The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Episode 212 - Which is Best: SweetSpot vs. Polarized Training for Cyclists?

September 04, 2024 • CTS • Season 4 • Episode 212

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OVERVIEW
Overview: The sports science debate between training methodologies seems to pit Polarized training (e.g., hard days hard, easy days easy) against Tempo/Sweetspot training (e.g., high aerobic training, often derided as "the middle ground"). For real athletes, all intensities matter and how you use them depends on your available time and your goals. Here's how to figure it out.

TOPICS COVERED

  • Polarized vs. SweetSpot definitions
  • SweetSpot pros and cons
  • Polarized training pros and cons
  • Practical recommendations for Time-Crunched Cyclists

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HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Speaker 1:

From the team at CTS.

Speaker 1:

This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Welcome back, time Crunch fans. If this is your first time joining us, it's great to have you here.

Speaker 1:

This is a podcast with no fancy frills or much entertainment, just my best advice on all things endurance training. Some of the episodes are with expert guests, others are me answering questions from you, our audience, and that's what we're going to be doing today. On today's topic, I've been getting similar questions or this type of question a lot lately, both with inquiries to the pod as well as out there in the wild. To frame it up best, I think I'll just read one of the original questions submitted in to me on the podcast, but that doesn't discount the other similar questions from people like Megan Davis, michael Brian, Pam and many others I've chatted with on this topic. After I read the question, I'll give you my straight down the barrel advice and explain my rationale with a bigger picture in mind. So today's topic sweet spot versus polarized training which is best? So here's the original question.

Speaker 1:

Hi Adam, I'm a huge fan of your podcast and a self-coached cyclist. I'm a time crunched athlete, training plus or minus seven hours of training per week, but I'd like to have high aerobic capacity and increase my aerobic threshold, especially in the base periods. However, I'm wondering which is the best way to achieve this. On one hand, and frequently mentioned on your podcast, you can do this by riding many intervals and sweet spot zone. However, others say it's much better to ride very slow zone two and have one training session with hard VO, two max slash anaerobic work per week and avoid spending time in the zones in between like sweet spot.

Speaker 1:

These two approaches differ strongly from one another. Which should I follow? Or does it depend on situation, slash other factors? Would love to hear your thoughts, especially about the difference and the different outcomes, if there are any, between the two approaches. Best, eiko, eiko, yeah, thanks for writing in. That's a huge topic and a very hot topic right now. So here is my straight up answer. Both Both approaches are good, and hear me when I say this Training all intensity throughout the year is the most effective way for athletes and coaches to develop high aerobic capacity and increase their threshold.

Speaker 1:

In my opinion and experience, with over 20 years in this industry, focusing on one method only or training a narrow range of intensity is not effective and can lead to frustration, staleness and burnout. Organizing your season into different phases throughout the year which focus on developing particular aspects of your physiology at different times, using different training modalities or methods of training, is more effective than using one method all year round. So, when it comes down to timing of when to use these different methods, when is best this is where it depends. Depending on your goals, the specificity of your important races, your strengths and weakness as an individual, you may choose one method of training versus the other, or combination leading into an event or a certain time period. More on that in a minute. But I'm really going to for you, eiko, and for and I hope I'm saying your name right so for you as well as our listeners, I really want to encourage you to think bigger picture when deciding what method of training to deploy at different times that will work best for you. So before we get into, maybe, some of the mixture of timing of what's going to work best, I want to give you a quick reminder of what each method sweet spot and polarized, what it really entails. So high level, just kind of bullet points, rapid fire here.

Speaker 1:

Sweet spot training is 88 to 94% of your FTP. The rate of perceived effort for that is about seven out of 10. You can usually do this multiple days per week back to back without too much fatigue built up because it's it's medium hard. Okay, you can. You can do it and keep doing it, as long as you stay hydrated. Uh, your, you know, sleeping well, you're eating well. Um, because of the medium intensity, okay, you can do as much as probably four days per week, five or six, really. I mean. If you really just want to go full, send on a week, because it's again medium intensity, you can get away with that. And it was popularized by Frank Overton and Andy Coggin, two respected individuals in this space.

Speaker 1:

Now, polarized training, that's a combination of both the zone two, which is 60 to 75% of FTP and zone four, which is a hundred percent and above. This is where we keep the hard days hard, the easy days easy or the easy days being zone two, or maybe recovery. Okay, depending on who's writing the training. Usually this is 20% of your total number of training sessions pertaining to high intensity focuses to them, okay, but that's also. There's a little bit of flex there. Okay, when I say about 20%, or or, um, uh, you know, this was popularized by Dr Steven Seiler and has been kind of evolved, um, by a number of people, including just the research itself, so that 20% is really plus or minus 5%. So we're talking 15 to 25% of those sessions being a high intensity focus. Additionally to that, that doesn't mean the intensity distribution of time in zone is 80-20 split. I've covered this on various episodes Look for Dr Steven Seiler as well as an episode I'll mention coming up.

Speaker 1:

But really, the intensity distribution, if you're looking at time in zone of where you're pedaling, it's a 90-10 split of 90% being that zone two and 10% of your total time pedaling being at that zone four or higher, or 100% of your FTP and higher. That's what polarized training looks like or entails. So now let's look at the pros and cons of each. Okay, and this pertains to your question, ekov like what are the benefits really? Or the outcomes? And I'm going to give you the both the good stuff and the bad stuff. So here are the sweet spot pros you get a lot of bang for your buck when it comes to TSS per minute. Okay, when it's time spent pedaling, the benefits of this high aerobic training are you you get increased mitochondrial, uh density, capillary density, and when you're doing long zone two training or this high aerobic training, that that is one of the goals, kind of like under the hood of what happens with aerobic training. So sweet spot tends to speed that up a little bit.

Speaker 1:

If you're, if you're curious about how and why of this, I've included some resources on our landing page for the podcast really good reads. I've read them before. But I went back when I was shaping up the outline for this podcast and I was like, yeah, this is really good and a few of the writers are looking at the research out there in kind of giving you some of these pros and cons in a little bit of a long form sort of write up. So if you're curious about this, I'm giving you the bullet points, but go ahead and read that. So again, the benefits of sweet spot is we get a little bit more of a microwave approach for aerobic training when you do it at the sweet spot without a ton of that fatigue. Now, for that reason this is a really good intensity for time crunched athletes in the late base to build time periods in the season because we need more training stimulus than what just the zone two aerobic riding can do. I'll talk about this more in a minute. But if you don't have that 15 hour plus time, that a lot of time crunch athletes don't just by definition, sweet spot's good for that. But I'll explain that more here in a minute, including the base and build Now a few more pros of the sweet spot.

Speaker 1:

You know it feels good. Okay, it's a high work rate. You get the legs burning, you get a lot of sweat going. You know if you're outside climbing you get to climb fast uphill and it just it feels really good. You're racking up the miles, you're racking up the the, the VAM and it's a. It's a really uh kind of comfortable. It's a sweet spot, right, that's what we talk about. So it feels good when you do it, you burn a lot of calories as well. So you get back from the ride and you deserve that donut. You got the endorphins going and you can eat a lot more too, and I think that's pretty attractive for a lot of people. It also does a good job of improving fatigue resistance. Okay, and I've talked about this in various podcasts but essentially what that means is if you do medium hard training and then if you go out and that's fatiguing, right, your, your body adapts and it gets resilient to it in that way.

Speaker 1:

Now, what are some of the cons of sweet spot? Well, it's it's easy to get overly fatigued by doing this too much. Okay, you can get really stale from it, and so, because it kind of like sucks you in with feeling good, you can do a lot of it. All this kind of stuff you can. You get this like comfortable fatigue going where you can still produce the power, you can still do the workouts, but you're like Ooh, my legs no, I don't know if I got it today, but then you try it. It's like okay, now I can do it because it's high aerobic I'll uncover that a little bit more, but that's what I mean by can kind of like sneak you into getting overly fatigued. Okay, you can stay off from it, because you, by doing a lot of this, you'll suppress some of the upper end muscle or the fast twitch muscle fibers in the upper end energy system, the ATP phosphocreatine system that I mentioned before on this podcast.

Speaker 1:

And because it feels so good and the benefits are so compelling, it's easy to get sucked into doing it all the time, like I just said, and thus it perpetuates all of these cons that I that I mentioned. It's kind of like this, this cycle, right, it feels good, so do it, keep on doing it, get more fatigued, more fatigued, more fatigued. So really the problem is doing it too much. Now, if you do it too much, without some of these longer rides, you can also become more of a sugar burner and less of a fat burner. And this I discussed with CTS coach Renee Eastman on a few episodes in our lab testing series. So search for that if you're curious about it series. So search for that if you're curious about it.

Speaker 1:

And this is because you shift from. You shift so much of your intensity distribution to high glycogen burning so frequently. So say, you're doing this four days a week. You know you kind of warm up for 10 minutes and then you get into your sweet spot stuff where you're burning glycogen right away, okay. And so your body adapts to this and we're just burning muscle glycogen which comes from exogenous carbohydrate, and we habituate our bodies into doing that. And if you're not doing long rides, we lose some of our fat burning capabilities.

Speaker 1:

Metabolically, I would say that this is simply a con for both endurance cyclists as well as healthy human individuals. We need our bodies to be able to burn fat as a fuel source for lower intensity and glycogen for higher intensities. And if you do too much sweet spot training, it makes that shift a little bit. So sweet spot is a narrow training window of percentage of intensity, and when you get too narrow it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. You're focused on the tree versus the forest. Now notice that much of these cons are really when you do it too much relative to other intensities. So keep this in mind during this podcast as well as when you're talking with your training partners, your friends and coaches. It's not to say sweet spot itself is bad, okay, it's the distribute, it's the doing it too much relative to the other stuff. That's. That's what I find is bad. So, for what it's worth, I'm not a sweet spot hater, okay, but you just have to balance it out.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about, uh, polarized the pros of polarized training. It's a proven method to develop performance. Hands down, it's a very good approach to training, provides a great framework to keep contrast in training hard days, hard, easy days, like I talked about now. It keeps you disciplined if you follow it. So if you're a good soldier following the polarized training program, it will work for you. It also incorporates a vast array of intensity, so endurance as well as high threshold up to maximum, which I think is the most powerful aspect of this method of training. So notice this Much of the pros come from the method because it just it has more training options.

Speaker 1:

Okay, the aerobic window is huge and the intensity limits start as low as a hundred percent of your FTP, which is still threshold training. Okay, a lot of people just associate it with like max efforts or VO two max or something like this. But no, I mean, if you look up the um, every um kind of the structure of of polarized training, it's a hundred percent of your FTP and upward and a six zone system. So that's the middle of zone four and the upper limits are maximum. So by definition of percentages, of FTP, I don't know, 700, 800, something like that. So you have these very big ranges or options of training intensity and overall I would say that the reason why it works so well is because you have a lot more choices in that way. And if you go back to my again, my experience and my opinion, training all intensities are really what prevails in performance. The polarized sort of method just gives you more of the options and will set you up for greater success.

Speaker 1:

But let's talk about some of the polarized cons again. If you do it all the time, it can get boring. For some athletes, simply lack of variety mentally just could make you be over it. Speaking of mentally, it can be very taxing because if it's two times per week and you're in, you're really focused on high intensity and performance every single time on those two days, it can lead to some mental fatigue, especially if your life stress score is high, your LSS, uh, as I joke about with some of my athletes. So if you just have a lot of you know stress at work, a lot of you know challenging times with family and you got to go perform and it's you know all or nothing on this interval session because you got to follow the program. It can get a little mentally taxing. Now, if you do this all the time, you'll likely miss out on some of that high aerobic work rate specificity. Now again, I've done a podcast on fatigue resistance training before. Go ahead and look that up.

Speaker 1:

But um again, it's like when you super polarized in that way and you just spend zero time in the middle. Or like um, it's if you get into a really hilly event, like if you do a grand Fondo with long hill climbs that are 20, 40, 60 minutes long, um over in France, or if you get into a break and a road race, you're going to be doing those really high work rate intensities, sweet spot threshold with surges, that kind of stuff. And I find that if you train that, it makes you more resilient to it. If you're always polarized, so it's always, you know, really hard and then, contrasted, really easy, you miss out on that. So that's that's what I'm talking about of you miss out on some of the mediumness.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so even if you are following polarized, you also still need to decide what you're trying to achieve on your hard days. So, is it intensive FTP? Is it extensive VO2 max? Is it intensive VO2 max? Is it anaerobic capacity? Is it sprint training? So again, it's just because you subscribe to polarized doesn't mean it's going to be easy to simply follow. If you're writing your own training program. There's still quite a bit of thought that goes into how to organize and what to do when. Finally, the majority of the training stress, or TSS, from polarized comes from the total hours spent training. If you literally do not have the total hours to spend on training, there will not be enough TSS to increase your fitness and your performance. Therefore this modality will not be effective.

Speaker 1:

So how do? How do I coach? Actually don't use sweet spot, or at least I don't call it that. I keep to a six zone training system. Then I individualize the percentage of FTP Once I'm prescribing, um, you know, aerobic capacity or anaerobic capacity, um, um, up to max efforts. Okay. So sweet sweet spot is really just nuanced tempo. Technically it's high tempo or low threshold. So I just keep things simple for my athletes in this way. I exclude sweet spot as a training zone and I just keep the percentages of FTP in there, and then they follow the training program. So keep it simple, sweetheart.

Speaker 1:

When planning a year for an athlete, I cycle through different phases and training methods and, generally speaking, I intensify the training as the season progresses, from base to build to race specific time periods. The training methods I use in these phases I call base, pure, middle and polarized respectively. So what that means is during base, that's a high volume, low intensity focus. Pure middle is moderate volume and moderate intensity, so probably like a lot of sweet spot. And polarized is mixed volume in high intensity, organized Well technically, uh, mixed intensity as well, because the polarized has both right, so mostly organized in that 80,20 way that we're talking about. So I use polarized training actually quite a bit in my coaching practice. For a complete discussion on all of that because that I mean that's periodization right there, and that's a huge topic I've done several episodes about it, but the most complete episode that I did was with coach Tim Cusack and that's episode number 46 and it's entitled periodization, training modalities and getting your training rhythms right.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's a long title. Whoever thought of that? So for echo and all your time crunched athletes out there listening, myself included here, in that late base and early pyramidal phase which comes after the base, I prescribe high tempo, low threshold or sweet spot, and I prescribe that two to three days per week for most athletes. If we're really crunched on time and I want to get aggressive, I may go up to four days per week of sweet spot training or this like high aerobic intensity, but I only do that for short time periods. If you're only riding around seven hours per week, eiko, and you're in your base phase, which for typically a lot of North American athletes is January, you're doing a lot of endurance work and maybe one structured workout from trainer road or something like that per week.

Speaker 1:

Really, the focus is zone two. You probably see your CTL, or your ramp rate, increasing, which is just measuring your fitness or your CTL per week. If that's going up, that's good. At some point that'll plateau and that's when you need to start to intensify your training. And this is where I think it's best to intensify up to medium or sweet spot at this point, because you don't have the hours anymore to keep the needle of CTL moving forward. So that's for when I say a time crunched cyclist, that's when I would start to add the sweet spot and I would maybe do like two cycles of three weeks each with one week recovering in between, and then start moving on to a polarized method Okay, versus a time rich athlete where I'll keep that kind of zone two base going for several months without adding too much of sweet spot. I might do some other cadence work and it's not purely just zone two all the time. There might be a group ride, something like that in there, but in the way of like a focus to drive training effect. That's where I would add sweet spot for you.

Speaker 1:

So when and how much sweet spot? Well, like I told you, it's usually late base, early prep phases or just when you want to boot up fitness quickly, maybe middle of the year or add some fatigue resistance training to the program. And a good starting point for all of this for folks who haven't done a workout like this just start by with three by 10 at sweet spot, so 88 to 94% of uh, of FTP I believe double check that off the top of my head and uh. So three by 10 at sweet spot, with four to five minute recovery in between. So you're really looking for about a two to one work to work to rest ratio, much like threshold, and then you progress up by adding more time in zones, so three by 12, three by 15, something like that, or and or decreased recovery periods in between. So this is this is an interval or an intensity where I would work up to long. You know steady state, as we call it here at CTS but long, steady intervals 45 to 60 minutes straight with no recovery that's a good sign that you're getting really fit. Some athletes could do more, some could do less.

Speaker 1:

How much sweet spot throughout the year? Now, this is getting nuanced and individualized. I can't give an answer like that. That would apply to everybody on this podcast. But what I can tell you is that if you're doing sweet spot training more than four days per week for six to eight weeks in a row, it's time to take a recovery period and move on, move on to more intense workouts.

Speaker 1:

The real problem is when I find athletes doing a bunch of sweet spot workouts because it's just so simple, from trainer road, from Zwift, from your own podcast, whatever it is, or from your own training program, whatever. Then they do a group ride out outside and that's their whole week. That's just too much intensity. That's just too much intensity. That's just too much intensity. That's just too much intensity. And if you do that all the time, you get all these cons that we talked about of sweet spot training.

Speaker 1:

But remember it's not sweet spot that is full of cons or full of problems. It's our overuse of it and the lack of variety in training that leads to the problems so many athletes look for one way, one method or the magic bullet. It doesn't exist. I wish it did and I understand why humans think like this. It's more simple. But human physiology is not simple. It's complicated and it seems to be that way for good reasons. Not simple, it's complicated and it seems to be that way for good reasons, namely so that our human tendencies don't destroy it with too much of any one thing. So my recommendations and overall summary is don't subscribe to just one method all the time. All intensity matters. Get organized with your season, change or cycle your training throughout the year to ensure enough variety for training stimulus, and all this will lead to increased performance and increased fun.

Speaker 1:

In closing, I just want to say thank you to Eiko for writing in with a great question and to the others that I mentioned, who you know ask similar questions about this topic and have had conversations of. I hope that an all-inclusive episode like this helps to answer all of those questions out there. If you're listening today and you've come up with your own question, or you think of one while you're out on the road riding or talking to a friend, if you've got an endurance training-related question, simply head over to trainrightcom backslash podcast and click on ask a training question, fill out the form and submit it to us here at CTS. Those questions get sent directly to me and I'll do my best to answer it on upcoming episodes. That's it. That's our show.

Speaker 1:

Be sure to come back next week for more and we'll be getting back to guest interviews on various topics, including cycle cross training. Why? Because cross is coming. Thanks again for listening and keep those questions coming in. Thanks for joining us on the time crunch cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to train rightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

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