The Honest Read
The honest read. Polarised training has the strongest research base for amateur cyclists, and it's not close. Professor Stephen Seiler's two decades of work on intensity distribution kicked this off, and successive studies have replicated the finding: roughly 80% easy, 20% hard, almost nothing in the middle, beats most other distributions for amateurs with limited training time.
Pyramidal works too — particularly at high volume. Many World Tour pros train pyramidally because they have the hours to absorb the Zone 3 work without it bleeding into recovery. Dan Lorang's plans for Pogacar and Vingegaard, the Bora setup John Wakefield runs — they're more pyramidal in base, then sharpen toward polarised through build and into race weeks. Volume is what makes pyramidal viable.
The amateur trap is neither. Most age-group cyclists ride neither polarised nor pyramidal — they ride threshold-grey, sitting at 75-85% FTP for most of every session. Too hard to be truly easy, too easy to be truly hard. The result is fatigue without adaptation. Both polarised and pyramidal beat the grey zone — the choice between them matters less than getting out of the middle.
Limitations of each, plainly. Polarised at high volume can leave riders under-cooked at threshold — a small dose of Zone 3 sweet-spot work usually has to come back in for build phases. Pyramidal at low volume (under 8 hours/week) doesn't give the body enough time to recover from the larger Zone 3 component, and adaptations stall. The model has to fit the volume.
The decision tree. Under 10 hours/week: polarised. 10-15 hours/week: polarised in base, pyramidal-leaning in build. Over 15 hours/week with race specificity: pyramidal works. Stuck in the grey zone right now: polarise first, worry about the nuance later.
Whichever model you pick, you need accurate zones to execute it. The FTP zones tool gives you the bands. Want a coach to design this around your week? Start with the assessment.
FAQ
What is polarised training, exactly?
A distribution where roughly 80% of training time is at low intensity (Zone 1-2), 15-20% is at high intensity (Zone 4-5+), and very little time is spent in the moderate Zone 3 middle. It's not a workout type — it's how you spend the hours across a week.
What is pyramidal training, exactly?
A distribution where roughly 75% is at low intensity, 15-20% is moderate (Zone 3 / sweet spot / threshold), and 5-10% is high intensity. The shape on a graph is a pyramid — most easy, less moderate, least hard.
Which is better for time-crunched riders?
Polarised, by a clear margin. With limited hours, you can't afford the recovery cost of moderate Zone 3 work, and the polarised structure delivers more useful adaptation per hour. The Seiler 80/20 framing maps well to amateurs with 6-10 hours/week.
Can I switch between polarised and pyramidal across a season?
Yes — and many serious cyclists do. Polarised through base (October-February), pyramidal-leaning in build (8-12 weeks pre-event), back to polarised in peak and race weeks. The model serves the phase.
Is polarised just an excuse to ride easy?
It's the question most riders ask before they actually try it. The 20% hard portion of polarised training is genuinely hard — VO2max intervals, threshold work, race-pace efforts. It's not soft. It's that 80% of the time is spent building the engine that lets the 20% land.
Where does sweet spot fit?
In neither model in pure form — sweet spot lives at 88-94% FTP, which is in the moderate range polarised explicitly avoids. In a pyramidal week, sweet spot is the moderate component. In a polarised week, sweet spot is largely absent except as build-phase accents. Sweet spot vs Zone 2 has more depth here.