As a 50 year old and someone who shoots for 15-18 hours a week, I keep my easy days on the trainer at about 56-60% occasionally up to 65%. My outdoor MTB rides will have me over 65% but I try to keep that to a minimum if I can. I’ve found that keeping it a little lower than TR’s version of Endurance allows me to continuously hit my hard days week after week and allows me to complete my volume goals without being totally smoked. I don’t know if it’s optimal but it’s what’s working for me right now.
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This season i started capping my z2 rides at 70% and my SS at 90% as i was feeling exactly like youve described.
It may just be consequential but ive hit all time pb numbers after a 2 year plateau.
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I also often find the polarized z2 hovering near 0.75 to be a bit too much. I manage but do wonder if a bit longer at lower intensity might be better.
Inspired by this thread I think I will endeavor to use alternates to keep IF lower in the next block. May not be able to do this on weekday rides due to time constraints.
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Filing the endurance rides with .75 style ones is not following the essence of the athletes seiler wrote about in his articles and discussed in presentations/intervieews.
This to me is my biggest gripe against AT, as it just raises the power levels for rides that should remain rather static when total time in the saddle doesn’t change much.
Just because polarized z1 goes all the way up to your aerobic threshold, the athletes studied spent the vast majority of their time well below AeT.
The ones suggesting rides 50-65% are on to something… there shouldn’t be a need to lower ftp because the plan is poorly designed. Those endurance rides should be capped at fatmax or the first inflection of lactate rise. If you can’t test that, using a power cap of 65% will generally get you there. (This means ride IF will be below that)
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This isn’t a flaw of AT. AT is optimizing under the assumption that you don’t have longer than x to ride. Few people will spend more than 3 hours on the trainer, and in order to increase the stimulus, you have to tweak the intensity.
If you can, IMHO you should trade a bit of intensity for duration. Outdoors this is in principle possible, but indoors it gets hard.
This isn’t exactly a secret, if you ride outdoors that what I think you should do. Indoors it is a bit harder to judge, I usually make it dependent on whether the day should be a hard or an easy day (hard day = it takes more than 1 day to recover from it). Still, I think 50 % is a bit too low, but 0.60–0.63 IF is a good pace for long and/or mellow endurance rides.
IMHO that’s overthinking it already. You don’t need to know anything about fatmax or LT1. In fact, I usually primarily pace by heart rate when I do outdoor endurance rides. I find that more relaxing than staring at power numbers. I generally agree with capping power, although I don’t think you can cap it below 65 %. Just a start at a traffic light will exceed that. Or perhaps you need to ride up a short incline.
I generally agree with @Bioteknik’s advice, although I’d simplify your approach a bit. If you can spend more time on the bike, you can replace e. g. a Z2 ride at the top end of the Z2 power band by a longer and mellower ride. Those are usually better in all ways that count — except that they might not be compatible with your schedule.
When I did my last polarized block in December and January, some of the endurance workouts during the week were 2 hours long. That was pushing it to the absolute limit for me time-wise.
I don’t think TR is great for Polarised to tell the truth. It’s always wanting to put harder Endurance in but for me that’s not the way forward.
Been doing it since June last year and I wouldn’t go back now. Pretty much use the TR workouts but I decide what I’m doing. Haven’t adjusted FTP for a good while. Never accept adaptions as they’re not what I want. Vast majority of the Endurance rides top out at 55% FTP.
At the moment I’m settled on 4 weeks on and one off, at almost 60, I still feel the need for a down week. Just moved up to over 11hrs a week plus a few weights and a long walk every day.
I do 4 Endurance workouts, 1 VO2 and another Endurance/Tempo which is set at what I’ve rightly or wrongly worked out as my LT1 pulse ‘zone’. Currently the VO2 workout PL is increased each week. If I ride outside with a local changing which has recently started up it’s 2 hard workouts a week. Sunday gone I rode 4hrs outside and for me, had a lot of time in Endurance which used to be unheard of!! For me, a 3hr turbo Endurance workout is a much different beast to 3 or even 4 hrs outside. As a previous poster said, little micro rests outside make a big difference
My wattage for the LT1 was initially 240 for an hour, aim is to get 270 for the hr with HR staying in the zone. Last weeks was 5mins 240, 45mins 250, 5 mins 260 and last 5 270. Definitely noticing a change now.
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I disagree that it is overthinking and stated why. You think I’m overthinking it, but i gave a succinct reason to keep the intensity of your endurance rides below a certain level. Increasing the intensity changes the metabolic demand/stimulus and has a different impact on your recovery rate.
If you’re at a fixed volume, doing more work on the hard days still increases your total workload. I will always say the the major weakness of the tr plans is that they’ll now creep up the intensity on the easier days, thus eventually bringing everything down or reaching a plateau.
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Well said.
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The simplest rule of training:
Keep the hard days hard and the easy days easy. Probably the best way to reach consistency in my experience. Consistency trumps almost every other nuance. Simply improving consistency will improve your overall volume over a macro scale.
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The opposing viewpoint reminds me of that old saying “When your only tool is hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
When your only solution is to hammer, everything gets bent out of shape.
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Thanks for sharing your feedback, y’all!
As you could imagine, there is plenty of feedback on both sides of this coin, likely due to the wide range of understandings/desires with Polarized Training. 
That said, I’m making a note of all of this feedback. Appreciate you!
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That’s not what I said. When I wrote you overcomplicated things, I was only referring to you considering fatmax and LT1 in your explanation. I did not claim you were wrong about anything, just that it wasn’t necessary. I was completely agreeing with you on the prescription, though, so I find it weird that you’d take issue with that.
Yes, and please re-read what I wrote: I was and am agreeing with you. The only minuscule point of difference was that I think going down to 50 % FTP is too low for an endurance ride.
I’m confused why you think we are at odds here. 
Not just for polarized plans, but for all plans. I substitute all Sundays for long z2 so my PL for z2 is high. The AI keeps trying to increase my z2 rides (I’m on HV plans). I always have to use Alternates to choose easier z2 for Wednesdays and Fridays. It’s an annoying feature that I can’t choose which adaptions I want.
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Figured I’d weigh in on this as I’ve been using the Polarized plans as a baseline for my training for the past several months.
I have a well established aerobic base and am generally limited to 2-2.5 hours/day during the week. I am not as constrained during the weekends, and can push much longer endurance rides - and have confidence that I can do fairly high durations on my easy days - generally reaching my aerobic breaking point after around 4-4.5 kj
I quickly noticed that AT was pushing me higher in the zone and not pushing out duration - this was fine with me due to the constraints listed above. However - on weekends I would consistently use alternates to find longer workouts than the plan suggested. This led to self perpetuating cycle during the week of AT pushing me higher, not longer, in Z2
However, given my prior base, and confidence in this, I decided to accept the challenge and see how high I could push LT1. As such - I made my focus pushing up, not out, on my Z2 rides during the week. This was a way to challenge my aerobic base in time frames where I couldn’t usually challenge that system
This worked for me and I can now ride at much higher IF on the longer weekend rides, and I avoided burnout (thus far) by adjusting the mid-week endurance rides based on my perception - both ahead of time with alternates, and during the ride
However - I consider myself fairly advanced with regards to base training and would not recommend this for most. If you aren’t coming in with a strong base and confidence in how to adjust your training based on your day to day recovery and perception then these fundamental adjustments that AT is making will likely be wrong for most athletes
ETA - I would suggest that limiting the time to what the plan started with is fairly logical as far as constraints go - and that AT should probably be taught that a block of time capped at 2 hours for a Z2 ride should be adjusted differently than a 2 hour cap on a sweet spot ride. Pushing UP on Z2 rides is not a good idea for most riders
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Yes, and I look at it another way (my point above hammer/nail analogy). You don’t need to progress everything. Endurance in particular is a game of balancing:
- endurance load against interval days
- ability to recover and hit hard on interval days
Once established, aerobic endurance shifts to maintenance work. Or looked at another way, its ongoing conditioning work to support hard interval work.
The science is pretty clear:
- you don’t need a lot of intensity
- too much intensity (above LT1) and it increases the recovery cost (nervous system)
- low intensity training improves heart’s ability to push more blood per heart beat
- low intensity training improves the (leg) muscles to work aerobically
The stuff that isn’t clear:
- how much or little maintenance aerobic endurance work you need to support interval
- at what intensity is going to drive up recovery cost, if you don’t test lactate, or have well developed perception of balancing intensity and recovery
What I’ve found:
- better performance on free rides and events, if I experiment and push up IF / %FTP on my z2 endurance rides. For example targeting 72-75% ftp later in endurance rides, versus say targeting 60% ftp.
Absolutely, same here, you posted as I was writing that last bullet. I did a 5 week low-aerobic build in Nov/Dec and I simply dialed back the % FTP / IF, and then in Jan/Feb I’ve kept endurance at 2-3 hours and pushed the % FTP / IF up. All by perception. Its not easy, because I’ve also found that longer warmups, say 40 minutes, I get stronger and then can smash intervals. So my coach usually gives me longer warmups at the expense of making mid-week workouts 2 hours.
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For that season. Then next season you can push that aerobic base higher, starting at a higher base than a year ago. Then maintain that higher base next season and so on.
Very few have maxxed out their aerobic base. There’s only so much you can improve each season. But you can keep improving it each season if you don’t let it whither too much after your main events.
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Yes, I’ve been consistent 7+ hours/week since late 2020 and each year have pushed my aerobic base higher. In power terms (at fixed heart rate), something like 150W season 1, 170W season 2, 190W season 3, and lately closer to 200W on a good day (no personal/work life drama). Meanwhile ftp has slowly crept up, from 260 to 275+.
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