Hi everybody,
Question :
When you do a 80/20 polarized training, does it mean that 80% of your time is done at Z2 and the remainder at Z4/Z5 ?
Or does it mean that on 5 workouts, you will do 4 of them à Z2 and the last one will be a HIT workouts where you will do some Z4/Z5 works ? So at the end you will do like 90% of your weekly volume at Z2 and maybe 10% at actually Z4/Z5.
Thanks for your help,
I ride “a lot” which for me is 6-12 hours per week and it ends up being 70-80% zone 1&2. Just go with it and see where you end up.
I believe Dr. Seiler’s work originally used the number of workouts for the 80/20 concept and the total time would vary depending on the year but would hover between 80-90% for z2.
I think (without reading huge amounts of the literature) it’s best seen as a concept rather than a hard and fast, numerical prescription; i.e. the substantial majority (~80%) of your rides should be easy, with the rest being pretty damn hard. If some/one of your longer rides is easier, this will tend to correspond to ~90/10 in terms of time.
FWIW, intervals.icu almost invariably classes my training as pyramidal when I try and do this, but I suspect that’s because my longer rides are often through hilly terrain (just a feature of the local geography) and hence have a bit more time at tempo/z3 than the ‘classic’ polarized model.
That’s my understanding
Thank you for your answers,
I’ll stick to a workout approach rather than an hourly volume approach in the strict sense!
I wish you all new PRs !
FWIW the study was also based on nordic skiing and Seiler himself now says it’s obvious that cyclists need to spend time in the “gray zone” (tempo/SST) because it’s relevant to most of our events.
I’d say do not get too hung up on abstract intensity distribution ratios.
Most riding suspiciously easy, (rpe < 4/10), then focus on giving it either extensive (TTE training) or intensive (vo2max) beans a couple times a week.
I like the San Millan way of thinking about it, i.e., what metabolic process do I want to stimulate today? Given that, the polarisation is by workout split, not time in zone. If a workout pushes your blood lactate very high, it takes a long time to transition back to metabolising lots of fat. So you may spend time in, say, zone 2, but the fuel substrate is not the one intended.
On this interview with Iñigo San-Millán he mentions that since he’s time restricted, he rides for 1h30, 3-5 days per week, and basically keeps a consistent “Zone 2” for the first hour, and do a really strong 4-5min interval near the end… — The order affects the results, since it takes a while for lactate to clear up…
Indeed, I even started doing this with my TR workouts. I would find a workout alternative for VO2 or anaerobic that was 30 min, then extend the warm-up to ride at a lower intensity for the first 45-60 min, followed by a hard punch at the end.
ISM seems to believe it, even though plenty of other prominent physiologists (notably Seiler and Coggan) disagree and as you said there is evidence to the contrary.
Do you have a link to an article or podcast where he discusses this? I would love to read that. TIA
Tons of them - just Google “Dr. Stephen Seiler”
I’m a big fan of Dr. Stephen Seiler. He explains things so well, using analogies and such. To answer the OP’s question, per Seiler, based on his observation of elite athletes, 80/20 would be 80% of the workout sessions are lower intensity, 20% are high intensity. Again, this was a summary of how high level aerobic athletes train - athletes that had a high volume (training time) and high frequency of workouts (number of workouts).