80/20 in the papers or references to papers that you've seen are in regard to "80% of sessions and 20% of sessions." In other words if you are a single sport athlete who trains 10 times a week 2 of your sessions will be with a main set with specific intensity in Z3 (seiler scale) or high Z4-Z5 (Coggan scale). What that looks like in terms of actual time is more like 85% z1-low z2, 10% high z2-mid z4 and 5% high z4-z5. The training in the middle being specific to triathlon race intensities and incidental "other" time. With regard to triathletes and spreading this over 3 sports you basically end up with one session in each sport per week being of high intensity and the others a mix of "just training" (ahem, EASY, you over achievers, you) and some race specificity work. On point 3, polarized does not mean a lack of periodized planning. Basically it means to stop riding at .76-.85 for your easy rides. Stop chasing TSS points cuz that's reductionist. I and David Tilbury Davis have (separately) drawn up sketches of a new stress score distribution, one that lowers point totals accumulated in the mid zones and boosts them in the z1-2 area and high 4 and 5 area. An inverse of the current points/duration accumulation curve.

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
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Most of the intervals will be in zone 4 of the Norwegian Olympiatoppen scale.


http://www.olympiatoppen.no/fagomraader/trening/utholdenhet/fagartikler/oltsintensitetsskala/page594.html


You can also use the special training diary for the polarized model also from Olympiatoppen. It is in both English and Norwegian
https://www.olt-dagbok.net/

I'm not with you when you say 'reductionist' . Can you clarify?

To answer the OP, yes pro and Olympic athletes do use the Polorised approach. Seiler used data gathered from pro Olympic cross country skiers and I believe cyclists and other sports to evaluate just how these athletes do train.

That is a good explanation.

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Simplify, Train, Live

Basically - the thought process of "more TSS = more better" is an over simplification. more TSS is more better, but the manner in which you accumulate that TSS is just as, if not more important as how many points you score. Hence his idea about more points per unit of work for lower and higher intensities, and less for the middle intensities.

Thing polarization is somewhat self-fulfilling. If you do a couple higher intensity rides, as high as you should, the only thing you'll be able to do is lower intensity anyway in between, otherwise you'll find you don't have the legs for anything more than tempo.

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Answers:

1. Likely all pros use this. Poll after poll suggest that the pros and age-groupers training differs significantly. Pros hold to the 80:20 rule fairly true, where age groupers are typically closer to 50:50 with way less total volume (so much for 'junk miles').
2. Pretty darn polarized. I didn't always try to follow this rule, but I try really hard to keep this balance now. For example, I'm a mid-17 minute 5ker right now, and my 80% run volume is as slow as 8:30 pace, but when I do reps, (typically between 90 seconds and 6 minutes), my pace is all faster than 5:40 and can be as fast as 4:30 pace for reps that last 90 seconds. I think there's this miss-conception about zone training in that you magically cross some arbitrary barrier and your physiological systems completely switch to a different metabolism mechanism, but that's not really how it works. In reality, you are always living in a bit of a spectrum (i.e. no one will be completely anaerobic or aerobic...your body is always using a mixture of fuel sources, it's just slightly weighted in one direction or the other...similar with slow-twitch or fast twitch leaning folks... a fast-twitch responder may only be like 52% FT fibers and a slow-twitch responder may be like 46% FT fibers). For example, ss you train to improve your lactate threshold, You'd be better off to try and 'bracket' what you think your LT is (say a 6.5 RPE out of 10). For instance if your LT is 6.5 RPE, train in a range from 5.5 to 7.5 rather than try to hit some barrier exactly.
3. Specificity and balance are not really inter-changeable. You still want to maintain the 80:20 balance all the way through, but you to want to work towards specificity if you are in the Canova school of throught. So on a macro level, whether you are a bottom up pyramid person (think Lydiard), or a top down person (think Canova), you kind of start at extremes and work your way to specific. In Canova's view, when he's working with marathoners, he has them do shorter, really fast reps the farther away from their peak race they are, and as they get closer, his 20% work gets closer and closer to what their racing stress will actually be. So a Canova marathoner may be doing 5k specific intervals 20 weeks out (say something like 20 X 400s at 5k pace with ample rest), then 10k specific intervals 10 weeks out (say 6xmile at HM pace with 90 sec rest), then 5 weeks out, his marathoners actually do workouts like 30k at MP. Also with Canova, I can run recovery runs with his top marathoners (thought they may not be recovery for me!), and he may have 5 or even 10 days between hard sessions.

Lydiard is not necessarily opposite (his hill repeats during the base phase are really hard sprints with a bounding motion), but can appear that way, because tempo type work is kind of in the middle block and he re-develops speed towards the latter parts of training.

Either way, the balance of 80:20 doesn't really change.

As discussed under point #8 under "Applying the Performance Manager concept" in this article:

http://home.trainingpeaks.com/...-performance-manager

That's novel. Wrong if you're attempting to quantify stress/strain, but novel nonetheless. :)


Well, it's certainly the inverse of this:

http://physfarm.com/new/?page_id=995

However, it's not the inverse of how stress/strain has historically been modeled (e.g., by Banister). That would look like the "maximum duration (volume)" curve on this graph:

http://www.fascatcoaching.com/sweetspotpartdeux.html

Thanks for googling that for me!

You're welcome.

(BTW, more is not always more when using the PMC, since guidelines are provided for an upper limit of CTL. OTOH, more IS always more when using Banister's original impulse-response model.)

Just a general comment: it may (or may not) be important that the idea of polarized training is largely based upon what elite Nordic skiers and rowers (and to a lesser extent, runners) do. If you think about the demands of those sports, though, they don't really resemble those of your typical triathlon (ITU races and Xterra are different). Thus, if you're going to employ a polarized approach to, say, training for an Ironman, it might require some re-thinking about what you're best off doing for the 20% of sessions that are supposed to be hard.

Thanks to the ones who provided answers and opinions

My synthesis is the following

1. Polarization is good
2. It basically means do the vast majority easy and the remaining hard
3. No reason to become obsessively focused on what easy and hard means as long as easy is easy and hard is hard...
4. However depending on what event you are training for and how far you are from it, the hard can be damn short and
hard and or longer and a bit less hard

I follow Jesse Thomas on Strava and I can tell you that his days are really easy and his hard days are hard. Most of his easy rides are in the 15-17mph range (140-160 ave. power)

Would that 20% be more specific to the event? Like longer 80% FTP intervals rather then shorter Zone 4/5 intervals and VO2 max work.

That's how I would approach, at least an event drew near. Then again, I am neither a coach nor an Ironman-distance triathlete (although I was once named a USAT All-American as a duathlete).


80% of FTP is level 3, so wouldn't 1) (need to be) done as an interval, or 2) qualify as "polarized" training. Rather, I was thinking of subbing in FTP work (i.e., true level 4) for VO2max (i.e., level 5) sessions.

Bottom line: "Spend your glycogen budget wisely."

So how does this apply to long days? I do long days (5 hours or more on bike, 2 or more hours running) at a slow pace while training for IM, but its not easy on the body. So even though it is slow, slow does not = easy; I need a day or two of recovery after. So how does this fit into the mix? Are those long days part of the 20 or the 80; are they hard or the easy in this context?

If they're part of the 80, isn't this what most athletes do anyway? A long day, an intensity day and maybe an additional easy or recovery day? Those long days are hardly recovery.

If these long days are part of the 20, how do you find time to also do any intensity?

Just not sure this is all that revolutionary for IM athletes (where a ton of time is already spent going slow).

This is directed at anybody, not just Andrew.

By definition, they'd be part of the 80. (Note that Olympic-medal-winning Nordic skiers reportedly average <2 h per training session and ~15 h/wk while following a polarized training program.)

Any chance they would end up in a product such as Raceday ?

good question. DTD works on the software itself i just pester them both to get shit done :D

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36 kona qualifiers 2006-'23 - 3 Kona Podiums - 4 OA IM AG wins - 5 IM AG wins - 18 70.3 AG wins
I ka nana no a 'ike -- by observing, one learns | Kulia i ka nu'u -- strive for excellence
Garmin Glycogen Use App | Garmin Fat Use App

I think Andy is spot on by asking the needs of each sport.

Nordic skiing- Less duration, more intense efforts (e.g. Hills, break aways etc) than triathlon.

Road cycling, Sprint, Long course triathlon, Cyclocross, they are all cycling but each has a different requirement.
Age-groups have different requirements, differing physiology has different requirements (remember, these studies were ELITES). etc etc.

Also, the 80/20 "easy" / "hard" split is intensity, Everything is "hard" if you do it for the right amount of time.

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For anyone interested in someone who has supervised the training of world champions in the triathlon, see Jan Olbrecht's approach to training. We have two websites on this training approach, one written in 1998 a year after van Lierde set his record at Roth.

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

Some of the terminology on this site may be unfamiliar to many but Jan stresses the difference between building what he calls capacity and what he calls power, or the ability to utilize that capacity.

The other site was posted a couple years ago and mostly based on a chapter in a proposed book on lactate testing which never got published.

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

Olbrecht has been using his training philosophy to train world champions for over 20 years. We call it high/low but it is similar to polarized training. It is described in his book , The Science of Winning

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

The skew between low intensity and high intensity will depend on the sport but the longer the race the more the skew is towards low intensity workouts especially with elite athletes who are most susceptible to negative effects from high intensity workouts.

Generally all training is low intensity or very high intensity and keeps away from the threshold except in very special circumstances.

Take it for what it is worths but there have been very few people who have had as much success as Jan.

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Jerry Cosgrove

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

That is really interesting to me, does this suggest that all the work folks do around FTP and sweetspot here on ST is potentially sub-optimal? Where does that leave our beloved (by some..) 2x20..?

Or does this say something about the difference in approach for an elite who already has a threshold close to their potential, vs a beginner or AGer?

Thanks for the info.

Rich.

It depends on what you are trying to achieve with your training, and where you are in relation to your prime races.