It will be interesting to see how Amy’s LT2 responds to the upcoming training block that specifically targets it.
It is no real surprise that it drifted down a touch with ~12 weeks of no specific threshold / threshold plus training, but it seems reasonable to expect that her aerobic fitness should be able to support the training designed to raise her threshold.
Do you watch their content sometimes? I watch occasionally and I hate to admit it but I was doubter. I thought there was no way in the world she would be able to ride all the TDF stages plus the transfer.
It is good to have you on the forum. You have a combination of knowledge/experience and I appreciate your contributions.
I have been aware of Amy’s youtube channel for a while, but it was only during her TdeF epic that I paid it much attention (and that was a result of her daily updates that featured on the Cade Media youtube Tour de France summaries).
Apparently she was in a cafe at the same time as a group ride I was on once too. I didn’t know that until someone mentioned it on our ride home though! So she missed the chance of getting herself a selfie with me
I love your contributions as well. As I said originally you bring another side to these conversations that is a great contribution even if I don’t exactly like your click bait video titles
Yes, if you read Maffetone’s stuff, Mark Allen saw amazing results with a very long base period of zone 2 but again in his case it was fixing a broken super athlete. Triathletes and runners are much more likely to be broken or on the verge of broken. But many people had experiences like yours in all endurance sports a nice bump in aerobic performance with a “z2” focus for a period. But I see a Zone 2 focus just like pro cyclists have done for a very long time which is a base period. How long and if a person can benefit from a base period depends on a lot of factors.
People are always trying to optimize progress quickly and I think more important is to try to have a plan that just keeps progress going year after year as long as possible and for consistent athletes a base period should usually be a part of that.
Hal Higgdon was one of the most famous running coaches/authors in the past and he said new runners should do a base period for about 2 years when starting out. Again that is more specific to running where the injury rates are so high.
Polarized and zone 2 has been great because they have brought a lot of attention to something people were not aware of but it has turned into marketing buzz words but I think that negative is worth the positives.
Year round true Polarized sounds like a terrible plan to me… Although if you just want to do zwift races 12 months a year it might be ok.
Even allowing that there is scope for the “20% hard” to cover a lot of different workout types, there are scenarios where it is not possible to build a plan that optimally respects specificity, progressive overload and periodisation with just polarized training.
For most of us, where the time available to train is a big constraint, we have to decide how to trade off time / volume versus intensity. Making more of our workouts “hard” is the obvious option to try to squeeze a bit more progress, a bit more quickly.
But balancing that is not an easy thing to do and we have to (sometimes grudgingly) accept that if we had more time available to train, we would train differently to the way we end up training.
And no matter how hard the six hour per week athlete makes her workouts, there comes a point where the athlete with more time available to train can do more work per week, every week. As @MedTechCD wrote above “In the long run, total work done is what makes you excell.”
Mostly we just have to accept that reality. Some of the people that we ride with / against have (and take) the opportunity to do more work than us and that is a hard advantage to erode.
Let’s have a video on that theme! Top tier basketball: Jay Williams on Kobe
Not trying to be contrarian just for the sake of it, but if someone just wants to get better at cycling if they used 80/20 with 5x weekly rides including 1x weekly hard ride whether it is 4x8, 4x4, 4x16, doesn’t even start with a 4, etc… someone could do a lot worse in my opinion.
The studies aren’t long enough and perhaps too intense, but they do show vast improvement. HIIT clearly provides an excellent stimulus for improvement.
If someone’s goals are obviously poorly aligned then the lack of specificity is a problem.
Yes as @Ivegotabike alluded to that misses out on a lot of fundamentals of training. Progressive overload, variety, volume increases… So it’s a reasonable plan to keep you in shape and healthy, it’s not likely a plan that will get you in peak shape and keep you progressing year after year. Since virtually no one does this, and for sure no pros ever do anything close this, there is no reason to think this is a good long term 12 month a year plan.
But on the flip side I agree with you. For a dead simple plan, for a non-serious rider that just wants to be healthy and reasonably fast it could be fine.
What the pros do matters, in the sense that they do something that produces the best results. So I am not suggesting we should get out and ride 25 hours a week. I am just saying no one does year in year out polarized training. So if no one does it, why would we think it’s a good idea? Because some 12 week study says it did better than sweetspot? Dr Seiler kind of does it but he is already pretty elite and just wants to stay in shape.
So if your goal is to stay in shape polarized is a reasonable plan. If your plan is to attempt to progress long term there’s no reason to think that is a good plan.
I should say most pros do some form of pyramidal training that results in part of the year being 0-5% very hard and a peak period might be 20% very hard. So if you define polarized just by how much hard you do (average for the year) then yes it’s a great plan especially when doing tons of volume.
Seiler references what pros do in many of his references so they are a big part of his opinion.
But let’s frame it differently. If someone wanting to “just get better at cycling” has the time available to consistently do 5x weekly rides, is there a better plan than having her do that 80/20 mix of rides every week?
Someone could certainly do a lot worse. But they could probably do a good bit better too.
I don’t think it takes many weeks of consistently and persistently doing 5x training rides per week, before someone starts to explore options other than whatever plan it was that they started out with.
Having cracked consistency they will be well on the way to uncovering the other inalienable principles of cycling training (specificity, progressive overload, periodisation) and working out how to apply them to their own plan.
Polarized training in my opinion is not optimal, but non-optimal does not equal terrible.
Pros and Joes may as well be a different species. Joey Lunchbox trying to emulate Pogacar’s training plan is likely to be a disaster. Maybe a super scaled down version of what Pogacar does would make sense, but there’s a higher probability of this being a terrible plan in my opinion than 80/20 style polarized.
Amateur cyclists do all kinds of really dumb training plans. How many stories are there of amateur cyclists cooking themselves in the search for improvement?
I think the true spirit of what polarized is trying to get across is to keep it sustainable. Keep the hard days hard and the easy days easy.
If you follow a true 80/20 methodology I don’t see how you can cook yourself. Maybe you won’t improve as much as you would with a different plan, but the downside is limited.
I generally agree with 90+% of what you say and you’re kind of my indirect coach so I’m not trying to be difficult.
Yes exactly. 4x8 + zone 2 was just the study. That’s it. It’s fine, it’s dead simple, you will be in shape, probably not broken but I also believe their is a lot of evidence to show that more variety is likely a better plan.
You need some of that sweet spot I used to be kind anti-sweet spot but more because everyone thought it’s all you should be doing (it’s the Zone 2 of the previous decade)… I think most people have learned that 5 days a week of SS is not the best long term plan. Just like years on end of Zone 2 is probably not the best for top performance. 5XSS maybe a good TT plan or good for FTP tests.
Highnorth has a good page on Polarised Cycling Training (that’s how we spell it over here!) that attempts to deal with a lot of the recent points in this thread
If any of the 8 topics grab your attention, you can see the url in the screenshot.
Is an extract from the Billat paper cited. It is a badly chosen extract as the very paragraph it comes from concludes by saying there is no correlation between this and marathon performance time.
The time crunched “polarised” example week plan needs to be taken in the context set by the “Polarised training for time crunched cyclists” section of the page. Crudely that says truly polarised doesn’t work well enough for time crunched cyclists in their view, so they butcher the principle a bit, but don’t change the name.
The points made in the context setting are way more useful than that example week.
I The article is ok but why did they include this