Hi everyone, need your opinion on this training program. I’m currently doing the HV polarized. I’m on my 2nd week. Is it OK to participate in fast group rides? Or it will conflict with the program?
The point of the ‘polarized’ approach is lots of ‘easy’ days so you can hit small amounts of ‘hard’ days and really nail them - eg no build up of fatigue that will compromise the high intensity days.
Fast group rides will be far too hard to be considered an easy day. but often also dont actually create enough high intensity work to provide a worthwhile ‘hard’ day either, so may well impact the plan. It does depend on the group ride though of course - generally people will include a fast group ride like this INSTEAD of one of the interval days, and then keep the overall TiD roughly the same.
If you do it as a 3rd hard day then you’removing away from the TiD associated with a more polarized approach and it will be more like 50/50 easy/hard days. That may or may not be a good or bad thing for you and your training…but it wont really be polarised any more and I have no doubt will catch up with you and impact your ability to complete those hard days 100% further down the line.