 Polarized training suggests that the optimal way to train to improve your performance on the bike and in other endurance sports is to spend the vast majority of your training time at an easy, comfortable pace. The remaining time should be extremely hard above your FTP. Or should it be? We'll get into that because if anyone might know the answer, it's probably my guest today. Yeah, we'll get into that, but first, what the f**k did you do with all my race numbers? How are the viewers going to know that on the weekends, I like to wear tights and ride my bike in circles a little bit faster than other dudes to win a 26-inch mountain bike tire and a tube of chamois cream? If you're a regular viewer of my channel, then you know how research heavy some of my videos can get. And I've talked about polarized training a lot on my channel because there's a lot of research to back it up. One of those researchers who helped conduct a lot of those studies that I talk about and has become famous for coining the term polarized training is my guest today, Dr. Steven Seiler. This video is part of a longer conversation and I plan on releasing all of it, but today we discussed polarized training and how Dr. Seiler's understanding of what polarized means has changed over time as more data has come out. We also touch on whether recovery rides are useful or whether you should just take the day completely off. Enjoy. Afternoon in Norway and early morning in Central, what is it? Mountain time in the United States? Central time here. I'm usually on East Coast time, but I'm actually in Texas right now trying to get some heat acclimation for a race. Okay, well that'll do it. I used to live in Texas, so heat acclimation in Texas go well together. So that sounds like a good strategy. I think that probably a lot of people know you because of polarized training. A lot of people say that you coin the term polarized training. I don't know if that's correct or not, but maybe you could give us a brief little history lesson of how did polarized training start? How did you discover it? How did it get discovered in general? It's not something I invented in the sense that I experimentally said this is going to work and anticipated or had a hypothesis. It's more that I observed it in athletes, that athletes discovered it through the trial and error of coaching and training over decades. And I as a sports scientist, I guess if I did something useful, it was to respect the knowledge of coaches and athletes and say, you know what, we have to move out and actually quantify what they do, what the really good endurance athletes do. How do they train? Because we think we know how to train untrained people and get them out off the sofa and improve their VO2 max after eight weeks, but that's really not that relevant to an athlete that's been training for five years and is now trying to take the next step up towards the national team. So that was really, you know, my kind of epiphany if there is such a thing here when I came to Norway, because I was I was seeing things and hearing things in the training environment that didn't match up with my, you might say, conventional interpretation of the available research literature. Then yeah, I published a couple of papers where I use the term polarized training. Yeah, I think it was me that coined it and then just been trying to figure out what it actually means and why ever since. What kind of things were you seeing elite athletes and coaches doing and perhaps that could be a segue into just for anyone who doesn't know what polarized training is, just a brief overview of what polarized training actually is. Yeah, and I think we're going to have to really say what it is and what it isn't. But what was fundamental about polarized training or what I see and 25 years later is still consistently observed is that the best endurance athletes in the world, whether they were you would, you know, four minute or way down three, three and a half, you can kind of the endurance spectrum, I would say starts around three to four minutes of competition duration and all the way out to six hour classics, you know, or Iron Man events, all of that, that entire spectrum, we saw just big universal or commonalities and the biggest commonality from a training perspective was is that they were doing large volumes of their total training at an intensity that was below what we call the first lactate turn point. Pretty comfortable intensity, but lots of hours, you know, high frequency, high volume, a lot of training. And then they were also doing, you know, significant amounts, but much smaller amounts of high intensity training and high intensity in my brain now, because of all the research we've done, we have done is basically anything above that first lactate turn point. But when we first published, we were kind of using a three intensity zone model based on the physiology where you have a first turn point and a second turn point for lactate. The first is a kind of a subtle increase that it can be compensated or can reach a new steady state. If you keep increasing the intensity, you reach a point where now lactate just continues to climb until fatigue or until you cease, you stop exercising. So that was, you know, we use this three zone model and my brain said those are going to each have different consequences. But then subsequent research on the stress aspects of it, using heart rate variability recovery and things like that suggested that actually, once you induce that big stress response, once you start really turning on the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system, the body doesn't really distinguish. And so more and more 27 for 25 years on, I would say it's almost like training comes down to two zones, a low stress zone and a high stress zone. And that's been, you know, I think it's been supported by subsequent research. And it's totally consistent with what we see athletes kind of self organizing towards, you know, because athletes were not saying, Oh, it's my autonomic nervous system. I need to balance that all out. They were just doing what was sustainable. They slowly were developing kind of an intensity distribution that allowed them to do one, a lot of training and two, some really hard training. And you need both. You need to do a lot of volume. We haven't seen much evidence of any way to circumvent that or to shortcut that, you know, good athletes train a lot. And I just, I'm sorry, but if someone wants evidence to the contrary that you can bypass the volume load, I haven't found it. You know, of course you can find, I think you can find evidence of athletes that have had a high volume that come down substantially in volume for a year or for a season and still pop some good results, you know, on the, they're on the descending curve, maybe because of an injury or because of they're about to retire or whatever. We've seen that, but they've been there. They've got a, they've got a big, you know, they've done a lot of work. And then usually when they go down in volume, they're more inconsistent in their performances. So that's what we've seen. So you can't get away from the frequency and the volume demands, but you also need the intensity occasionally. And so balancing all that out is really what good endurance training or effective endurance training comes down to, as far as I can tell after all of these years of trying to understand it. And it seems like that polarized distribution where a lot of the volume is extensive and at a more moderate intensity is more sustainable because you don't trigger that big stress response. You get a lot of cell signaling. You build mitochondria, you get the capillary density changes, you get even cardiovascular improvements. You know, it's, you don't have to do intervals to get a VO2 max improvement. It turns out. And so you get a lot of that at a fairly low stress cost. And so that's, that's what it comes down to, I think, for a long-term development is finding a sustainable balance. I know that people are going to be wondering, okay, how do I implement this into my own training? So I think probably the best place to start would be, how do we properly do one of these low-intensity rides? What intensity should I be riding at? How long, etc.? Yeah, that's a great question. And the most common mistake, of course, will be a kind of a half-wheeling type acceleration towards motor-auto, towards threshold level. And so you start out with good intentions, you're going to keep it low, but then somebody passes you and here we go with the testosterone reaction and says, oh, hell, I'm not letting them do that. And then you're on their wheel. And then we'll start the half-wheeling process and group rides and all this go out of control this way. It happens on Zwift, it happens in real life. But, well, the fundamental, that what I see with all the, with the best athletes, athletes that I've been fortunate enough to meet and talk to that have won multiple gold medals, they just, they put their ego aside when they're doing these workouts. They will let some 20-year-old, you know, goofball cycle past them. You know, they know what they're good for. And they know that they're like, dude, take off, man, have fun. I'm on a four-hour easy ride today. But you can come back tomorrow because I'll be doing a hill session. Join me. Bring it on. You know, and so that's that what you see in the best is discipline, intensity discipline. So the first, the start of a low intensity session is to have the discipline to do it that way. To say today, 200 watts for four hours, you know, or whatever, whatever it is. Now, then you say, well, yeah, but there's some climbs here. You know, there's this, this is underlating terrain. And yeah, terrain can be tricky in cycling because it can tend to push workouts into that threshold zone. So you, you got to one, pick your terrain for low intensity sessions and two, pick your gear when you're climbing. Or, you know, when you do have to face the, the, these realities. So it's all about saying, what's the goal of this session today? You know, what is the, in the big picture of things where I'm doing hundreds of workouts this year? What's the, what's the goal here? And so I think that's what I see with the best athletes is that, you know, a clear understanding of what's the goal today and, and discipline and executing. I hear a common criticism of polarized training is that it works great for a pro who literally their only job is to ride their bike and they can do it for 20 to 30 hours per week. But I only have five to 10 hours per week. Doesn't seem like polarized training is going to work for me if I have to do all this low intensity. What do you say to that? Yeah, if you only are able to get out on the road three times a week and you've got four hours to train total per week or something like that, you know, you're just completely time squeezed, then yeah, I'm kind of in agreement with you. Then I'm going to just pretty much hammer those three days a week I have and hope for the best. But we have data and there is other studies that have been done that at least once you get up into that five to seven hour a week range, then already there if you're constantly training just kind of like threshold, you're kind of in that where everything squeezes into the same intensity in the middle that those athletes who are able to get a bit more disciplined have a long ride that is at the appropriate intensity a couple of those a week and then a really quality interval session and that and you know they will start seeing effects of that discipline in that in a range that a lot of us are able to be guys like me if I can train 10 hours a week yeah it definitely makes a difference for me if I get that right if I find the right balance in my intensity distribution and you know so 10 hours in that five to 10 hour range where a lot of people are it does still make a difference based on you know experimental studies so it does translate down these things we've seen from the top performers translates pretty far down into the the lives of the typical age group and and the most common training error in in the age groupers the you know the regular amateurs it will not be that they don't train hard enough it'll be that they train too hard that's just that's just what we see and and hard becomes kind of semi-hard every day one quick thing that I was going to ask uh related to taking rest days uh how do you feel about recovery rides easy one hour as easy as you can go versus a just taking the day completely off the bike I'm going to be honest with it if if you are really tired and you really say I just want to pedal as slow as I can then I would say well then why don't you just stay on the sofa and watch reruns or something and really rest rest and the other thing is a lot of times let's just be honest a rest day is not just a rest day for your body but it's also a day where you can kind of do other stuff you need to be doing you know you you get some stuff you get the bills paid maybe because now I have saved three hours today so I've got time to do some other stuff and you lower your stress load just because that day you can get some other shit done so and and let's remember that this is part of the practical realities for most people that both their body needs rest but that rest is also freeing up a bit of time for them to be a mom or a dad or or pay the bills or whatever it might be or the coach of the little league team and so the rest day ends up being a de-stressor in many ways and I do not know of any data to support that actual recovery processes measurable recovery processes are accelerated by a recovery ride versus a rest day I have tried to look into it myself and it's very limited most of the research on recovery intensity is is done on recovery intensity between hard efforts it's not done on a recovery day I don't want to keep you too much longer but one one thing that I did want to ask you is pyramidal training versus polarized training where do you fall on pyramidal versus polarized dawg and spearlich there were the two guys that introduced the term pyramidal they did a nice review and I was actually a reviewer of that paper and I can recall the first version of it and I said yeah you're on to something here and I and I think you're right I think the term polarized is is being used inappropriately because it's not always truly polarized what's being called polarized and so they they ran with it and they demonstrated and showed that yeah a lot of studies it's actually this kind of it was always consistently a lot of low intensity but then the threshold versus above threshold that distribution wasn't always polarized it was sometimes you know peer what they called pyramidal and and we've seen that with runners we've seen it with cyclists and it's true and the consistent part is about 80% of training sessions maybe 90% based on time and zone is in that low intensity zone but how the rest is distributed varies quite a bit what determines that it's event duration where they are in the season and probably also some individual issues of how they tolerate different load or intensity regimes you know if I use an example of myself an old guy doing intervals I handle short hard interval sessions pretty well but a really long threshold session will kick my butt probably because I get so glycogen depleted and I've got a lot of fast twitch fibers relatively speaking so I play in my wheelhouse with with more stochastic suit high intensity it fits my physiology better and I recover better I need the long tough threshold sessions but they're tougher for me now a super slow twitch diesel athlete may be exactly the opposite they could go all day at threshold and I and but they'll struggle in a with a 3015 workout and the other thing about this pyramidal versus polarized which I think makes the the whole discussion a bit artificial is that even if I do a nice polarized power distribution the heart rate based data can look pretty darn threshold for example if I do 30 15's you can end up if you look at it so that looks like upper threshold but I was cranking some pretty big powers here well yeah but you were cranking you know you were doing them for short periods and then you're getting recovery and so you get this dissociation between the central point of view cardiovascular response which is based on overall oxygen demand and the peripheral point of view which is the the localized recruitment of muscle with these high intensity accelerations so there can be a disconnect between those two and the one looks like threshold and the other looks like a high intensity session so that that also contributes to confusion in this pyramidal versus polarized discussion so have I have I muddied the waters enough here but the point is I really do believe that it if we understand that both a threshold intensity kind of workout that's long and tough and a interval kind of typical high intensity interval session they're both hard you're activating a big sympathetic response and they should be seen as both going in that kind of high stress bucket if you're doing your accounting of how many week workouts a week are going to be hard and how many workouts are going to be low stress and and you're trying to manage that then both threshold sessions and high intensity so called vo2 max interval sessions land in the same hard bucket do you think that it would make sense for somebody to maybe do more polarized for one part of the year and more pyramidal for another part of the year or somebody to do more pyramidal if they're training for say a longer ultra endurance event and somebody to do more polarized if they're training for a shorter distance event yeah in general the progression the periodization if we want to call it that of the interval sessions will be a bit towards more race pace particularly in running where you have a very specific race pace and so if you're a 5000 runner 1500 meter runner then that means you're progressing towards pretty darn high intensities vo2 max type sessions but if you're a marathoner then your goal is to extend threshold you're trying to stay at threshold longer because if you can hold your goal pace longer then you get a pr in your marathon so they will be doing a different load structure where they their toughest sessions may end up being really long tough threshold sessions and they so some marathoners do what we call a reverse periodization where they do vo2 max type intervals earlier in the season and then they start stretching them and and reducing intensity just a little bit extending and moving towards marathon goal pace it's all hard a 90 minute threshold session is tough more and more I've developed this kind of just dichotomous thinking of of low stress sessions that we can recover within 24 hours from versus high stress sessions that will require more than 24 hours of recovery you know and that's your could be the tough interval session the tough threshold session the race and so forth that the recovery clock is now longer it's extended and now I've got to manage that within the training microcycle to finish it up is there anything that you're currently working on that you'd like the audience to know about or are there any areas of endurance training that you feel need more research oh well the first the last I'll say first there's definitely areas that need more research because we have tended to be intensity centric as physiologists because it's just kind of sexier things happen faster when we're working at high intensity the workouts are shorter everything you know it's just our intention span like everybody else is short but we need to know more about the interaction between intensity and duration below that first LT the first leg take turn point given that so much of the training is is there and should be there I think we probably could benefit from more information more understanding of that careful interaction between you know is it 60 percent for four hours or is it the same if I do 70 percent for two hours you with me I don't have any data on that but I suspect that people have an opinion so that's one area that we need more data on another area is just this this issue of stress of training load versus stress in other words what's happening in the workouts and how in this uncoupling or decoupling between the the internal workload and the external workload and how much is enough and and all of these questions that were emerging we need more data on that and and heart rate is a good tool but it's probably not it's it's not ideal it doesn't tell us everything and so one of the other things I'm working on is is understanding the second vital sign which is breathing ventilation because now with modern technologies we're able to breathe take breathing and ventilation out into the field and and and all that and there's some really interesting research going on related to that so I'm doing a bit of work there too thanks for watching I've linked to dr. Seiler's personal youtube channel down in the description and I highly recommend checking it out if you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a like subscribe and share this video with your cycling friends I'll see you in the next one