Great lecture. I am sold!!!

Bump,

Thanks for the link.

Maurice

Good information, thank you for sharing this.

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Two wheels good. Four wheels bad.

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Cool vid. Along those lines I read somewhere that the Brownlees hardly do any of their hard run training at race pace...it is all faster.

Seiler is the anti-Coggan;-) I'd love to see those two have a debate!

One thing that would be interesting is to map their defined intensity zones onto the Coggan power zones. How easy is all that easy, and how hard is the hard? I always think of it in terms of % of FTP so it is hard for me to glance at those charts an know what it means.

I was surprised that even the time constrained athletes did better with the polarized approach, that is eye opening for me.

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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

This is the training I am used to from cross country skiing. Easy or hard, nothing in the middle.

I also wonder sport-specificity. The rowing regime as described sounds more like a "solid" cycling program.

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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've been scouring for months to find more info on this, other than what I've seen in Runner's World. This was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for posting!

For the aspiring new crop of NCAA coaches, there is an interesting video from Inigo Majuka on 4 year planning in ITU races etc.

Found it interesting that swim volume is almost as big as the bike for ITU athletes. With this athlete it looks like run volume was lower than the other two.

Another 4-5 videos on the side bar.

Maurice

A point to note for those who don't watch the video, or make it to the end - it looks like longer intervals at a slightly lower intensity are better than shorter at higher, ie accumulated time is important at the cost of attainable intensity. For example, 4 x 8 minutes at 90% VO2 max better than 4 x 4 mins at 95%.

So, don't conclude that if some polarisation is good, more is better. This lecture doesn't say the high intensity training is 30 sec intervals at Zone 10 or whatever as the high intensity portion - eg Tabata style.

Like several other people, there was little new to me on the video until that last bit on recreational runners which refers to his 2013 study. The model I had in my head was that the intensity distribution seen in elite athletes was a function of the time available to train, so inevitably 80% of the 30hrs/week had to be at low intensity. But that if you are training 10 hrs per week then that distribution has to change. In Seiler's paper (http://www.sportsci.org/2009/ss.htm), he even says:

"Elite endurance athletes train 10-12 sessions and 15-30 h each week. Is the pattern of 80 % below and 20 % above lactate threshold appropriate for recreational athletes training 4-5 times and 6-10 hours per week? There are almost no published data addressing this question."

However, even in that 2009 paper he refers to an unpublished study on recreational runners that suggested polarised training works for them too.

So, evidence accumulating that for recreational endurance athletes, the polarised model works well also. Into the bin goes the Flanagan Method, the nslckevin 2x20 Sweet Spot method, and EN?

I still struggle with this. The strong evidence is that a 30hr/week elite athlete should follow a polarised training model. Much less evidence that recreational athletes should too. But what about (like myself) an ex-20hr/week guy who says 'screw this, I'm reducing my training hours way down but still want to race as fast as I can'.

I'd guess that their 'zone 3' would be in the range of 106-120% of FTP (which as I recall is what's called out in the Coggan/Allen book for VO2Max type intervals). That would seem to correspond to the interval durations they mention -- 4 to 8 min.

No, if you're talking about his 5 zone system, then Z3 is well above VT1 and well below VT2. I think this is about SS or tempo effort.

I was referring to his 3 zone breakdown. Forgetting about the zone and just looking at the interval duration, he talked about 4 & 8, which I think would equate to roughly the 106-120% FTP (or somewhere thereabouts ... low end for the longer interval, higher end for the shorter)

Their threshold zone would hover right around FTP, iirc that was zone2 in their 3 zone system?

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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

This video is in sync with what Jan Olbrecht has been prescribing for his athletes for over 20 years. What Seiler calls Polarized training has also been calle Hi-Lo training and has been popular for over 25 years in certain areas of Europe. An essential part of Olbrecht's recommend training was to keep away from the threshold in training except for very special instances during the last month of training before a major competition. Why? Because threshold training breaks down too much.

Olbrecht wrote a book on this about 17 years ago in Dutch and it was then translated into English and published in 2000. The book is called the Science of Winning. It is now available as an ebook or in print.

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

Also his ideas on training were published on our website in 1998 in a section on triathlon training.

http://www.lactate.com/...hlon/index_1998.html

These ideas first published on the web in 1998 were essentially ignored. A more extensive discussion on endurance training is on our expanded triathlon site.

http://www.lactate.com/triathlon/index.html

Olbrecht was the training advisor for Luc van Lierde and to several other current and former world record holders/champions. He now works with Luc as part of van Lierde's group of advisors. He first met Luc in the 1980's when Luc was an age group swimmer and a couple years later started the long training process that led to Luc's world records.

He also has been advising the Dutch swimming team since the mid 1990's and Dutch rowing since the early 2000's.

Also here is a web article by Seiler from a few years ago:

http://www.sportsci.org/2009/ss.htm

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Jerry Cosgrove

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

There are several other videos from this conference that took place last October. In a round table discussion Seiler and Steven Ingham discuss this training model in response to a question asked from the audience.

http://www.canal-insep.fr/...ei_13_10_va_tr_1-mov

Start about 23:20 into the round table discussion video just linked. For all the videos from the conference goto

http://www.canal-insep.fr/...13?page=1&epp=58

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Jerry Cosgrove

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

In his 3-zone system, they are split by LT1 and LT2. So z1 is up to aerobic threshold (~75% FTP) and z3 is above lactate threshold (~105% FTP).

Have you found any good resources/links on how to apply the polarized principles to an actual sample training plan? I'm trying to figure out what the real life application is. I maybe trying to over complicate but it essentially seems like 80% in Z1 and 20% in Z3 based on Seiler's presentation. Translated to training if I bike 210 minutes a week, make sure 42 minutes of it is in that Z3 zone.

I can try to give some insight in this kind of training since I grew up in it as a cross country skier in Norway. So first of all, this is nothing new, and the use of lactate and HR monitor started in the beginning of the 80. The interesting thing is that the HR monitor was mostly used to keep intensity down and sometimes we had to walk uphill to keep it low enough (you will find a lot of long hills in Norway).

Also training under this system is based on time, not speed. You will go and run/ski/roller ski for 90 minutes. Nowhere in your training plan will a coach tall you your speed. You as an athlete need to find out what is easy and stay there. One good sign, if people stop talking during an easy workout the intensity is too high. Yes, an easy workout is talking speed and yes you have to scale back in the hills (that is hard for cyclists).

During intervals individual start is quite common, you should not push too hard in the beginning and then die, but keep the whole workout at the correct level (do not go into read). For the top level skiers, using lactate is quite common to make sure they are not pushing too hard or too low during intervals (hard is usually most common, but low if the athlete is tired or close to overtraining).

How to set up a program with this methodology.
If you work out every day, you can have 5 easy days and 2 hard. If you work out more, keep 2 hard sessions and just add easy. For adults, intervals should be around 30 minutes (4x8,5x6, 6x5). The reference to 4x4 in the video is actually a reference to a debate in Norway about intensity, intervals and if you need easy training. If 2 hard sessions seams hard, start with one.
You will find it frustrating to go slow so maybe turn off your GPS and Strata :-)
During intervals, make sure the first one is the slowest, do not start too hard.

Let me know if you have any other questions.
And yes, I got in hell of a shape using this (sadly many of my competitors did the same ;-)

I have not found anything that puts a plan together. I did train using Maffetone when I started triathlon, have used MarkAllenOnline and can tell you that it's humbling to walk and paperboy up hills in training. I have read, on this forum, countless time that some make training too complicated. I'm going to give this polarized method a try. I'm going to look at how much time I have available to train each week and make 80% of it easy and 20% of it hard. Leading up to a race, I'll sprinkle in some tempo work for specificity. It's not rocket science....is it?

Is that 2 hard workouts per discipline (S/B/R) or total? Equal recovery?

I did notice early on, the woman who got a new coach and won a million world titles:

"her new coach had her just train.. MORE"

MORE!

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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