For example, 80/20 polarized training has been shown to be extremely effective in many athletes for improving overall ability on the bicycle to get faster riding farther. It has been shown to be effective not just for elite athletes, but for everyone of all abilities.
With 80/20 polarized training in particular, it is important to remember to actually go light on your 80% low intensity days, because that helps your body to make adaptations and build upon your base endurance, which is proven to be a vital component of growing stronger and making measurable gains.
In practice, however, it is both counterintuitive and difficult to train this way out in the real world. Even with the most carefully curated route, you will find yourself pushing too hard in many situations: trying to beat a light, get up a hill, or get home before dark, or just chasing down someone who dusted you because your ego took over for a minute and you forgot you were supposed to be going light today. “No pain, no gain” in practice actually turns out to be a fallacy during 80% of your training plan, but it is an easy trap to fall into. Conversely, you may be stuck at a light or at the beginning of a long descent when you actually need to be going harder at that stage of your session in your training plan. These things may not have a significant impact on your training, but they are, by definition, inefficient use of your time.
Real world situations often make it impractical or impossible to train the way we actually need to in order to optimize our gains.
Because we can make them consistent, trainers are actually our best tools to help us eliminate the risk of inefficient training time. But that is only true when you combine your trainer with the best software to drive science backed workouts designed to get you to your goals.
There is a lot of software and hardware out there that is simply designed to make you sweat, but it is important to understand that just jumping on and pedaling is not necessarily gaining aerobic or anaerobic fitness. In fact, doing too much can actually set you back very easily, and it can be very tempting to do exactly that.
BitCrew will customize and guide you through efficient training sessions customized for you as part of an overall training model to help you actually get faster and stronger. You never want to do too little, or too much, when you’re trying to optimize around your abilities and your schedule.
That being said, that doesn’t mean we can never introduce some variation in our sessions. In fact, slight variations during the course of even the most basic steady state training session can help tremendously with the psychological monotony of training indoors. And those variations can still be frequent and mild enough to keep your workout engaging while not significantly impacting your intensity of effort.
You will find no squirrels to chase in BitCrew. We leave the racing for the real world. Trainers are for training.