Polarized training and my experience 1 year on
This post has had quite a lot of interest, so I updated it a bit on 12/01/2017. It’s just the last two sections that have changed, mainly to clarify what I think is wrong with the scientific studies around polarized training.
Around November 2015 my cycling buddy Dan came over for a beer and we talked about this thing called polarized training. Basically the idea is that you avoid doing any training in the “middle ground” between easy and smashing it.
Almost all your rides are slow and easy, with just one high-intensity session each week. The high-intensity would typically be something like 4×8 at over 105% FTP. You do nothing in the middle of these two extremes, so that means no threshold intervals like 2×20, no tempo rides, and no steady state.
Meet Stephen (he doesn’t like threshold)
The godfather of the polarized approach is Dr Stephen Seiler, and anyone interested in the details or considering changing their training should check out the video below. It’s over 30 minutes long but it’s good.
The polarized training zones
Most cyclists use a 5 zone system…
- Active recovery
- Endurance
- Tempo
- Lactate threshold
- VO2 max (sometimes this is split into 3 zone to give 7 in total)
However in the lecture above Stephen uses a 3 zone system…
- Endurance
- Threshold
- Above threshold
When researching this, I found quite a lot of the discussion around polarized training revolves around what zone 1 actually is in a 3-zone system. The general consensus is that zone 1 in a 3-zone system is anything up to and including the lower end of zone 3 (tempo) in a 5-zone system. Like this…
In a 3-zone system, a polarized approach means spending no time in zone 2. Translating that to the 5-zone system that we’re more familiar with, it means spending no time at all in zone 4, and also no time in zone 3 except perhaps the very bottom end.
Putting that into watts, this means that in the polarized approach the majority of your rides are below 78% FTP.
Sticking to the plan
The video above references several scientific studies that compare the polarized approach to other training methods. In all cases, the athletes switching to the polarized training method always gained the most fitness.
Because this style of training goes against what athletes think they should do to get faster (i.e. beast themselves) sometimes the test subjects didn’t do what they were told, and snuck into the higher zones. One of the studies showed that within the test group who were told to adopt a polarized approach, the variation of fitness gains within the group was closely aligned to how well the subjects stuck to the plan. In other words, polarized training works best when you stick to it and don’t deviate.
Sounds good, let’s try it
This sounded quite attractive. My FTP was around 260w when I heard about this, so that meant riding around at a maximum of 202w. Easy!
I decided to give it a go, not just for a few weeks or a few months, but for a whole season. Of course, if I started losing power I would abort and go back to doing Ye Olde 2×20 intervals and tempo rides, but as long as there weren’t any disasters I really intended to stick with it.
The first couple of weeks were awesome. I could do a 2 hour ride and still feel pretty fresh at the end. 1 hour rides were almost unnoticeable in terms of how I felt afterwards. Sometimes I’d go out riding with my wife Gemma, and she would whip past me up all the hills — I was determined to stick to the plan.
Did it work?
Yes, I think it did. My FTP increased over 3 months of polarized training from 260w to 280w, and I was placing very well (sometimes even winning) in club-level time trials. I also felt fresh all the time, which was great.
However, in road races and anything with a lot of power variability I felt like I was off the pace. I also seemed to hit a bit of ceiling with my FTP increase, and towards the end of the season I was struggling to hold 280w for 20 minutes, let alone an hour.
After sticking fairly closely to the polarized approach, I’ve decided to go back to a more traditional model of riding harder instead of sticking rigidly to the zone 2 sessions. Here’s why…
The flaw in the scientific studies
OK, it’s not a flaw as such, but it does limit how applicable the studies are to the majority of amateur riders.
I noticed something subtle about all the studies Dr Stephen Seiler referenced. In all cases they kept the training stress constant when they switched an athlete from whatever training they were doing onto the polarized model.
In Training Peaks language that means if you were doing 500 TSS per week then you would continue doing 500 TSS per week but mostly in zone 2. Because training stress is proportional to the square of normalised power (double the power = four times the training stress) this means the time you spend riding has to go up significantly to compensate.
My theory is that this is where most of the athletes’ gains came from. They were simply putting in more time, albeit at a much lower intensity.
Professional athletes can train for something like 30 hours a week. It’s just not possible to do this unless nearly all that time is spent in zone 2.
So if you have a choice between volume and intensity, choose volume. If you have the time available to do more training, then according to the studies in this area you are better off putting in more hours at a lower intensity and adopting a more polarized approach.
If you are limited by the amount of training time you have available (like most amature riders) then doing most of your training in zone 2 will mean your CTL drops well below what your body can handle, and means you aren’t making the best use of the limited time you have available.
Next season
Like I said above, I’m not planning to continue with a pure polarized approach. However, I am going to try and keep to the idea of doing either “easy” rides and “hard” rides without spending too much time in that middle ground.
Instead of doing my “easy” rides strictly in zone 2, I’ll be spending more time in zone 3 to increase my CTL. Then I’ll do one or two harder sessions a week, or races during the race season.
Something that I definately have learned though is the difference when you feel really fresh and hungry for some high-intensity work. When you’re doing polarized training, you really look forward to that 4×8 session once a week, and when you do it you ride those 32 minutes of zone 5 like you life depends on it!
Following this new “polarized but in zone 3” approach, my CTL is 31 points higher than this time last year with about the same volume of riding. I do feel more tired, but I don’t think I’m close to being over-trained and I’m still really enjoying all the riding I do.
I’ve also taken up running as cross-training which really helps get in an extra session or two in each week, particularly in the winter.
