SERIOUS TRAINING 33

In last week’s SERIOUS TRAINING 32 I described two common recovery methods for concluding a mesocycle (about a month of training): scheduled recovery and recovery on demand. But there’s another important place where recovery belongs in your periodization plan—within each microcycle (usually a week of training). Just as there are different ways to recover between multi-week training blocks, there are also options for balancing stress and recovery within each training week.

As with almost everything in training, weekly recovery comes down to balancing hard and easy workouts. Aside from taking an occasional day completely off, performance depends on getting that balance right.

Back in the 1980s, athletes often trained hard far too frequently. We had no real recovery protocols. I remember weeks with as many as five hard workouts while also piling on enormous training volume. No wonder I was constantly tired and frequently injured. We simply didn’t know any better.

The 1990s brought important changes. Periodization was beginning to spread beyond the Eastern Bloc, where it had long been used with great success.

I recall speaking at a coaching clinic in California around 1990 alongside Tudor Bompa, PhD, who is considered by many to be the “Father of Periodization.” I spent that weekend asking him countless questions about how Romanian coaches organized training. I was fascinated. That experience eventually inspired The Cyclist’s Training Bible (Dr. Bompa wrote its foreword), followed by The Triathlete’s Training Bible and, eventually, 17 more books on periodization for endurance athletes.

Back in the 1990s, it was common for endurance athletes to concentrate their training program just below their lactate thresholds (LT2). That was considered by many to be the intensity that would produce the best results with the least stress. Such precision training was then possible due to the common devices of that era: heart rate monitors, portable lactate analyzers, and power meters. Athletes did several such moderately hard workouts weekly.

Things began to change in the early 2000s. I often refer to this as the time of the greatest changes in training since the popularity of interval training in the a930s. This change wasn’t just because of the also growing popularity of easy training. Elite athletes have nearly always seen that as the foundation of their training. The change had to do with sport scientists beginning to carefully measure what the world’s best athletes were actually doing in their training.

Researchers began analyzing the training diaries of elite Nordic skiers, rowers, runners, cyclists and biathletes. They found a remarkably similar way of training regardless of the sport:

• 75-90% of their workouts were below the first lactate threshold (LT1).

• 10-25% were at or above the second lactate threshold (LT2).

• There was very little training between LT1 and LT2.

Coaches and athletes who had believed that optimal training was mostly conducted between the two thresholds were skeptical—and still are.

Perhaps the greatest contributions to this high- and low-intensity training method were made by a US sport scientist working in Norway—Stephen Seiler, PhD. He led many studies on this topic and introduced the concept of “polarized training” and the simplified “80/20” description.

There are still some misunderstandings about polarized training. His 80/20 is not a rigid method. Depending on the athlete and their event type, season, and periodization, the ratio may vary from roughly 75/25 to 90/10. It’s not unusual at all to hear that some of the top athletes in the world only do 10% of their training above LT2.

But there is another caveat which is critical for understanding polarized training. Seiler’s data balance is not based on how much time was spent in the high and low intensity ranges, but rather how many workouts focused on these variables. In other words, roughly 80% of the athletes’ workouts were easy and 20% of their workouts were hard.

This was not a training revolution that took place in the early 2000s. What began changing in then was how coaches understood, measured, and described how the best athletes trained.

But polarized training was not the only model that came out of the early 2000s. Many began to use a pyramidal training method. This also divides training intensity into three ranges: easy (below LT1), hard (above LT2), and moderate (between LT1 and LT2). The athletes workouts are classified into these three zones with the finished product looking like a pyramid with a very large base (below LT1), a moderately sized middle, and a small peak (above LT2).

About the same time another method also was becoming popular—block periodization. The sport scientist Vladimir Issurin developed and refined this way of training especially for elite athletes. This method focuses on developing one or two abilities within relatively short training blocks while maintaining other abilities.

Polarized training has attracted the largest following, especially at the upper end of the athlete-ability spectrum. But it’s important to realize that Seiler didn’t invent easy training. It’s been around for a long time. Arthur Lydiard made it the foundation of his training method for runners in the 1960s. And Scandinavian Nordic ski coaches have relied on huge training volumes at low intensity for decades.

The real change was in how sport science documented these successful methodologies, explained what made them successful, and developed a common endurance-sport language with terms such as polarized training, intensity distribution, and 80/20.

So what does all of this history mean for your weekly training? It comes down to organizing your week so that hard workouts are separated by enough easy training to allow complete recovery and maximum adaptation. That’s what ultimately improves fitness. Here’s how I’d suggest doing that.