In my previous post I mentioned how I’d estimated VT1 and VT2 and how they would be useful in the context of polarised training, so what is polarised training?
When it comes to building endurance, there are many ways mix up training intensities to produce a desired result. You can do lots of volume first and then add speed work, you can do speed work first and then add the volume. You can do lots of work just under your 1hr threshold, and there’s many more options behind that.
Polarised Training is a prescription popularised by Dr. Stephen Seiler. Dr. Seiler has done lots of research on how the best elite athletes train. He’s based in Norway, so his research has been with the Norwegian cross-country skiers, some of the best endurance athletes in the world. What he found was that the skiers would spend the vast majority of their training time at relatively low intensities and a small portion at really high intensities, with almost no time in the middle. These are Olympic or World Champion athletes, and on many of their training days he could keep up with them. He checked a few more sports, again with elites, and found that the pattern held.
Now the immediate objection that springs to mind is “if I’m doing 20-30hrs of training a week, then sure, lots of it will be easy” and you might assume it doesn’t hold for those of us with more modest weekly training hours, but no, further research has shown that the polarised model also works for athletes training 7 hours per week.
Pretty much anyone who coaches amateur athletes would agree that one obvious flaw in the way amateurs train is that we typically do our easy sessions too hard, and our hard sessions too easy, so this model makes sense from that perspective too. Take it easy when you’re supposed to so that you are fresh and ready to smash it when hard sessions are prescribed.
Dr. Seiler’s Polarised Training says that 80% of your sessions should be at an intensity below VT1 and the remaining 20% of sessions should be above VT2, or the splits in hours per week should be 90% below VT1 to 10% above VT2. Training below VT1 trains your fat burning system, which improves your fuel use at all intensities and also builds lots of mitochondria, the engines of your cells.
Bear in mind too that this is my summary of his decades of research, but, if you want to hear from the man himself, he has appeared on Velonews’ Fast Talk Podcast a number of times to explain his research in more depth.
Dr. Seiler isn’t the only one talking about this. Dr. Phil Maffetone has been coaching for decades and has a similar prescription, providing a method for calculating your aerobic training heart rate which you should not exceed. The goal also being to build a solid aerobic system.
In terms of my training plans, I can train approx. 10hrs per week, so when adopting the polarised approach nine hours should be below VT1 and one hour should be above VT2. In reality, it will take me a while to build up the fitness required to handle that much high intensity, so any intervals I do will fall a little short of VT2 initially.
My brother and his family are arriving tomorrow morning for tens days holidays, so I won’t be doing much cycling between now and the beginning of July and putting the polarised model into practice will have to wait until then 🙂