Load, stress, strain—they’re terms we hear a lot in sports science, but what do they mean? Your internal response to external load will change as you become fitter and more durable. Dr. Stephen Seiler explains all.
Dr. Stephen Seiler
5 Things to Know About How Polarized Training Changes Over a Season
Get the right mix of intensity at the right time and polarized training pays off. Take a disciplined approach for best results.
Emma-Kate Lidbury
Understanding Stress and Its Impact on Your Athletic Potential
Polarized training is most successful when your body is ready to undertake high-intensity sessions. Understanding how your autonomic nervous system works can help you time it right.
Alan Couzens
The Science Behind Going Slow to Be Fast
The concepts of central and peripheral conditioning help explain why an effective training base period leads to speed and durability in the race season.
Trevor Connor
The 8 Golden Rules of Polarized Training
Sticking to 80/20 and training by heart rate are just two of the key rules you’ll want to follow.
Trevor Connor
How to Achieve Polarized Training’s Greatest Prize: Durability
Polarized training is all about building duration without incurring high stress. Where does your steady state break down and what can you do about it?
Get expert advice and insight from Dr. Stephen Seiler, Alan Couzens, and Trevor Connor to help you transform your training and create your own, custom polarized approach.
To achieve a top performance an athlete must be both physically and mentally prepared. It’s the mental piece that can be the toughest to coach. Joe Friel talks with Coach Julie Young about how she develops athletic potential and resilience over the course of training her athletes.
Julie Young
Lessons from the Lab
When athletes show up at the lab to test lactate threshold or metabolic efficiency, they are often fixated on a goal or data point. Julie Young encourages coaches and athletes to take a broader view, and notice gaps that might exist in fitness. The lab simplifies the path forward, showing how the body is responding to training and taking us back to the basics.
Julie Young
Which Goes Further—Talent or Motivation—and What Does This Mean for Your Coaching Style?
Every coach wants to work with athletes who possess both talent and motivation in spades. In reality, your clients are probably lacking in one or the other. As we explore the four types of athletes, consider how your coaching style might be well-suited to a particular type, and whether your client list reflects this.
Joe Friel
Performance Gains from Year-Round Training
Coaching works best as a process of building performance, rather than a hot pursuit of an outcome. Coach Julie Young describes the performance gains a busy executive experienced at the Leadville 100 mountain bike race. Breaking from his habit of cramming for the event with just six months of training, he committed to year-round coaching, incorporating strength and stability work and building the mental resilience that made him a better athlete.
Load, stress, strain—they’re terms we hear a lot in sports science, but what do they mean? Your internal response to external load will change as you become fitter and more durable. Dr. Stephen Seiler explains all.
The concepts of central and peripheral conditioning help explain why an effective training base period leads to speed and durability in the race season.
Polarized training is most successful when your body is ready to undertake high-intensity sessions. Understanding how your autonomic nervous system works can help you time it right.
Every athlete is a study of one, presenting different limitations and strengths. The best coaches are able to identify these differences and adapt their style and strategy to meet the unique needs of every athlete.
Coach Scott Saifer started out coaching elite-level road cyclists. Over the years his coaching business has evolved with the needs of his existing and prospective clients. Now many of his clients work toward goals outside of racing. He discusses what it takes to work with athletes who might lack ability or motivation, or both.
By coaching athletes of all levels and aspirations, Christine Schirtzinger has learned how to build a better business—and be a better coach. She sees the limitations in working solely with high-performance athletes.
Coach Joe LoPresto has made a name for himself in Chicago’s triathlon scene by welcoming newcomers to the sport. Whether it’s the last person to cross the finish line or the ones standing on the podium, he believes they are more alike than different. The human desire to improve and grow is the focus of his coaching.
Every coach wants to work with athletes who possess both talent and motivation in spades. In reality, your clients are probably lacking in one or the other. As we explore the four types of athletes, consider how your coaching style might be well-suited to a particular type, and whether your client list reflects this.
Head Coach Ryan Kohler shows the right way to do a Tabata Intervals workout, based on the research of Dr. Izumi Tabata, and when to do Tabata workouts during your season.
Polarized training is most successful when your body is ready to undertake high-intensity sessions. Understanding how your autonomic nervous system works can help you time it right.
If you have an energy deficit day after day, it can have devastating effects on your health and performance. Find out how to get it right with our guide to low energy availability.
Is more better? We explore how our bodies adapt to training and why the right amount of stress at the right times is a far better way to train than going hard all the time.
Medical doctor and elite Zwift team manager Jennifer Real talks with us about indoor training and racing, and how to achieve effective recovery including monitoring sleep and taking Vitamin D.
All athletes reach a point where progress depends more on the skills they can build between their ears, more than the strength of their legs or lungs. The very best athletes are as strong mentally as they are physically. Grant Holicky, Dr. Stephen Cheung, Dr. Simon Marshall, Lesley Paterson, Julie Emmerman, and Julie Young help us explore these critical and often overlooked mental skills.
We’re joined by coach and athlete Julie Young who helps us field questions on how to build an annual training plan, coping with race stress, and overcoming body image issues.
Every athlete has a personal IZOF. Coach Grant Holicky shares the concept and explores how to determine your IZOF. Then he shares why knowing your IZOF is helpful and how you can recreate your IZOF on demand.
Physiologist Rob Pickels nerds out with Trevor Connor on four recent studies that span a wide range of topics, from the benefits of percussive massagers for strength work to the impact of pregnancy on elite runners. Tune in to find out more.
Neuroscience isn’t an exciting term, but it can be one of the most important factors in how well our muscles perform. We talk about this fascinating connection between mind and body with Dr. Scott Frey.
“Women are not small men” is a phrase synonymous with Stacy Sims—and in this show, we find out exactly what that means. Tune in to learn just how important it is for coaches and female athletes to adapt training so that women’s physiology can be used to harness their strengths—not hinder them—throughout their athletic lives.
This is our first episode of a limited series recorded with Dr. Stephen Seiler. In this episode, Seiler explains his background as a researcher, and talks about something near and dear to all of us: the heart.
How do you reach the podium in not one sport, but three—and all in the same season? We chat with McBride and their coach, Mateo Mercur, to find out more.
