The 3 zone L1 or the 5 zone l1?

would be nice to have standardized zones wouldn't it?

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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 think the three zone model is "widely" interpreted and applied by different coaches, it depends on how one determines exactly what VT1 and VT2 are.

VT1 is sometimes referred to as BL of 2.0 or the first turn point in breathing, or the tipping point between easy and sort of hard. This "aerobic threshold" and how you find it, and whether or not it exists is up for debate. 2mmol will mean a lot of different things to different athletes.

The VT2 threshold is a bit different, I think most people would say that it is 4mmol or about FTP or one hour pace. I think it was Canova who was basing the 3 zone model with a VT2 or threshold based on Marathon time (2 hours not one) and he was assigning work based on that. IE for some of his athletes VT1 would be 3:10 per km and VT2 would be 2:55 per km.

So a very narrow Z2 and almost all of the specific work was done there, right up the middle. Not much Z3 and only active recovery and warm up done in Z1 (which was a shit tonne IIRC) He was also saying that the Kenyans could hold a steady state BL of 5.0mmol not 4.0mmol. So still I guess a polarized model but for the longer (marathon athletes) the polarization was done in Z2, or a lot of the work in the specific phase close to a marathon was done within a very narrow range of race pace.

Maurice

Judging by this pdf (http://www.triathlon.org.nz/...%20Frankie%20Tan.pdf) ...

I think they're:

Zone 1 is L1-L2
Zone 2 is L3-L4
Zone 3 is L4 and beyond.

It gets confusing. Not to mention Coggan/Allen use 6 zones and Friel uses 5 zones with 5a, 5b, 5c. Sports scientists need to create their version of the IEEE and set up some standards.

I was referencing the 3 zone L1.

A series of slides from the video presentation:

This is the 5 zones he is talking about 1-5.
Zones 6-8 are anarobe zones.
http://www.olympiatoppen.no/...tsskala/page594.html#
(you will need to translate this page)

to all that have posted on this thread, I have to say a great big thank you.
this would have to be the most enlightening explanation of easy/hard or hi/lo training, or to any training method that I have seen.
clear, succinct, practical with not a single harsh comment .

thank you.

I got the impression they are talking about "20% of the workouts" not necessarily "20% of the training volume". A bike racer doing 20 hours a week would have a hard time doing 4 hours above 105% FTP every week. Or even a 15 hr week doing 3 hrs at those levels.

Hmmm...
*fires up wko+*

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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

ok I agree, this spring I was doing ~20 hours a week killing it a lot of the time and about 1 to 1.5 hours of above 105% is the most I would ever hit

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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

Maybe you were going too hard on your easy stuff?


Hugh

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

ha ... well that's one way to find out. I wasn't thinking including races though ... which might make it possible Just doing a pre-season training week, if I did 2 or even 3 days of 105%+ FTP workouts -- it wouldn't reach 3 hours. 6x5 (at probably 118%), 3x per week would still only get me 90 min.

You are right. The literature is talking about 2 sessions a week, rest should be easy.
2 sessions will be around 60 minutes (+/-) effective interval time.

The easy part is really easy. In cross country skiing you are calling it "talking speed". You should easily be able to talk, even when you are going uphill.

During intervals it is important to not start out to hard, the first interval should be the slowest.

It is a reason this system is using HR and lactate and not speed, speed will push the intensity up.

I think this work is completely focused on highly trained athletes and, has already been pointed out, for an athlete doing 20hours/week, the 80/20 means 4 hours above threshold which is a lot of work!
If I am on 6/8 hours/week it would result in just 1/1.5 hour of high intensity and the remaining 5/6 hours very easy: probably ok on tapering.

What I really doubt about this presentation is the disregard of the middle zone (classic Z3/ sweet spot/Z4) which instead give enough stimulus for building a good aerobic engine even with limited hours.

What I found instead quite interesting is the re-evaluation of LSD training but again only for high volume.

While he only quoted a single time-constrained study, the time constrained group did better with the polarized training as well.

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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

The 80/20 is numbers of sessions, not time spent. If you work out 10 times a week, two of them will be hard. Most likely the time spent in the hard zone will be around 1h. No top athletes can be in zone 4 for 4 hours a week.

This way of training is how cross country skiers in Scandinavia is brought up on. What is happening when you get older you add more easy training (more sessions and longer) and add more intervals. Intervals once or twice a week is enough.

The hard part with this concept is to understand that easy training is working. This is a different way of thinking than no pain no gain.

I did this when I was a cross country skier, and yes I even walked uphill if I had to to keep the HR down, and yes I was in great shape.

my golden cheetah distribution since oct has it as 26%tempo, 21%Sweetspot, 22% Threshold, 4% VO2max and 2% anaerobic.
This is without the extra 1.5 hours per day riding to the pool and back.
Its fair to stay I'm stuck in that threshold model!

Although in Jan, where I have shifted to a more polarized approach, Threshold and SST have gone down, tempo up slightly and VO2max and Anaerobic up slightly.
Still though, no where near 20% over threshold, I'm on about 10% now.

I have been trying to follow this Nordic polarized way of endurance training the past few years. I have to say, that especially with biking, I have progressed a lot better with focusing almost purely on sweetspot training during the past 2-3 winter months. My FTP has been in stagnation the past years and now I seem to have gained a significant leap forward (260W -> 305 W) just in few months (changed the training method in the beginning of november). I bike only 3-5 hrs in average per week and solely on rolllers (Elite e-Motion). At spring I intend to include a lot more longer 65-75 % FTP biking to the program.

In running though, I´m a big believer in polarization model. Just remember to include those 10-15 sec bursts to end of all slow jogs.

Swimming is a totally different beast in my opinion. I think with swimming you should stick with the intervals and avoid that sloppy continous kilometer gathering. Intervals with different speed and different RI´s.

Just my own personal experiences, absolutely no scientific background. It might be also a bit individual what method works best?

Interesting topic.

Here's a screenshot of how he defines the zones:

http://imgur.com/eY6RrP1

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My Blog

What is the RI on the 4x8:00 interval session?

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My Blog

the figures presented are in % (like 78% Z1, 4% Z2, 18% Z3) so it must be time percentage and not session percentage

sub-3-dad wrote:

What is the RI on the 4x8:00 interval session?

If I am not totally wrong, 2 minutes between the intervals.

Regarding the question about the 20/80 split. This is from Seiler's article 2009
http://www.sportsci.org/2009/ss.htm#_Toc245522385


The 80:20 Rule for Intensity[/url]
In spite of differences in the methods for quantifying training intensity, all of the above studies show remarkable consistency in the training distribution pattern selected by successful endurance athletes. About 80 % of training sessions are performed completely or predominantly at intensities under the first ventilatory turn point, or a blood-lactate concentration £2mM. The remaining ~20 % of sessions are distributed between training at or near the traditional lactate threshold (Zone 2), and training at intensities in the 90-100 %VO2max range, generally as interval training (Zone 3). An elite athlete training 10-12 times per week is therefore likely to dedicate 1-3 sessions weekly to training at intensities at or above the maximum lactate steady state. This rule of thumb coincides well with training studies demonstrating the efficacy of adding two interval sessions per week to a training program (Billat et al., 1999; Lindsay et al., 1996; Weston et al., 1997). Seiler and Kjerland (2006) have previously gone so far as say that the optimal intensity distribution approximated a “polarized distribution” with 75-80 % of training sessions in Zone 1, 5 % in Zone 2, and 15-20 % in Zone 3. However, there is considerable variation in how athletes competing in different sports and event durations distribute their training intensity within Zones 2 and 3.

I have just watched the second video, with the round table discussion. Most of it was just expanding on what had already been discussed.
But towards the end there is a very very interesting quote from the American chap, who states that in the polarized model they noted the lactate produced at low intensity, or endurance intensity steady went down over time, to barely anything (no details on whether power was increased to reflect what presumably was a reduced effort required). And at high intensity the ability to produce lactate increased. I think I have that correct. So obviously, with lactate used as a fuel at high intensities that is a good thing.

Now, he then goes on to say that the opposite was observed in the threshold model, presumably meaning that lactate levels were increased at lower intensities and also inability to generate lactate at high intensities, or use it.

I don't remember seeing any evidence for this second statement. Its fine to state the first one, if thats what they have found, but I would have thought that if you followed the threshold model and pushed your thresholds up then the first aspect (reduced lactate at lower intensities) should be true.

Also, to think of this as a different way. Clearly the polarized model replicates road cycling better, with long periods in low intensity with bursts of high intensity, but surely the threshold model replicates TT/Tri better? Yes in many of these studies 40k TT was improved, but were they using time triallists/well trained triathletes?

Hi guys (seems to just be guys that debate this stuff :-)

Stephen Seiler here. Got a nice tip about this website and discussion from Halvard Berg (he and I have balanced out the American-Nowegian immigration quota). Really enjoyed reading the comments regarding the polarized training model. As several have correctly pointed out, I am definitely not smart enough to have invented a new and better way to train. Polarized training is not "new". I have, however, applied for trademark protection of the term (just kidding!). What I have hopefully been smart enough to do is observe and aggregate the told and untold story in a lot of research and test some hypotheses that emerge, while always trying to keeping the language balanced between good science and good real-world communication.

One little point regarding interval training, and some comments regarding 4x4 minutes versus 4x8 minutes etc. Folks, do not attribute to me some magic interval training formula, because I do not believe there is one. What I do believe our studies and others suggest is that intensity and accumulated duration interact to determine the intracellular signalling for adaptation, and not "just intensity". This currently popular idea that intensity eats duration for breakfast is wrong because by extension you end up with 20 second intervals at supersonic intensity and an accumulated duration of say 3 minutes! I know we Americans have a short attention span, but our cellular signalling mechanisms apparently do not. So, whether we are talking 30s-15s,2 min, 4min, or 8 min interval, if we manipulate work and rest duration correctly, and build accumulated duration (number of interval bouts) with increasing fitness, it seems that we can achieve effective signaling for adaptation. The ceiling effects on intensity alone are substantial and our measurements of RPE suggest that the transition from "92%" VO2 max to "97%" during interval training induces a special kind of hell that does dot provide a clear payoff physiologically, BUT really cuts down on the tolerable accumulated duration. In the no pain, no gain lingo, the pain-to-gain ratio becomes too high, even for damn tough endurance athletes training a LOT and thinking long term development, so they use "4 x4" intensity surprisingly sparingly. I think this may explain why when I look at the interval training regimes of our gold medal winners in Norway, what impresses is not the lactate concentration during intervals or the heart rate, but just how many minutes they can accumulate at those high workloads.

Thanks for posting Stephen,

A question or a summary maybe?

Would you argue that under the polarized model that it would be better to extend the duration of intensity at say 105% of FTP (ftp for the sake of argument being steady Max effort you could hold for 1 hour) with say 3X8 min intervals then over a period of time moving towards say 6-7X8 min at 105%?

In other words it seams like multiple longer intervals at just above threshold (say 105%) and then extending those intervals to maybe an hour. And then at that point re-evaluting "threshold" and re-setting interval power or pace are better than a shorter amount of work at what might be called "Vo2 max work" or say 5-10 times 3 minutes at 110-120% FTP with equal rest.

It sounds like the training response is not so much based on raising the intensity but extending the duration of the intensity or the amount of work that can be done over time.

Thanks,
Maurice