Originally Posted by
force10
i do keep an eye on the breakdown of time in zone. The harder Saturday rides are about evenly split between zones 3 and 4 for about 85-90% of the total with zone 2 and 5 for the balance.
Scrolling back through my rides for the last 6 months or so the easiest I see was 60% zone 3 and 18% each 2 and 4.
Im not sure how I could spend the bulk of my time in zone 2. Are the people training that way cycling nearly every day? Or for short rides??
I’m afraid I’d be bored.
Last question first: Z2 rides can be any length, what matters is hours/week. Last September through December, I rode mostly indoors on my resistance rollers with a power meter. I rode mostly 5 days/week, 1.5 to 2 hour rides, constant power with an effort level which allowed me to breathe through my nose if I wanted to. Conversational effort. It wasn't boring on the rollers, plenty to do staying on them, holding power steady, noticing my breathing, working on a smooth pedal stroke, IOW just paying close attention to details, trying for perfection. That was the first time I'd ever done that thorough a purely aerobic training period. I very much notice a positive result from that now. Oh- I also lifted weights for 30' twice a week.
The idea for a polarized style of training is that one goes like stink once or twice a week, then does moderate rides the rest of the time. Outdoors, the idea for the hard rides would be to go moderate on all the flats and then take the climbs as hard as one can. You'd see that you could definitely go harder on the climbs if you did that, and going harder is where one gets the big results. The moderate work is to create that ability to go harder.
I had a big awakening 23 years ago when I went on my first competitive group ride, a double metric. I was used to riding a fairly steady Z3 everywhere. The fast guys on this ride rode moderate on the flat and hard on the hills. I'd drop them on the flat, but then they'd pass and drop me on the hills and it was getting harder to get them back on the flats. So then I started doing what they were doing and sure enough, it worked better. In fact, that's how one TTs a long course, simply because of the cube rule: power to maintain a speed on the flat increases as the cube of the speed. On the hills, at least for non-pros, speeds are low enough that wind resistance isn't the primary issue so you're not throwing energy away..
That last Sunday group ride on our tandem, 40 miles of 50' per mile, longish climbs, HR zones:
Z1: 4.8%
Z2: 23.7%
Z3: 25.6%
Z4: 38.2%
Z5: 7.7%