You mean like centuries, longer races, etc. That’s an interesting scenario, because efforts in this case would be efforts that are supposed to be reduced to practically nothing in the polarized plan (tempo). In this case I suppose you could switch to what I’ve seen called polarized sweet spot? I don’t know the answer.
This aside, given the research out that demonstrates that higher intensity intervals can in fact increase aerobic performance, you could still start adding more HIT efforts into your build plan.
Even though POL is easier to plan, you still have to vary your workouts from week to week, that is, increase workload to account for enough stimulus in order to improve. I imagine that you may have to periodise at some point. I think a TR POL plan would come handy.
Original author mentioned Matt Fitzgerald’s 80/20 plan which from my perspective is quite different to Seiler’s approach in his studies. If you look at IM plans you will find a lot of workouts (I would say majority of hard workouts) in Zone 3 of 5 zone model. That are intervals targeting 91-100% of FTP. Only couple remaining workouts are targeted in Z4 (102-110% FTP) or even Z5 (above 110% FTP).
Nice, just one note. Those Z5 efforts should have been done with low cadence in CFo workouts. The purpose of those intervals is high torque low cadence strength work. At least that what I’ve read in the guide book for Matt’s workouts.
I don’t focus much on triathlon, but is the 80/20 valuable for an event where it seems like you’d be riding Sweet Spot/Threshold for the majority of the time in the Tri? The big benefit (ideally) for polarization is that the hard is very hard (vo2max) and extremely applicable to traditional bike racing, but this doesn’t seem (I could be wrong) anything like a triathlon. Curious how a triathlon 80/20 polarization plan might be different, or are they the same? If so, it just seems very non-event specific.
In more recent interviews Seiler isn’t holding that one needs to be truly polarized in their training for better success (i.e. no middle zone training), just that they need to focus the majority of their training in the EZ/All day pace. Some people are using more of a pyramidal model of like 85% easy, 10% medium, 5% truly hard when using a time in zone model since there is specificity needed for their events.
A polarized plan is pretty good for draft legal oly distance racing, but it’ll be more pyramidal for the long distance events with most of the intensity in the middle zone and only a small amount of time above threshold.
What’s limited time?. In same interview, Seiler also mentioned that age groupers with limited time can skew towards a higher time in zone at intensity than someone doing lots of volume. In one of his presentations I found on the internet, he summarized a study that followed XC runners doing 8-10 hours a week, so not elite but lower division college athletes. The two groups did the same amount of high intensity work, and same total volume, but one group did more of it easy compared to the other group that did more middle zone work. The group that did the higher percentage of easy aerobic work made a statistically significant improvement in their time over the other group. So plausible that a normal age grouper could do well with 80% of time as easy. That’s still a lot of time to do intensity, a 6x3 minute workout is only 18 minutes + a little extra during the warmup. As an event gets closer those can change to 10-20+ minute intervals of a specific intensity.
The time distribution advice is over a macro cycle, and not necessarily on a per-week basis, more like a monthly/quarterly/annual tally that will change in distribution depending on where they are compared to the competition phase. During parts of the year an easy/non-taper week is almost 100% easy aerobic work.
Winter/base is 3 months of pure sweetspot in the trainer, 100%, building length and number of intervals, 6-8h per week. Then once weather improves and I’m getting closer to my events I switch to the 2x per week VO2 work and longer steadier rides (twice riding to work) the exception being Sunday when I do a long ride but which includes a lot of climbing at sweetspot and above…10-13h per week.
Distribution of the two groups were 80/10/10 vs 65/25/10. So lower in middle intensity distribution than the sweet spot base, which is roughly 50/40/10 distribution. Both groups got faster, but the one doing less intensity improved to a greater extent than the group doing more middle zone work, which might not even be that much since about half of the traditional zone 2 of the 5 zone model is in the polarized zone 2.
