New feature coming to HRV4Training: training polarization analysis

Blog post by Marco Altini

What's training polarization?

We've talked about training polarization a few times in the past. To recap, quite some research in the past 15 years showed how elite runners (and not only runners) spend much of their time training at low intensities (if you are into papers, check out Seiler's work or this review by Paul Laursen). Following early research, interventions have been carried out to randomize runners in groups including a greater amount of low intensity training, and groups including more moderate intensity training. Results showed consistently improvements in running performance for groups training at lower intensities for most of the time, typically 80% of the overall training load. Many runners, coaches and authors have been adopting low intensity training for many years, under slightly different guidelines, but all following the same core principles (see for example heart monitor training by John Parker Jr, most of Phil Maffetone's work - the 180 formula, MAF test, etc. - and more recently 80/20 running by Matt Fitzgerald, who also wrote this nice piece on the topic on RunnersWorld).

Personally, I've reported before how shifting to a much more polarized training brought significant improvements to my running. We also analyzed HRV4Training users and highlighted the same relations on our userbase, for both runners and triathletes (about 400 users in total). Faster runners consistently trained at lower relative heart rate and pace with respect to slower runners, according to the data analyzed at this link.

How does it work?

For the ones adopting this training method, objective data can help keeping ourself honest and keeping track of the overall balance. Similarly, you might simply be curious to know how you are training and analyze training periodization a bit more systematically. While training with a heart rate monitor is a must, as perceived effort might not be very well aligned with how hard we are working our system, sometimes it can still be hard to keep track of how we are doing. Hence, the new training polarization feature aims at providing a simple overview of our past month of workouts, in terms of training intensity above or below threshold.

The threshold can be automatically computed based on your maximal heart rate as retrieved from your workouts, or manually set. You can also run the same analysis for different sports or using power instead of heart rate if you prefer.

Below you can see for example how my data looked before starting a more polarized training program, when I was stuck in moderate intensity training (always training at way to high heart rates, as shown in the medium article, only 23% of my trainings were easy at that stage), and how it looks now that I mainly train at low intensities (78% of my trainings in the past month are now easy), the last screenshot shows improvements in estimated VO2max following 6 months of polarized training (as VO2max is estimated using as one of the main parameters sub-maximal heart rate normalized by pace, changes in aerobic capacity resulting in the ability to run at low intensities faster, will reflect in improvements in VO2max):

This feature will be available by end of February, 2017. Some additional screenshots are shown below, the same functionality will be also available on HRV4Training Coach for all your athletes.

Enjoy!