You’re overlooking the fact that people’s motivation varies, and that athletes are a different breed than the sorts of folks in these studies.
As I mentioned, most competitive racers go pretty darn hard more days than not, while training 500-1000 hours per year.
I watched the video and thought it was a fair critique.
I’ve commented in the past about how even low volume TR plans have too much intensity - especially if the ramp test happens to overstate your FTP and/or if you are a masters athlete.
Here is the first 5 weeks of LV SSBII:
2 Sweet Spot workouts
4 VO2max
8 Threshold
Sequence as follows:
This should be called Threshold base.
Yes, to summarise, it doesn’t matter what DJ says because:
“You shouldn’t be following the TR plan anyway”
“The plans work for me so its fine”
“The science shows pyramidal plans are as good as polarised, therefore TR must be pyramidal”
“The science on polarized is shaky, so better not to get involved in science at all”
“DJ is on youtube, therefore everything he says in incorrect”
Think that about sums it up.
Yep seems about right from what I’ve skim read. Can I set an auto notification for if anyone actually connected to TR bothers replying? 
There is a difference between users criticizing a product and competitors trash talking for their own personal gain.
I baffaled about this thread!
I am not planning to read the whole thing. I am also looking for TL;DR…
But I think I know whats going on.
3 camps.
I think i am camp #2. I love the idea of TR. I love the Tri plan, and I think they can do better.
Right now I am doing my own plan. 1 day or Vo2Max, 1 day of SS, 1 day LR of endurance, and few days of lower intensity, including actual recovery rides (like today, 60 minutes at 0.5. It felt good).
Certainly, but I just don’t think he was doing that. Will just have to disagree on that point.
I want to start with the caveat that I didn’t watch the video and didn’t read all these posts. But as a triathlete I have thought for a while there were too many intense sessions per week in the TR plans. There is scientific evidence and anedotal evidence that people can continuously handle and improve with two or three high intensity sessions per week. You need a day in between these sessions because tendons and ligaments are weakest 24 hours after high intensity so doing high intensity two days in a row tends to lead to injury.
You CAN do high intensity day after day. But eventually your nervous system and endocrine system will get too stressed to be able to recover and super compensate. There was a study in runners where they did four high intensity sessions a week and they did improve but after only 4 weeks they started to breakdown.
Since this limitation is due to endocrine and nervous system stress, it carries over to different activities. For instance, heavy weight lifting or lifting for power is very stressful for the nervous and endocrine system. Doing that twice a week and trying to do two high intensity interval bike rides a week will eventually cause burn out or injury.
This makes triathlon training very difficult. The Science of Triathlon recommends one high intensity bike, one high intensity run, and one high intensity swim per week. That’s already three HI workouts per week. You can’t do more without eventually breaking down and long term consistent training is what you want.
The kicker here is what is considered a high intensity work out. There’s a high degree of agreement that threshold, VO2 max intervals and heavy weight lifting or power lifting are very stressful. But there isn’t agreement on what sweet spot is. Stephen Seiler did an experiment to try to figure this out based on heart rate variability. I’m not convinced heart rate variability is the best measure but he found that any workout over the first aerobic threshold (perhaps a heart rate of 120 or 130) increases the time it takes heart rate variability to recover and is therefore stressful.
So putting aside labels like polarized, pyramidal, etc. The fundamentals to building a training plan for long term improvement would be that you can do 2 or 3 workouts a week above the first aerobic threshold and the rest of your workouts – regardless of how many hours or how many sessions you do per week – would be in zone 1 or 2.
So if sweet spot workouts are stressful to the endocrine and nervous system (which is still a big if) then TrainerRoad workouts contain too many high intensity sessions per week.
I was excited to have the TR podcast hosts do a triathlon because I wanted to see if they would be able to tolerate their own plans over months. I was betting they would get injured and/or burned out.
Im just trying to keep this simple. We all know how deep into the weeds it can get when we are talking about training and nutrition.
It is the 20 minute test. And I say that because THAT is where it all started. THEE 20 MINUTE test was the one everyone was talking about. The standard. Trainer roads philosophy came from a lot of Hunter Allens as far as the 20 minute aspect of it. Allen also was an advocate of the 95% of a 2 minute test.
So, what Im only saying here was back when TR started, one simple thing that could have made a significant change in the wave we rode as aspiring cycling athletes is to have a mindset that was a little different than stating your FTP is 95% of a 20 minute hard effort test.
This metric change alone has the potential to change the trajectory of all conversations that are about training.
And what you’re saying about the RAMP test is the exact same thing Im saying about the 20 minute test.
No matter what test we use, simply lowering the percentage to a more realistic number for MOST athletes would again, change the trajectory of training in general.
Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but some folks do seem to be hyper-sensitive to criticism—certainly more so than anyone officially affiliated with TR.
Words of wisdom 
. Still not being heeded 300+ posts later though 
.
Yep you would have thought its in everyone’s interest for the product to improve. Yet some fight tooth-and-nail to say it’s already as good as it can be.
Why is watched in quotes?
Typical distribution with any contentious issue… far right, far left (who are the most vocal) but most fall somewhere in the middle.
Like most thing in life, the truth is somewhere between the middle.
This whole thing was my first exposure to Dylan. It really shows his immaturity and lack of respect for science.
His immaturity because he sells his own plans. But instead of promoting those and building around it, he attacks competitors (I don’t like Zwift but he attacked them as well). He also specifically hones in on the high and mid volume plans but ignores what they say for low volume. He doesn’t touch on build or specialty.
He grabbed some science papers with the intention of backing up his claims and pulling things out of their context to do so.
TR is far from perfect because nothing is and can be improved. However, if he actually wanted to improve it and not drive away TR customers, then his video would have been much longer to actually go into depth.
he is not wrong, i stopped tr workout and only did recovery + some classic (3*8 is my fav) workouts and i had my best form ever last year.
He sells his own plans. Call me a cynic but he did this to sell his own plans and get subscribers to his YouTube channel.
Great post and my sentiments exactly.
It does seem like a lot of users have taken the criticism extremely personally 