WHY THE MIDDLE MATTERS

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

- Rob Kemp

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. It's a simple, compelling message - especially in an era obsessed with data purity and perfect zone distribution. But what if everything we thought we knew about how to divvy up our effort across the week was wrong?

Steve Neal, a Canadian coach with 37 years in endurance sport, doesn't believe in a single “one-size-fits-all” model. Instead, he adapts training to the season and the athlete's specific needs - sometimes pyramidal, sometimes polarised. The key, Neal says, is selecting the right method to move fitness in the desired direction. While pyramidal training often emphasises coaches, he doesn't take training software outputs at face value. "I think software does a great job of the higher-intensity training zones, but I still prefer to use lactate testing to dial in the training below threshold."

At the heart of Neal's philosophy - and his success in raising the performance of elite riders across varied disciplines - is pyramidal training. He has found that this approach especially suits athletes aged over 40, who make up 95% of his coaching clients.

At its core, pyramidal training means plenty of easy endurance work, a solid dose of tempo or "middle" intensity, and just a small amount of hard effort at threshold or VO2max. Picture a pyramid: a wide aerobic base that narrows as intensity rises, with that middle zone getting real attention.

Unlike more strictly polarised models, pyramidal training doesn't avoid the "grey zone" - it makes smart use of it.