I keep thinking I should be training more. more volume etc. I don't have any time constrains and I think I could train (time wise) as much as my body could take.
Yet because almost all of my quality training sessions happen on the trainer I tend to gravitate towards training around threshold. For instance I did 2 hours last night, I could have just spun along at endurance power, but I would have gotten very bored. I had breaking bad on in front of me and wanted to watch 3 episodes.
So I decided to do 45mins at 80%FTP, 45 mins at 85% and 45 at 90%.
I had already done an hour and a half in the morning on the singlespeed running errands around the city.

I still can't decide whether I should use my time to my advantage and start exploring a polarized approach. I have moved a little towards this in the last 2 weeks, changing my 2x20s for 2.5min intervals x as many as I can do, every 3-4 days. Currently I have managed to do more work during each of these sessions, power has been the same (but then I am trying to keep it the same and not go too hard. I'm aiming for 120% FTP in these intervals.
But the problem is, I have no one to train with, so no one to log the miles with and to be honest I don't like the idea of going out and riding for 3-4 hours on my own in crap weather!

Interesting that active recovery (as a result of low intensity workouts) isn't so much as mentioned in the lecture or roundtable. I'm not a scientist, but I believe in the validity of active recovery.

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Madison photographer Timothy Hughes | Instagram

Yeah, It seems that too many want to compress their gains to just a few months. There's a reason Olympic athletes train on an Olympic cycle, one that is a multi-year approach, rather than a few months.

I'm interested in this question too... That's what I was asking myself.

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-D

A couple salient things that help me make sense from the round table/original presentation:

Good ROI out of hard workouts when athletes are in high spirits and largely fresh. Rather than, say, a beat-down on a beaten down athlete.

Racing itself may provide sufficient stimulus at the sports-specific levels of intensity, so the rest of your training can actually be more moderate for longer (or specific sessions at much higher intensity)

A lot of this seems to fall in line with what we hear about elite runners in several African training camps...so nothing terribly novel. Or Lydiard, for that matter.

Given the non-linearity between effort and output (power, so to speak), I'd suggest that (and having met a few olympic/high-level athletes in my time) the takeaway is to get a very large amount of solid effort (but one that you can get up and do again the next day no problem) and then a couple time a week (15-20% ish of total training time) give it stick. Given the duration of our racing, those should be more threshold-ish sessions than higher intensity.

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The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.

-Albert J. Nock

If you read the first chapter of Olbrecht's book which is online at

http://www.lactate.com/sciwin_ch01.html

You will see the following



For Olbrecht the most time consuming part of training is regeneration after the proper stimulus has been applied.

A quote from the chapter

"Requirements for a Successful Super-Compensation Process:

1. A healthy body: inflammation, overtraining, mental stress, etc. strongly reduce the possibility for super-compensation

2. Adequate training intensity and volume: This is probably the most delicate, even crucial aspect of successful training. Indeed, the training must be just long enough (volume) and just hard enough (intensity) to stimulate the body in such a way as to induce morphological (structural) and functional adaptations. When training is too hard and/or too long, it will break down the body too much and will actually impede the process of super-compensation. So, the real art is always adjusting intensity and volume to meet the purpose of the training as well as the conditioning and mental state of the athlete. We will come back to this later

3. Enough rest (passive or active rest): rest or regenerative workouts will make up most of an athlete’s training time. Insufficient rest or insufficient low intensity training (regeneration training) between important training sessions prevents the body from achieving super-compensation"

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Jerry Cosgrove

Sports Resource Group
http://www.lactate.com
https://twitter.com/@LactatedotCom

I have not found any literature about swimming. Most of the research done in Norway has been around sports where Norwegians have excelled and swimming is not one of them. I guess the principles will be the same, intervals harder than race pace and longer sessions slower. But of course you break up a swimming session more than running and cycling. (just remember I am not an expert on swimming, know more about skiing)

For triathlon to follow this principals I think you can target 1 session per discipline. 80-90% of time spent should be easy. In his presentation he hard 20% of sessions are hard, but 90% time spent is easy. Of course top athletes have more time to work out :-)

Olbrecht said once that he would often have the triathlete enter a local swim meet in a 500 m or 1000 m freestyle event. This would be their anaerobic workout for that week in swimming and serve a secondary purpose of measuring their progress. Harder to do for track or cycling but there is nearly always a swim meet going on locally.

He also said there is no more stressful workout than a competition so be careful with how many the athlete schedules. Especially cyclists who sometimes want to race every weekend. It is also why he says to stay away from the threshold. It is too stressful because the athlete can maintain the pace for a long time.

He also says there are always exceptions and some athletes respond differently to the same type of stimulus and it usually takes about 18 months of experimenting to find out what is best for each athlete.

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Jerry Cosgrove

Sports Resource Group
http://www.lactate.com
https://twitter.com/@LactatedotCom

I just listened to a podcast on Polarization and it is 2-3, max 4 hard interval days across ALL disciplines. http://www.zentriathlon.com/...olarized-method.html

The podcast is interesting. But it miss the main point about the intervals. Usually you want to go longer than a typical 4x4 intervals. In the video they used 4x8 minutes.

The main thing is not to have to many hard sessions, or too many minutes hard. If you work out 10h, 1h can be in interval intensity..

My situation exactly. And what I also struggle with quite a bit.

This way of training is not only for the top athletes. This is the most common way of training in rowing, xc-skiing, biathlon and cycling in Norway (and I am sure the same is true for Sweden). I grew up in this system and the hardest part is to go slow enough.

What happens is that when athletes are growing up, they actually add more easy workouts. I remember that we start adding a 2h easy run when we were 12, and that was common. And yes, we walked up hills to keep the HR down.

It is actually liberating not to think about speed or distance, but hard to keep the speed down and to find the right intensity on intervals.

Coggan debate? No way. He would have no way to delete dissenting opinions.

Interesting about 4x4 vs 4x8 intervals. From my review of available material on the Internet, it seems like as long as you accumulate up to 20% of training volume as "hard" that should be sufficient for benefit. Do you think beyond that, the type of "hard" effort (ie 4x4 vs 4x8) further increases the benefit? Does it have to be 4x8 or can it be a mix of different intervals such as 30sec, 1 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute....up to 8 minutes as long as it equals the 20%?

Endurance training is debated a lot in Norway, even in the newspapers. During the presentation he mention 4x4 intervals. 4x4 is used as a term in a debate between the easy+hard camp vs a lot more intervals (4x4 camp). This is hard to know without living in Norway or read Norwegian :-)

Usually you want some longer intervals, but you can do 10x3 minutes as long as the rest period is not too long. In testing they are using 2 minutes a lot. For adults you want the intervals for one session to add close to 30 minutes (of course this depend on level, as a youth skier we used a lot of 3x5, and 4x5 when I was 14/15 years old)

Thanks again for your insight! Off-hand, are you aware of any coaches/training plans that incorporate the polarization concepts?

He used to debate here so much, without being able to delete dissenting opinions that he was asked to leave.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

I am sure the principals are used here in the US, but the term polarized training is maybe not used.

Polarized training is not difficult. They way it is incorporated in Norway is that the athlete should be empowered to know what is right. The coach is more there to discuss, not so much to write a plan in detail. Here you have some writing from a American biathlon athlete that spent a year in Norway.

Preparations started last weekend when coach Torgersen asked me to produce a training plan for the week prior to the national competition. The Norwegian training philosophy before important races is that everyone has a different individual recipe for being in top physical form. Therefore, everyone had their own “training recipe” prior to these big races. Me, on the other hand, had no idea of what to do so I looked through my old training diaries (finally putting them to some good use!) and put together a plan for the week. I knew it probably wasn’t going to be perfect the first time around, but at least it’s a starting place to learn from. Anyway, I felt that my training the week before the championships was well thought out and had some benefits.
http://blogs.fasterskier.com/...008/09/21/sommer-nm/

Again, I feel that discussing Norwegian training is best done in reference to the experiences I had before traveling to Norway, which included a detailed and structured training plan created by the coach for the training group I was participating with—both in college and in Minnesota. In each situation, training plans had morning and afternoon sessions that I followed dutifully with not too much thought as to how they were formulated.
This “show up and train” mentality, if I can call it that, was challenged as soon as I got to Norway. I still remember my first workout with Team Statkraft Lillehammer, a roller-ski and shooting workout, where I asked the coach, Tobias, “What do you want me to do today?” I received a blank star and he said something like, “um… don’t you have something to work on? We are having easy skiing and shooting today…” There was nothing specific about how long the workout should be or how much I should shoot—simple things I’m usually told. After a somewhat confusing and frustrating workout, I launched myself into the encyclopedia that is Norwegian training.
From that point on I realized that planning on my behalf needed to play a larger role. At least in regard to the structure of easy trainings—intensity trainings were planed along with other time-trials or tests. This caused a greater thought process in choosing workouts, as well as asks the question, “What works for me?”
http://blogs.fasterskier.com/...ll-treningsfilosofi/

Within the same overall approach you will find individual variations.

The American cross country team is one of the most improved teams the last years. And Kikkan Randall is the fastest sprint skate skier in the world and huge favorite of the Olympics. Here you will have a nice write up by a top Norwegian skier that trained with the Americans.
In our team we are much more strict with intensity, controlling pulse and lactate both in L1 and L3 training. Especially when training at altitude.
The fact remains that it is still harder for us to go slow, than to go fast – we are always eager to take a new step. But sometimes it is best not to push the limits. When we do L3-intervals at home we never go together in a group because history has told us that someone will always push too hard when we ski in a pack.
http://skitrax.com/66180/

Jack Daniels has long been an advocate for ~80% easy and 20% hard. Pretty much a poster child of polarized training since way back when.


Hugh

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

I am being dense, I assume, but does the methodology in the hi/lo or polarized training then stand in direct opposition to the concept of a boatload of trainer sweet spot workouts over the winter on the bike? i.e. their weekly bike plan would be lots of recovery/endurance riding (50-75% FTP) and a sprinkling of supra-threshold/vo2 intervals? I am just trying to wrap my head around what they are saying.

Not really really that hard on your hard days. It would seem more like a LOT of ones sessions done at the bottom end of the sweet spot (or a little easier), and a couple of sessions a week where you light it up threshold style (at least for our events). The key was making sure you're pretty fresh (i.e. don't feel like a zombie) for those harder sessions and tune the rest of your week around achieving as much volume as sensible.

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The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important.

-Albert J. Nock

I'm still here. I just decided to stop posting when the powers-that-be decided to censor actual scientific debate* (as opposed to the sorts of snarky comments that permeate the internet).

*EDIT: Here's an example:

https://www.academia.edu/...siol_1997_24_896-900

Their "easy" zone would intersect with the sweet spot zone to a large degree, so maybe not direct opposition.

I'd be interested in a more fine grained breakdown of the efforts involved, I'd like to know how easy, easy is.

power based level 2 is pretty "easy" but a 3 hour ride at level 2 is somewhat grueling. It isn't just tooling around comfortably.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

Thanks Hugh...I have Daniels Running Formula so will incorporate that as my running program. I'm trying to figure out what a polarized Ironman bike program looks like. From what I've seen, it looks like two to three 75-90 minute rides at 70% of FTP and a hard day of 4x8 intervals

Isn't sweet spot 85-95% FTP? That would be greater than L1 in the linked presentation. Would it really make sense to call a ride "sweet spot" if it is below the aerobic threshold?