80/20 rule (Page 2)

My Oly plan (non-recovery week) schedule looked like this:

Monday:  6 AM bike - the easiest of the workouts (probably sweet spot) then a quick run, afternoon evening swim

Tuesday: 6 AM quality run, afternoon swim

Wednesday:  6 AM bike (most intense), afternoon EZ run

Thursday:  6 AM yoga, afternoon optional bike or run

Friday:  6 AM Masters swimming then short run home, afternoon bike (longest one)

Saturday:  short bike, followed by long run followed by short swim cool down (about 2 hours total)

Sunday:  off day or makeup

I also did some strength training sessions.  All of the runs other than Tuesday were at an easy pace. 

So, I'd go into the week fresh on Monday and Monday is a medium-intensity day, so my Tuesday morning runs were really effective.  I would occasionally run a road race on Saturdays, but those were mostly at the end of recovery weeks.

All three of those sessions were hard-ish, some harder than others, depending on the week.  Nothing like 90' Z2 or anything except when I got outside and went for a couple of longer rides, but even those had plenty of hard work in them.  And I'll admit my biking took a bit of a hit with this plan as it was pretty run-focused.  You gotta make some concessions somewhere.  There were some weeks I was really struggling, in which case I dialed down the intensity a little where I needed to.

Here's are 5 weeks of the recently-released 8-week Oly plan (note that there are precursors to this that prepare you for this work):

 

I think a lot of stock or stock-ish bike focused (whether for just plain cycling or for tri) spend far too much time in either in the dead zone or the too hard zone.

The Trainer Road tri plans, IMO, are way too hard from workout to workout with negative downstream consequences on future bike and run workouts.  They will work for many/most over the short term (which could be 2-3 years) but it will take an eventual toll.  Same with stuff like EN.  Their bike workouts are just too hard for the long term.

The whole point of polarization is to keep most of the workouts easy so you can really destroy the hard workouts.  You don't need to destroy every workout.  People would be surprised by how effective one killer workout in each discipline is per week while easing up on the other workouts.

I've been coming to that realization more too. They might be of some help at times if people get stuck, looking for a breakthrough, but something noteworthy from Seiler's presentation is how so many elites in all different sports were able to keep it up year round with the high/low. The specific workouts may change (he didn't track to that level of detail), but the 80/20 was largely kept to all the time.