where he lives. His running volume, even for an Ironman training schedule, is still less than it used to be when training for ITU events. And 60% of his total weekly volume (which is now 100km instead of 120-130km in his ITU years) is done on trails, while the high intensity and speed (making up 40%) is on the road.
and paychecks…
Bucks trump boredom. 
> 
They also have all the time in the world to train so they almost always train outside. So this would definitely make the need for outside entertainment less. Though I’m sure there are lots of pros that listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks, or mostly ride with groups while knocking out 25 hours of base miles through the winter. Then a lot of their training through the season comes in the form of racing.
It’s a little different for someone coming home from their job when it’s already dark outside and forced onto a training in their basement.
My take is that polarized may work better for athletes that are already predominantly slow twitch - they don’t have much fast twitch that needs to be “converted” to behave like slow twitch. Or in the terminology of Sebastian Weber/INSCYD, these athletes already have low VLaMax - hence don’t need to do SS intervals to reduce it further.
If you have an appreciable amount of fast twitch fibers, you’ll have a higher VLaMax, and will need to do a lot of SS to build muscular endurance.
I’ve yet to see any study that compares the efficacy of polarized vs. SS by athlete physiology - fast vs. slow twitch. Would be interesting to see the results.
Lifetime member of the slow twitch club, while muscular endurance development comes fairly easy I still need to do a lot of SS/threshold development to support long 1-5+ hour climbing and flat headwind rides.
Yeha it’s possible it’s exactly the opposite: pure slow twitcher can do a lot of tempo and SS fairly easily and bounce back from it quickly, making it a good way to accumulate training stress without digging into a hole.
Whereas fast twitcher might get similar benefit from it but it comes at a higher cost. It wouldn’t be that each session is less effective, but the cost-benefit calculation of all sessions would be different.
it’s possible it’s exactly the opposite: pure slow twitcher can do a lot of tempo and SS fairly easily and bounce back from it quickly
That’s what I think, fits my profile quiet well. I have no major problem with anaerobic work up to about 3 minutes or so, but sweet spot is killing me 
Doing traditional base I usually see improvement doing long z2 or low z3 (Coggan) rides but threshold and sweet spot is not very productive. By coach Chad’s standard I’m a sprinter (currently squats 5 reps x 90kg and 70kg body weight, been lifting for 6 weeks).
Seiler tested time-to-exhaustion on the equivalent of a 10-minute climb. Is it no surprise that the 4x8-min group had the biggest gain? The 4x16 group had a pre-intervention TTE of 8.52 minutes, while the 4x8 group had a pre-intervention TTE of 11.88 minutes (almost 40% higher!). Not sure what to think of the TTE differences between those two groups.
When I talk of muscular endurance, my thoughts are 30-min to 6-hour efforts. For example Matt Hayman winning Paris-to-Roubaix by doing nearly 6 hours at 90% IF. Or my own efforts on long & hard rides.
That doesn’t have much to do with being a sprinter.
If sweet spot is killing you then something is wrong. If you are good at anerobic efforts then you’ve probably gamed the ramp test or short FTP test.
The solution is to do a longer FTP test protocol.
The other thing is lower the percentage of FTP during SST. SS is defined as 84-97%. If 95% is too much, try 85%. SS should be fairly easy if the FTP is set correctly.
We were discussing in another topic the Kolie Moore podcast where he was saying that even longer “FTP” intervals should feel very doable.
Just an idea that I want to throw out there. The 10min test falls in between the 8min and 16min intervals. I think it would have felt like a shock to the system of the 16min interval group and the 8min group probably felt like they could settle in. It would be interesting to see that TTE difference for a 20min effort instead of 10min.