To be fair, Seiler expressly addressed 4-5 hr/wk athletes: he said POL probably shouldn't apply to them.

Part of the reason why Seiler isn't my cup of tea is because of a communication or labeling or pedagogical issue. He's often not precise enough about what he says until someone tries to pin him down. I think another way of expressing what he says (and I think this is fair but maybe it's not and you can tell me if you disagree) is that *if you're doing high volume* then the vast majority of that volume should be very low, and a small part should be very hard.

Here's something else that bothers me a bit about Seiler: he puts a lot of credence in his observations of what champions do. He observes that gold medal winners do a lot of volume, and that their distribution of intensities is a lot of very low intensity (he cited under 200 watts as very low) and a little very high intensity. In a different part of my life years ago I used to have to review grant applications from researchers who were trying to identify the characteristics of the best hospitals, or physicians, or best practices. Quite often we'd get applications where researchers had identified, according to some metric, the best places, and they proposed to go to those places and study them. I usually dumped those applications in a pile, because not only do you want to study the best places, you also should study the average and bad places to see what the differences are. Seiler works with champions, not guys like me. I want to see what he finds from guys who only ride 4 to 5 hours per week, or guys who're taking Social Security, or guys who are bathroom-scale challenged.

But where I really agree with Seiler is that over the last two decades we've spent a lot of research time focusing on time-intensity distributions. I think "Sweet spot" training, and hyper-structured workouts that require a power meter, and the debate about 4x8's vs 3x10's is (to use a pro wrestling term) kayfabe. Many of us got seduced into thinking that there is an intensity-duration tradeoff, and that we could get by with 6 or 7 hours per week if we did a lot of it in the "sweet spot," or that we could get good results just by attaining 500 TSS per week. None of you went for my bait, but I blame a lot of this kayfabe on Coggan's invention of NP and TSS, and TP's and WKO's 7 training levels or 9 i-levels. Years ago, when Coggan and Seiler were sniping at each other, I think I may have been one of the few to say that if "sweet spot" were put just below VT1 rather than just below FTP, Andy and Steve would mostly be in agreement.

I'm coming back to the view that for most of us, the training rules are:
1. volume matters, a lot, and intensity won't really make up for that;
2. if you're doing a lot of volume, the vast part of it probably has to be low intensity;
3. if you're doing a lot of low-intensity volume, the residual amount should be hard;
4. if you can't do a lot of volume and can only do 4-5 hrs/wk, do what's fun.