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Always training at high intensity or close to your maximum capabilities is a very poor strategy for progress, even if it stems from a desire to do well. In most endurance sports, high-level athletes tend to practice what is called polarized training. What if you applied this method?
By Guillaume Judas – Photos: depositphotos.com
According to an empirical principle that states that in any field, 80% of effects are the product of 20% of causes, we observe that this distribution of effort is applied by most high-level athletes in training. That is, they spend 80% of their time training in endurance, and 20% working on intensity. If you read between the lines, you can therefore consider that 80% of their progress is a consequence of 20% of the time they spend training.
Based on this observation, many believe they can do without the 80% of time they consider useless or almost useless, to focus only on the “profitable” 20%. Convenient. But this often leads to failure, partly because intensities are often poorly chosen, and partly because this method is not based on a sufficiently solid fitness foundation, much like building the roof of a house on paper foundations.
Fast or slow: which speed to choose?
If we follow this principle to the letter, the training pace should be either slow or fast, but rarely in between. Because in between, it’s often wasted fatigue with no benefit. Moreover, even if you enjoy riding at an intermediate intensity, chasing average speeds, or indulging in the fast pelotons of Longchamp or the Wednesday or Sunday morning groups in any region, you rarely step out of your comfort zone.
In other words, and according to the 80-20 principle applied to sport, training at a medium pace would gradually wear you out while providing very little benefit in terms of progress.
Obviously, reality is a bit more complex than that, and you need to distinguish three main training zones to understand their effects: low-intensity training, medium-intensity training, and high-intensity training.
Low-intensity training
This is the easiest concept to understand. It involves training below the ventilatory threshold, or in other words, below the aerobic threshold. This is a pace that promotes the consumption of fat reserves, optimizes the functioning of the cardiovascular system, improves muscle oxygenation capacities, drains waste products, and produces what is called active recovery.
Believe it or not, this type of training also has an effect on the development of VO2 Max and muscle power. And finally, it is also the most favorable intensity for maintaining good general health.
Medium-intensity training
Here you are situated between the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, an intensity comparable to what you naturally adopt when climbing one or more passes in a day. You are busy, but in balance between the intensity of the effort and the accumulation of waste products that cause severe muscle pain.
This is, in a way, the race pace, the ideal zone for achieving the best performances in an endurance sport, the one where you need to be good. It is above all a reassuring training pace.
It makes you believe you are in shape, because you can achieve your best average speeds there. You are somewhere in the comfort zone. The zone is interesting because it is the race intensity for most sportive riders, but to improve it, you need to frame it rather than stay within it.
High-intensity training
… or in other words, the red zone. It is never pleasant to approach, but it is the intensity that aims to develop maximum muscular and cardiovascular capacities. We are talking here about FTP work, sprints, anaerobic efforts, which make your legs hurt and sometimes give you a taste of blood in your mouth. But it is these short, violent efforts that bring real benefits in terms of power gains and the ability to make a difference in key moments of an event.
There are many examples of exercises and programs to improve in this area, but it must be kept in mind that these workouts should never represent more than 20% of the time spent training each week. Beyond that, you recover poorly, you accumulate a lot of fatigue, and you limit your aerobic capacities by the principle of communicating vessels. Do not be surprised then if you do not progress, or even regress, because you are entering overtraining.
Ease off to progress…
To summarize, fast or slow, you have to choose. Too many of you train in the intermediate intensity zone. It’s fun, it’s the pace of group rides, these are efforts that give you the impression of doing what’s necessary, but ultimately you do everything to have what’s called a “stuck speedometer”. These sessions generate significant fatigue, but the intensity is not high enough to allow the body to progress.
And as for truly intense sessions, essential for raising your level, you need to do just enough not to fall into overtraining.
In parallel, a base of low-intensity training allows you to acquire and maintain what is called endurance, work on technique, and regenerate the body to be perfectly ready to work intensely when necessary.
What is called polarized training, with the ratio of 80% endurance and 20% high intensities, makes perfect sense, if we remember that in cycling, what is truly difficult is not riding for a long time, but knowing how to ride fast at a given moment.
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