40 Goals

Below, in the spirit of the great continental philosophers, is a dialectic that attempts to synthesize the typical arguments that arise when debating a polarized training approach. It is not intended to serve as an introduction to Polarized training, there are many of those in-print and online. I think that Joe Friel's blog post  is a good intro for us amateurs. For Synthesis Against A Elite athletes have been shown in a number of studies to train in a polarized manner - 80/20 split of workouts targetting polarised zones 1 and 3 [1][2][3] There is variation across sports in how that ~20% is split between time in Z2 and Z3 [1] There is more than one way to skin a cat and coaches will adapt general principles to specific needs of the sport. The key message remains: Elite athletes adopt plans that include high-volumes of low intensity and low-volumes of high-intensity. Elite athletes have also been...