What I don’t understand is the point for some the TR MV SSB are to intense and then the results of a study comparing Polarzied and Threshold trainig are referenced showing better results on the polarized group.
The polarized group did 3 sessions a week of 6x4 minutes @105-110% of Ftp with only 2 Minutes rest and added then roughly 3h of z1 riding on the other days of the week. They did this for 6 weeks straight and even increased power if the hr was not reached from privous workout.
That is freaking hard in my book. I would rather continue on the TR SSB plan than that regime.
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"It seems like the real dispute here is a detail-focused one over what, precisely, constitutes “going hard” or “a hard day.” Both Dylan and the TR guys seem to agree that more than two or three days of “intensity” in a week is a bad idea. Both seem to rely a lot on the research of Stephen Seiler. But they seem to disagree about what constitutes a day of “intensity.”
Dylan uses a three zone model and seems to assume that any workout including efforts above zone 1 counts as one of the hard days for the week. Obviously, Coach Chad disagrees, and seems to think that you can do at least some amount of sweet spot work without that counting as one of your hard days."
Great comment! Interestingly, the first study that Dylan refers to the “sweet spot” intervals in their study as moderate intensity.
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Random thoughts after continuing to scan this thread…
-Exercise science is complex. Hard to isolate variables in studies. There is likely a good amount of variation as to how different people respond to different training stress.
-In absence of duration, you can make it up through more intensity - but tough to say how much intensity and what type of intensity.
-Knowing our training zones, whether 3 zone or 5 zone, is tricky as there are different ways to measure/estimate these zones. We try to estimate it with an FTP test, but different FTP testing formats can yield different results so there’s a lot of room for error in estimating these zones.
-TR does not directly replace a coach. But there is a huge amount of variety in quality of coaches.
-What outcomes are we measuring in saying in that one training philosophy is better than another? This can vary based on objectives.
-I don’t feel like TR presents their plans as sacrosanct and the only way to get faster. But I suppose I understand how it can appear that way if you don’t read the notes, workout text or blogs, or listen to the podcast. They do encourage more experimentation and listening to your body.
-I think TR does a nice job of helping you give the tools to figure out how to manage your own training, but I understand this may not work for everyone.
-TR’s plans don’t account for what to do when you get sick or have set backs for any variety of reason. You kind of need to learn what works for you in dealing with these situations, and their blogs and podcast provide some help with this.
-TR is sitting on a ton of valuable training data. How they use this training data to improve their plans is a function of the quality of the data and what kind of data scientists they have on staff.
-The idea of using AI/ML to optimize training plans as you go is exciting but we are going to need to keep our expectations in check as to how much this will actually improve our performance.
-My guess is that if TR switched all their plans to polarized, the overall fitness of their subscribers would largely be the same. Some would see a bit of improvement, some a bit of decline - but mostly it would be a wash.
-Those who want TR to have polarized plans and present good reasons for why are probably capable of doing it themselves through selecting the workouts from the TR library.
-DJ provides a nice job of presenting literature to support his points; however, it’s superficial and that’s okay. Regardless of his age, I don’t think he’s adequately trained to really tease apart these studies, which would likely require extensive education, such as a PhD. For example, I’ve spent 15+ years in the life sciences - with my lowly BSc and experience I can get a sense of the literature but I don’t have the training to assess the quality of a study or do any sort of post publication peer review.
-DJ could probably do any variety of training plan and be way faster than most of us.
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The thing is, I’ve never heard anyone from TR ever say we shouldn’t replace one of the high-intensity rides with a Z2 ride. I know for a fact that is not how they feel. I’ve heard them many times say that we should modify the plans as needed. They even made a workout creator in case we can’t find the workout we want among their very extensive catalog. How many times have we heard Chad say “minimal effective dose”? Lol, he has said it so much it has become a drinking game in he podcast and it has its own acronym (MED).
As a 50+ year old, I struggled some with the last half of build last year. I’m starting build again tomorrow. I contacted a TR team member last month via a private message and asked about changing one of the 3 intensity workouts to a Z2 ride along with substituting the Sunday sweet spot ride with the recommended Z2 ride. I received an email back from Coach Chad himself saying it was a “great” plan. Thus, I will have 2 intensity rides per week through build phase and the rest will be Z2. Sounds polarized to me, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the results will be. Again, and I really want to stress this, I am doing this with Coach Chad’s full stamp of approval. So no, TR is not adamant that we do 3 intensity rides per week and any suggestion otherwise is simply inaccurate.
More importantly for this discussion, it is a prime example of how TR plans have been intentionally designed to be easily adaptable to the athlete’s needs and the TR staff very much supports such modifications. They’ve even created a workout creator in case we can’t find the workout we want within the thousands that are freely available in the catalog to every TR subscriber. With all this in mind, it leaves my head spinning when I hear folks who still don’t understand that it is OK to change the plan to meet their own personal needs. If TR really didn’t want us changing the plans, they wouldn’t have made it so darn easy for us to do so.
I’m very curious to hear their take on the podcast next week, but unlike some, I don’t expect a polarized vs. sweet spot debate. I anticipate that TR will take the high road and simply expose the mistakes and mischaracterizations Dylan made in his video while stressing their “minimal effective dose” training philosophy along with the adaptability of their product. Cheers.
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Importantly, adaptability is part of the product — as are the blog posts and podcasts that are meant to explain to you how to adapt TR’s training plans to your needs.
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Here is the comment I dropped on the video:
I’m looking over my aggregated power data over TrainerRoad SSBLV1 & SSBLV2 (I’m in week IV of that plan) and I’m seeing the following: Z1,2: 61% of total time, Z3: 9% of total time, and Z4+: 30%. My understanding is the big no-no is Z3 the tempo zone, correct? That we should be 80/20 in Z1-2 & Z4+, correct? My actuals are a bit off from that, but not crazy so. I am going to make a point of adding more endurance time for the rest of the plan. A few notes in TR’s defense -1) They constantly remind us to listen to the body and bailing on a workout is not a problem. 2) They suggest starting with low volume plans and only after completing the lower volume plans consider moving up. This video has me confident in my choice of plan. I finished TBMV and am now working on SSBLV with supplemental recovery and endurance workouts. I’m handling the stress very well (which I attribute to fully fueling my training) so I am comfortable adding workouts. I tried SSBMV last year but with less than full fueling and it ravaged my body - I would nail a week and wake up Monday feeling like I was coming down with the flu, take a few workouts off and resume only to repeat until I really did come down with the cold & then a flu. Start low and adding workouts makes you feel heroic, starting high and skipping workouts makes you feel zeroic.
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can you share your TR profile?
Precisely! You nailed it but at that point why pay TR 20 dollars per month as there are many workouts available online for free. The real attraction of TR to me is that it was supplying a comprehensive plan that unfortunately did not live up to my expectations. I am truly hoping that TR listens to it’s customer base and takes a “deep dive” into the constructive criticism and win back some former clients and improve their product! Some really great analysis in your random thoughts BTW.
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Thanks for sharing this. Once the weather gets nicer, I may do something very similar. I’m in build right now…but in 6 weeks when I restart to go through base-build-specialty again…I very well may go with 2 hard days plus a lot of zone 2 volume. I’d like to start bike commuting again…have showers at work, can get in 30 miles round trip a day.
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Anyone can search PubMed and read literature on exercise science. A vast chasm exists between reading a study and actually having the know-how to understand them and to practically apply them. I trust Chad absolutely falls in the latter while it appears DJ is a quite the novice (just a cursory look at some of his videos). He could benefit from some humility too. Just my .02.
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One critique of Dylan’s channel is that he uses a lot of footage from other people’s videos in his, without credit, as backdrops to paper excerpts, it’s a little thing but kind of irks me
I’m sure I posted this above but I want to underscore again. I’ve taken doctoral seminars where we took published research and basically massacred and critiqued them to the point where some were considered questionable as publishable pieces. I’m not going to say the studies cited in the video are bad, a cursory glance sets off some flags as far as sample size and design for me. I think too many people are using this video as a reason to claim some sort of absolute preponderance of evidence of one training style vs another, when it’s likely not very conclusive either way
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Totally valid point. I guess it also depends on what you value in the subscription, which is also connected to how much you pay and what your expectations are for that price.
I’m at the $99/year rate since I started about 4 years ago. I’m good with using plan builder and adjusting as I think I require (I just like the process of experimentation and figuring out what works for me). If I was paying $20/month, my expectations may be different.
Totally agree with you! Realize now that the phrase ‘the TR team that we should not’ could be interpreted as a very rigid statement, which it was not intended to be. Maybe should have included ‘on average’ or something. I am swapping out these types of rides myself when needed, and don’t think for a second anyone at TR has an issue with that. Keep up the good work!
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Just FYI because it is a common misconception and might be interesting for people not familiar with POL training: If you refer with your assumptions to Seiler: The 80/20 distribution is more about sessions. For example you have 10h training time per week, you can imagine these as 10x 1h sessions. 8 sessions would be easy and 2 sessions would be hard (80/20). But if you look at the time in zone, in the hard session (for example 4x8min) you spend roughly half of the time with easy riding as well (warm up, rest, cool down). So if you look strictly at the time in zone for a polarized training it is rather a 90% easy vs 10% hard distribution. And when you look at it that way, that’s quite a difference to the 60/40 or 70/30 distribution you observed. I hope that’s helpful.
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I hope you’re trying to highlight the bias on display here?
Moving way past data and well into anecdotal for me here, but: I think this is a really big factor too. If I lived in S. California or somewhere where it was gorgeous and sunny 10mos out of the year, and you told me I could get ripping strong doing caf runs with my friends loving life on a bike with a few sprints + a hard workout a week? Oh man, I’d be the biggest pol evangelist in the world. Given that I do my structured training indoors in the winter, I just personally don’t engage well with z1/2 on the trainer. No joke, I actually kinda dislike recovery weeks because I find them so dreary.
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I do worse on recovery rides than on vo2max days…
Has it been decided yet if TR plans (esp HV) have too much intensity or not? 
Excellent points. I’d also add that the discussion of polarized vs. sweet spot seems inadequate to capture entire training plans. If you have a race or you would like to become good at a particular thing, you eventually will have to practice just that. Dylan seems to be best at long-duration events, so a training plan that is good at lifting his 70-80 % power seems ideal — for him. If you look at TR’s crit race specialty plan, then the efforts mimic those in a crit race quite closely, and it’d make sense to me that these will make you a better crit racer than sticking to polarized training throughout. Or similarly, if you are on a 40k TT plan, they prepare you for the gruesome task of spending about 1 hour at FTP. That’s a huge mental challenge, no matter what your FTP is.
So the success of e. g. the specialty phase is not captured by measuring your FTP. Again, I’m not saying TR’s plans are “ideal” or “optimal”, you should always adapt them to yourself whenever necessary. Just that how you measure success of a particular training plan can influence the verdict of whether or not you are doing well in races or the efforts you want to be good at.
I am looking forward to tomorrow’s podcast to learn how Coach Chad and Coach @ambermalika think about that. Perhaps @ambermalika can share how she trained when she was a pro, how that compares with TR’s approach, polarized training and pyramidal training. And whether with hindsight she’d change something.
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Oh yes, same here, recovery weeks indoors are ugh. Last weekend it was really nice for the first time since November, and I did a recovery ride outside. It was amazing, because I knew I had done my work and could just cruise along the coastline. Having to do mostly Z1/Z2 rides indoors would be much harder mentally.
I reckon that doing only 80:20 year-around would likely wear me out mentally really quickly. I’d still like to see TR offer a polarized training option (perhaps in the guise of an updated traditional base plan).
And it’d be nice if we could give Plan Builder more input to adapt training plans. For example, you could tell Plan Builder that one of your weaknesses is endurance, because you can only hang 2 out of 3 laps with the first group on a rolling road race. Or that I’d like to work on my sprints a bit more, because they are a limiter of mine. That being said, I think it’d be nice if TR found a way to customize your training plans more. I’m sure they are working on that, because that’s a really hard problem.
PS I enjoyed your video on the topic.
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