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

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?

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

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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

Thanks for contribute to the discussion since the discussion is about your research.

One question I think many triathletes have is: how do you do intervals over three different sports.

Thank you for your post Stephen (Sorry for referring to you as the American chap earlier).

I have a question that is slightly related to Maurice's above.

Firstly, I have always considered the area been FTP and VO2max as a danger area, so 100-105% FTP, as I regarded this area as being too taxing, both during the session and with subsequent sessions, but without a significant physiological benefit. I.e. you were between two attack points of physiology so to speak, lactate threshold and VO2max.
I always thought it was best to either go under FTP, or over Vo2max.

Also, am I right in thinking that the 106% FTP being VO2max often quoted is this (in most people) is the lowest intensity that VO2max can be achieved given enough time?

Further to this, is there any benefit in knowing your VO2 kinetics and your ramp to VO2max, and would this dictate the length of interval. Presuming that the time spent at VO2max is what you are after? Surely someone who takes over 3 minutes to ramp to VO2max should be doing more than 3 minutes an interval.

And finally! Would you consider the idea that increasing each session/each week the duration during the session that you can spend at the desired intensity as a logical goal/marker for performance improvement?

That is not correct. You might want to google "slow component"

Really appreciate your post here, thanks.

If possible I would like your opinion regarding the so called "sweet spot" training.
Being just below the threshold it would fall in the upper part of the "yellow" Zone 2 (in the 3 zones model) and quite disregarded in the polarized model.
At least in cycling, it actually seems to give great benefit in terms of improving the threshold FTP/CP meaning that it causes what you called good "intracellular signalling for adaptation" (probably because it allows large volume at good intensity without much disruption).
Unfortunately I think there is no much literature about that, I am talking both from personal and others experience and from others, and would be good to have your opinion.

Thanks in advance

Cool thanks.

I would like to know the answer to this too as I seem to have found benefits from sweetspot work.
Could it be that when talking about these physiological adaptations sweetspot is just too low? Despite the fact that it can result in relatively high duration.

I also came across an interesting study the other day which supported this point from a different angle.

It compared two groups of runners completing intervals at Vo2max speed, one with an interval duration of 60% Tmax (time that Vo2max speed could be maintained) and the other with 70%.
The 60% group improved most, despite the shorter interval, but this was because despite the shorter interval they completed more of them in each session so completed more work over the duration of the study.

I definitely want to redouble this appreciation. Big thanks to Stephen for swinging by (and you for reaching out to him).

I'll try and take a stab at your question: I'd weigh the distribution of interval sessions appropriate to your "focus" block (as it's nigh impossible, and arguably imprudent, to maintain pure balance between the 3 sports at any one point in the year). My second weighing factor would be towards placing more of my interval tickets into my weakest sport, as that's where I'm most hoping to elicit response. My third weighing factor is towards which sport I can effectively recover/"live to fight another day" in the most.

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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

So what would these workout looks like in Trainer Road?

I currently have a "polarized" workout built after a similar discussion last year that's :
6x4min at 110% FTP with 4min rest between.

Now I'd like to build one that is:
4x8min with 2min rest, but what would I target for % FTP?

From my previous "bests" my 5min max would be about 120% of FTP and my best 10min would be about 110%. I supposed the only way to find out is to try...

I like his accent

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what accent?

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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 big ole AMURRICAN one.

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I am not familiar with how Trainingroad works so my advice will be more general.
You do not need to change from 4 minutes intervals to 8 minutes. The goal should be to get close to 30 minutes in the interval zone.
You can do 6x5, 8x4, 10x3, etc.
But I think you should have shorter rest than 4 minutes. I use 2 minutes on my 6x5 minutes intervals for both run and bike,
Hope that helps :-)

It's less than your 10 min/110% ftp.

I think that is where he is going with 4x8 instead of 4x4. 4 minute efforts tend to get done close to VO2max, but that is a demanding workout, and more intensity than needed. With the 8 minute effort you have to slow it down to complete the workout, and you get the same effect from the intensity but more effect from the duration (or in other terms, 32 min is better than 16 min). 110% is likely near your VO2 max, but you don't have to go that hard and then you can get by on a shorter recovery period. I wouldn't be surprised to see it as the % FTP you can do for 35-45 minutes.

They would look the same as if you were on the actual road.

My understanding of what SS is saying is do more work at a higher level, in whatever chunks of time allow you to do that.
So maybe as an example, and I'm making shit up here, but if you can do 15x2' at 115% FTP! that better than 7x2 @ 130%. Or something like that.