Originally Posted by
RChung
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..
Not only that, but I think he's actually said that distribution is actually pyramidal, which often gets lost in this whole discussion. He's also extrapolated a lot from other sports (I think specifically rowing is where he made these initial observations) and applied them to cycling. A strictly polarized (lower end endurance and doing vo2 work) ignores other stuff cyclists work on like time to exhaustion at sweet spot/threshold. There are definitely some takeaways, like doing 2 or 3 max hard workouts a week and a lot more easier riding, but I think there's a lot of misinterpretation.
Also, as an side, I don't really respect Dylan Johnson, he tends to do abstract summaries and, in my prior observations, address study limitations. So conclusions he make tend to become a bit exaggerated and of course a non-science literate audience is gonna jump on certain things as conclusive evidence when that couldn't be further from the truth.