 Trainer Road. I did not want to make this video, but this has probably been one of the most requested topics since I did a review on Zwift training plans over two years ago. And at this point, I've lost count of the number of people who have contacted me saying that they've over-trained or burnt out using a Trainer Road training plan. Part of the reason I've been so hesitant is because I actually like and listen to the Trainer Road podcast. There's a lot we agree on and if we don't, it's always good to hear different perspectives. And every once in a while, I find myself learning something new. Coach Chad often references research, which I obviously appreciate, but when it comes to the actual training plans that they sell, it's as if they forgot that research on this topic even exists. Trainer Road is not alone here. There are plenty of sweet spot coaches that do the exact same thing. But given that Trainer Road reaches the most number of people with their platform, I'm going to be addressing them specifically in this video. Wow, you're really going to do this, huh? Hold on, I need to get some popcorn first. This video is sure to get a lot of hate from TR fans. I'll probably lose some subscribers and there'll be a lot of angry people down in the comments. But as always, I'm simply here to report on what the science has to say. And I've done my best to curb my own personal bias and look objectively at this question, just like I try to do with every video I make. And as always, when I make a controversial video, I'm not here to bash Trainer Road or steal business from them. I'm simply pointing out a rather large inconsistency with what the research says optimal training should look like and what they prescribe. All right, enough of that. What exactly is the problem with Trainer Road training plans? You need a Trainer Road subscription to see their plans. And I want to respect that and not reveal any information that you have to pay for to thousands of people on the internet for free. So therefore, any screenshots that I show you in this video are ones that you can find on the Trainer Road website for free. That being said, I did take an extensive look at the plans that you get with a Trainer Road subscription to make this video. Let's start with the infamous sweet spot based plan. As the name suggests, this plan has you doing a lot of sweet spot work operating under the assumption that this intensity is high enough to give you a lot of physiological adaptation, but low enough that you can do it many days throughout the week. The low volume plan has three rides a week and every one of these rides is an interval session. The mid volume plan has five rides a week and of these five rides, four of them are intensity days, leaving just one day where you're riding at endurance zone. Finally, we have the high volume plan and it's not pretty. This plan has you riding six days a week and for five of those six days, you're performing intervals. The six day is not a recovery ride, but a zone to endurance day. So you're essentially going six days in a row without recovery. And for five of those six days, you're doing some sort of intensity and wait for it. You do this for five weeks straight before you get a recovery week. Well, two things. One, I did three weeks of the high volume plan to kick off this Cape Epic endeavor. And honestly, I emerged from that. I recognize I wasn't going to be able to make five without completely breaking down. So I did three, but I came out of that dang, you're bulletproof. I'm sorry, you're going to have to give me a second. I'm starting to feel over trained just thinking about that. You know, I don't say this often, but you're absolutely right. This plan is horrendous. I mean, one recovery day a week, that is just way too much recovery. If you watch a lot of my videos, you were probably cringing just hearing me describe that high volume training plan or you were waiting for me to have an aneurysm or something. If not, then let's jump into some science so we can get a better idea of why this plan is a bad idea. But before we do that, the research that I'll be referencing and most research in general on this topic uses a three zone training model. Zone one is zero to roughly 75 to 80 percent of your FTP or the point at which lactate levels first start to rise. Zone two is between this point and your FTP, which is where lactate levels spike and zone three is any intensity above FTP. To avoid confusion for the rest of this video, when I refer to training zones, I'm referring to the three zone model. With that, let's see what the science has to say about what optimal training should look like. This study on training intensity distribution and performance adaptations in train cyclists had subjects follow both a polarized and threshold distribution for six weeks. When the subjects followed polarized training, they spent 80 percent of their time in zone one, zero time in zone two and 20 percent of the time in zone three. During threshold training, they spent 57, 43 and zero percent of the time in these respective zones. So the threshold condition in this study more closely resembles what trainer Rhodes sweet spot based plan looks like in that you're spending a lot of time in that in between zone two or sweet spot. So what did this study find? Endurance performance, peak power output, lactate threshold and high intensity exercise capacity saw greater improvements following a polarized distribution. I'm going to get into some more research to really hammer this point home in a minute, but first let's use this study to address one of the most common criticisms of polarized training and a criticism that I've seen the guys at train road make, which is that with polarized training where you spend a ton of time in this endurance zone one, you need a lot of training time in order to make it work. Rather, it was this is what the fast professional riders do. And it's really a product of they spend so much time training that obviously they're going to have to do most of their training in a really easy territory if the productive, the other type of productivity is going to come from the really high intensity training. In this study that I just referenced on train cyclists, how many hours per week do you suppose the polarized group had to ride in order to see fitness gains? 12 hours per week, 15, 20. Nope, the polarized group average a little over six hours per week. What's even more shocking is that the threshold group actually spent more time training per week than the polarized group at an average of seven and a half hours per week and had a higher training load. And yet results were still better for the polarized group. As always, though, this is just one study. Where does the balance of evidence tilt on this issue of polarized versus sweet spot training? This study on recreational runners came to the same conclusion. Runners who ran the most polarized saw the greatest improvement. Even in Ironman triathletes who spent a significant amount of time racing at zone two between the two thresholds show slower race times when they spend more time training at this intensity. This 2019 meta analysis, looking at many studies on polarized versus threshold training, confirmed these findings. Looking objectively at the science, you simply cannot conclude that traditional sweet spot training is the best approach. Key word there being best. I can already hear people in the comments saying, I follow trainer Rhodes plans and I improve my FTP by 40 watts. This kid is an idiot. Great. I'm not arguing with you there. Clearly you can gain fitness using this approach. The research I just referenced showed this. The question here is not, can you get fit or following a sweet spot approach? Because the answer to that is undoubtedly yes. The question is, is it the best approach? Or is there another strategy out there that would lead to better results? When you take a look at the science, the answer to that becomes pretty clear. No, no, it is not in this review on current evidence for polarized training. They found an effect size of 0.85 to 2.8, which is a wide range, but is greater than the range for traditional threshold training, which was between negative 0.42 and 2.16, indicating that in some athletes, it had a large positive effect. And in some cases, actually decrease the performance of the athletes. That's right. The sort of between threshold training that trainer Rhodes promotes actually decreased performance in some athletes. And I've heard about this firsthand when athletes have emailed me saying that they tried trainer road and quickly felt burnt out. But why exactly does following this approach often lead to overtraining, burnout and staleness? This study on the autonomic recovery after exercise gives a pretty good potential explanation, finding that exercise below the first ventilatory threshold or that endurance zone one causes minimal disturbance in A&S balance. However, training at zone two or zone three induces a significant, but essentially identical delay of HRV recovery. This threshold between zone one and zone two demarcates a clear threshold for A&S recovery. Basically, if you ride over endurance zone, you'll start to build up autonomic stress. If you do this day after day or every single time you ride, then you may start to feel burnt out, overtrained, lack motivation or just generally fatigued. You may be able to get away with it for a week or a month, but over time it'll start to wear on you. What's ironic is that this is how most cyclists naturally train. They just want to ride kind of hard to feel like they got in a workout that day, but never really easy, which in turn means they can never ride really hard, which is where the real gains are made. This is essentially what a trainer road plan looks like. Lots of focus on intensity while completely ignoring longer and lower intensity rides, which is a problem. This review on high intensity versus high volume training stated that both high intensity and low intensity training are important components of the training program. When training does not have an appropriate blend of both high intensity and high volume training inserted into the program, performance ability can stagnate. What does this mean in terms of your training? You want no more than two or occasionally three high intensity or threshold intensity sessions per week. More than this does not induce further improvements and tend to induce symptoms of overreaching or over-training. That's right, two or maybe three intensity days in the week and the rest should be easy endurance riding. We've already seen that this is far from the case with trainer roads sweet spot base plan, but if we take a look at their other training plans, we see the exact same problem. For example, the short power build plan has three days of intensity in the low volume plan, five days of intensity in the mid volume plan, and five days of intensity in the high volume plan. And this pattern is fairly consistent across most of their training plans, three days of intensity in the low volume plans, four or five days of intensity in the mid volume plans, and five days of intensity in the high volume plans, which is still absolutely blowing my mind that any coach in their right mind would prescribe something like this, let alone a fairly credible company like TrainerRoad. This high intensity workout frequency is really the heart of the problem here, and I know I've spent a large portion of this video taking a dump on sweet spot training, but training in that zone isn't even the real issue if you're doing it sparingly, which TrainerRoad doesn't do. Training mostly in zone one, but then spending some time in zone two instead of avoiding it completely like you would if you were following strict polarized is called pyramidal training, and actually has some research to back up its effectiveness. For example, this study on Ironman triathletes which found no difference in race times between the polarized and pyramidal group, or this systematic review which found that polarized and pyramidal training was more effective than threshold training. This is not really an issue of polarized versus sweet spot, because it appears that if you use sweet spot training in the right proportion then you can see great results from it, potentially as good as following strict polarized training. The issue is that TrainerRoad simply overprescribes intensity, and I don't see how anyone looking objectively at the science could come to any other conclusion. Now to be fair, they have a traditional base plan which is mostly endurance zone riding, but in the description for that plan they state, it requires a large time commitment to give you significant gains. Unless you have at least 10 hours per week to train, we do not recommend the long low-intensity traditional approach. And then we have the description for the sweet spot base plan, which states the sweet spot block is the most effective form of base training for the majority of cyclists. It's what we recommend. I don't know what layperson would read these two descriptions and think, hmm, let me go with the inferior traditional base plan. You know, the one that they say they don't recommend. And despite offering this alternative plan for base training, they don't offer a polarized or pyramidal plan on their platform despite a large body of evidence supporting these approaches. Let me address one last potential criticism before I go, which is anecdotal evidence. This argument runs along the lines of, there's this guy at the Tuesday night group ride who always rips our legs off and he just rides hard every single day. Or there's this pro that I know who rides sweet spot all day every day and just look at how fast they are. Yeah. And what about Rick's teammate's three-legged dog's friend, Josh? I mean, there was some random dude on the group ride who told me that that guy got three KOMs in one day by using beer as his recovery drink. I mean, call me crazy, but that's all the evidence I need right there. These are all examples of anecdotal evidence. And in all of these cases, we don't know how much faster these riders could have been had they followed an optimal approach. As we know, though, there's a huge genetic component to adaptation to training, meaning that no matter how good our training is, there will always probably be someone faster than you, even if they don't train optimally. But again, clearly it is possible to make large fitness gains while spending a lot of time training in tempo and sweet spot zone. Probably even more so for pros who are naturally gifted with the ability to recover very quickly between hard workouts. But is it the best way to train? While we're talking about N of 1 anecdotes, I personally have used both training methods. I used to be the guy that would train at tempo or sweet spot all day every day. And then I did my research and I transitioned to a polarized slash pyramidal model. And I saw my best power numbers across pretty much all durations when I did this. In 2020, I got my FTP up to 370 watts, which is a solid 20 watts higher than I had ever gotten it using a tempo sweet spot approach. Does this mean much? No, I'm just one person, and there are a ton of potential confounding factors here. What I am saying is that very fast riders and even pros make training mistakes, but how much faster could they be if they trained perfectly? Maybe a lot, maybe not much at all, but we don't really know, so using this as some sort of checkmate is really a weak argument, especially compared to all the evidence we have for what a proper training intensity distribution should look like. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe for weekly science-based cycling videos just like this one, and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.