GMAN19030 wrote:
sentania wrote:
Swim 4x per week. Mostly easy, only a little harder then warm-up effort. Some of it *really* hard, maybe four or five minutes at a time. Bike 3x-5x per week. One session killer hard, with efforts of above FTP, another one hard, but as you get close to the race, switch that ride to include more race pace work.
Run: 5-7x per week, all easy. One hard. More than 10 weeks out, include hard intervals. The last 10 weeks make it a 70 to 90 minute run building to an hour broken at race pace.
That's it.
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Scott (and others), thanks for this. I've spent the last week reading everything I could about the polarized approach. I like what I've read and would like to adopt this approach next season and see how it works. I've been doing the typical threshold/sweet spot training for the last few years and it worked great the first couple of years but I think I'm stuck in a rut and I also think contributed to fatigue issues that caused me some physical problems this year. I'm getting older so recovery and fatigue issues are something I want to pay more attention to next season. So I do like the sounds of having less "hammer time" in my workouts and some more easy time.
The polarized approach makes most sense to me for sprint, oly and IM distance training. If you're to take the approach that one of each SBR workout should be hard, the hard workouts more than cover sprint and oly distance and intensity. I'm good with it for IM as well since IM racing is at easy pace.
I'm having a harder time wrapping my head around a polarized training approach to 70.3 bike training (swim and run I get). I like to ride 4x per week. Let's say two 60 minute workouts, one 75-90 minute workout and the long bike of 150-180 minutes. If we're operating under the assumption that easy is something like 70-75% IF, I'm good with one of the 60 minute workouts being an ass-kicking trainer workout (4x8' at 105% or whatever), the other shorter rides at 70-75%. My concern is how to manage the 150-180 minute long ride. I "think" riding that ride at 70-75% would leave me undertrained for a 70.3 bike ride where I'd be targeting close to 85%. I can trust and have faith in the process but I'd like it explained to me a bit more so I can wrap my noggin around it better.
Cant say that I am surprised at all by this response. Polarized model works great. IMO the caveat is that you need to have a relatively sound base going in. ie. no low hanging fruit. I think yourself fits this well. Should help you break through the plateau and more importantly the fatigue issues you were having on your previous program.