The mantra of polarised training is ‘go easy or go hard – never in between’. But what if that’s all wrong? Rob Kemp meets the coach who says the middle is where the magic happens
For more than two decades, polarised training has dominated endurance sports. The model – popularised by physiologist Stephen Seiler – demands that athletes spend about 80% of their training at low intensity, and 20% at very high intensity. Anything in the middle, the theory goes, is no man’s land: too hard to recover from, too easy to stimulate real adaptations.
