My tl;dr is: rather than either polarized or sweet spot, I say polarized and sweet spot. One of my more popular posts is me summarizing my experiences after my first polarized block. I have done a second one in the meantime, and my opinion hasn’t changed much. The tl;dr of my experiences is:
- Don’t expect a game changer, think of it as another arrow in your quiver.
- Don’t expect it to be easy, I found the polarized block harder: yes, the easy workouts were easier, but they had me get up at 4:30 am rather than 5 am
And the hard workouts were just hard. - You really need to know your FTP. If you just “choose a lower number to be safe”, you’re just doing another sweet spot block.
- Approach it knowing your training fundamentals: your body will get better doing what you make it do. Polarized focusses on Z2 and sustaining long efforts at threshold or VO2max. After my training block, my mental fortitude was through the roof. I reached sweet spot PL 9.0+ and it felt mentally easy.
- After my polarized blocks, I saw no or very small gains to my FTP. The gains were elsewhere: it gave me a lot of mental fortitude and a longer life bar (in computer game terms).
Hence, I use polarized blocks with that purpose in mind, i. e. whenever I want to build my base and train my mental fortitude. Personally, I recommend trying it, e. g. before you start a new training block. See how your body reacts and whether it makes sense for you to integrate it in your training plan.