Maybe they are in Canada...............;-)

You see this as well in other sports, canada in freesyle skiing and some short track events and the U.S. in some of the "extreme" slope events.

I think it has a lot to do with IOC desired minimum feild size, and country participation. The winter olympic sports are often a bit "elitist" and only so many countries have the conditions, money, and programing to field even one decent athlete who has a chance at even a top 10.

Maurice

Haha..... Careful, you guys are at the top now, but pretty soon speed skating and nordic will be over.

I actually thought that you guys had some great athletes in the slope/extreme events, this side is also becoming a culture in Norway.

Maurice

Iñigo Mujika reports this distribution for the 8th female triathlete at 2012 year end and 7th in London 2012:

• swim 74%±6%, 16%±2%, 10±2%
• bike 88%±3%, 10%±1%, 2.1%±0.2%
• run 85%±2%, 8.0%±0.3%, 7%±0.3%

training performed at intensities below her individual lactate threshold (ILT), between the ILT and the onset of blood lactate accummulation (OBLA), and above the OBLA.

source: Olympic Preparation of a World-Class Female Triathlete

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Ale Martinez
www.amtriathlon.com

Interesting. Thanks
Still more time in that middle zone than what is presented, correct ?
Would be interesting to see how that is distributed over the year.

The Brownlees seem to use a polarized model based on what's been published about their training.

Cept for swimming, where the recovery rate is quite quick.

From what I have seen of the Brownlees having ridden and ran with Ali, I'd say that was pretty true although no one including them would say they were doing it intentionally! Its more a case of lots of easy miles up and around the dales combined with hammering yourself silly every so often.
Their capacity for hard work is quite miraculous.

Anyway.
How are the guys doing who have switched to a more polarized model recently?
My experience is going pretty well, I have switched from sweetspot/threshold work 3-4 times a week to approx 10-15 hours of what would be coggan zone 2, so around 75% FTP. Sessions on the rollers around 2.5-3 hours at this intensity, with 3 HIIT bike sessions over the 9 day training blocks and 3 run intervals.
No SS to speak of, but in a 20 min test today the power for that was up by 12w from a few weeks ago, having climbed steadily then stopped. So I reckon thats not bad going!

what distance are you racing ?
do you plan to stay "polarized" all the way to next race day ?

This year I'm racing, standard distance duathlon and triathlon.
But my main focus is on half ironman, a few close races last year that I want to improve on.
My swim is poor, its always going to be, so my aim is to do a race distance that suits this (HIM) and work on my bike run.

I'm not sure, I have a standard distance duathlon March 22nd, and was thinking of doing another two 9 day blocks of polarisation then a transition into threshold as race prep for 2 weeks.

Didn't Mark Allen do something like this? Lots of volume and kept it under a certain heart rate. Once the test stagnant - race or high intensity than back at it again.

I will race some half IM races this year. And yes I will stay "polarized" all year.
When taper I will keep the same intervals, but do less easy.
This kind of training has worked for me before, so I know it will do that again. But as always, consistency is the most important part of training. Progress takes time.

Well, we may not polarize, but we have THIS
http://msn.foxsports.com/...ics-021014?gt1=39002


try topping that !

What do your HIIT intervals look like if you don't mind sharing?

I'm very interested in training blocks like the 9-day one you mentioned. I know that there is not only one way to put it together, but what kind of workouts are you filling the 9 days with?

I think this is a pretty important point about establishing LT vs rise in LT, or VT2 vs rise and how it is specific to your event, time of year etc....

That tipping point between yellow and green could mean any steady state maximal effort between 8 minutes and 2 or more hours, really it is about how one chooses to define "polarization" also keeping in mind that the goal of the model is to have a high % of working threshold at low BL, and then a good An capacity at the end, this is what 5-10km runners, nordic skiers, and ITU racers *might* need, maybe not so much HIM and IM AG'ers.

So depending on how you look at it it could be highly polarized or maybe a lot of stuff strait up the middle. I have seen a few people who work shift (nurses, heavy industry workers etc) 12 hours a day/night who may walk up to 100km in a 4X12 hour set, that is a shit tonne of polarization (for the run) and for the average AG athlete.

Maurice

My 3 HIIT sessions are -
Ascending intervals, 10 minute intervals where you move up by 10 watts every 2 minutes, so 5 stages.
Then 1 min rest, then the second 10 minute interval starts at 10w higher than the first.
I do these to failure but try and get to somewhere in number 4.

For reference the first 2 minutes of the first interval is normally around 10w below FTP. So in the first 10 minutes you spend 2 mins below, 2 mins at and 6 mins above FTP.
Then the second you're starting at FTP.

It's a challenging workout!

2nd HIIT is 4 minute intervals x6 aiming for around 115-120 FTP, but the key is the rest is reducing. So after the first interval it's 3.5 mins then goes down by 30 seconds each time. So ends on around 1.5 mins.

3rd session is straight up 2 minute intervals at above 120% FTP with 4 minute rest x 8


The reason I use a 9 day cycle is simple, I sometimes extend to 10 days, but currently it's 9. A week is too short physiologically I have found, with me personally. If I do a workout and do the same one a week later I don't necessarily improve in the session, however if I do it after 9 days I almost always improve. I concluded that my physiology takes around 9 days to start responding to the given stimulus and put mechanisms in place to improve. This is particularly evident with this type of vo2max training. 9 days also gives more breathing space, I think most people try to cram too much work into each week.

How old are you? As I've gotten older, I've noticed the same thing you mention here-need more recovery (absorbtion) time.

2 x 9 day cycle separated by 5 easy days gives you two 9 day blocks in 23 days, meaning you can get 4 weekends to work this over 3 weeks and only two of those weekdays are stressful from a training angle. I think this is very practical for most age groupers. Basically every alternate group of weekdays ends up being quite light, but you are training hard every weekend. So it kind of ends up being "one week heavy, one week light"...but every weekend is heavy on training load (be it intensity or volume).

Dev

Not that old, but as I say I don't really view it as recovery time, its more that if you are doing the same sessions and using the performance in those sessions as markers of improvement then I think you need to work out the 'cycle' your body is on.
FWIW I think I remember Brett Sutton saying that all of his athletes were on cycles of more than 7 days, with the typical being 9-10.
He never fulled explained why (and I don't think he fully understood the physiology behind it) but it was something he gleaned from experience.
Along with many of Brett's training methods he didn't really understand why they worked, they just did.

If you always try and get your sessions into a 7 day schedule you will at some point either be overloading, if you are getting in all the key sessions, or not doing enough key sessions to really have an effect.
Having 9 days allows me to fit in,
3 key bike sessions, 3 key run sessions and 3 key swim sessions. I could not fit those in a week and would end up not doing 1-2 of them, passing them over to the next week when the others would suffer.

Dutch speedskating anyone?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24408352

Didn't have access to the whole article (which would give the real details), but the conclusions were:
"The relation between total training hours and time (successive Olympiads) was not progressive (r = .51, P > .5). A strong positive linear relation (r = .96, P < .01) was found between training distribution in zone 1 and time. Zones 2 and 3 both showed a strong negative linear relation to time (r = -.94, P < .01; r = -.97, P < .01). No significant relation was found between speed skating hours and time (r = -.11, P > .05). This was also the case for inline skating and time (r = -.86, P > .05). Conclusions: These data indicate that in speed skating there was a shift toward polarized training over the last 38 y. This shift seems to be the most important factor in the development of Olympic speed skaters. Surprisingly there was no relation found between training hours, skating hours, and time."

At least somewhat interesting that it was how they trained, not really how much. Surely, there has to be SOME critical volume to achieve results, but perhaps those are reached fairly quickly and equipment/technique play a larger role at speeds approaching 30 mph. This is a big red flag for me, but maybe the pool has already thinned to include only the top skaters, excluding an AG-type athlete.

If someone has access to the full article, maybe they can point out major flaws in the analysis, noting that it's a retrospective and not a designed trial. -J

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Life is tough. But it's tougher when you're stupid. -John Wayne

Read the paper -- their old data had to be "fit" to lactate values by having present near-elite athletes do said workouts and figure out where their lactate levels fell. Very surprised how low their numbers are--even if it is hard to get sufficient ice time per year. Especially given the 10k is a ~12 minute event.

Weightlifting was accounted for in terms of total hours per year, but not used in the L1/L2/L3 distribution (given the difficulty of doing so).

And really the data set is 88-2010 and oh by the way '72. The quality of 98-onwards training logs is much much higher.

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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

How low is low for time? 10h /wk? Just ballpark.

And that's a pretty clever way to estimate the earlier lactate levels. Guess really it's a 12 year review with some extrapolation, but that's still pretty good. Thx Derf!

-j

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Life is tough. But it's tougher when you're stupid. -John Wayne

Hours/week


'72: 5.6
'88: 7.6
'92: 5.8
'98: 6.1
'06: 11.9
'10: 6.6

Also, this was only males, also.

(Oh, and you're welcome! Interesting stuff for me as well, since, at least looking at my bike power summary from the last years, I'm firmly in the "threshold" camp)

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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

After what I have read, a long distance speed skater will train close to 1,000 hours a year. I am sure there are some variation, but they train a lot, also on the bike. Sven Kramer is a good cyclist.

Just watched that guy for the 3rd time since you posted it - he's really made me re-consider how much intensity I do. And how I distribute it.

Although wonder how his 9 sessions of high intensity during the month works for 3 sport athletes - that would mean only 3 high intensity sessions for each discipline per month, unless I'm mis-understanding something.

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Advocating for research & treatment for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME).
http://www.meaction.net/about/what-is-me/

"Suck it up, Buttercup"
(me, to myself, every day)