Polarised VO₂ Max Booster
Workout - Polarised VO₂ Max Booster
- 15min @ 6'00''/km
- 5 lots of:
- 3min @ 3'45''/km
- 3min rest
- 12min @ 7'00''/km
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Intro
Here’s a breakdown of What is polarised training (and why we should do it) from This Messy Happy—a video worth checking out for deeper context. We’ve extracted the core concepts so you can start applying them right away. Watch the full video if you want the complete picture.
Key Points
- Polarised training divides your training into roughly 80% easy (Zone 2) sessions and 20% hard (high-intensity) work, leaving little room for the middle ground. Zone 3—“junk miles”—delivers minimal aerobic or anaerobic benefit.
- Easy Zone (Zone 2): Sits around 6/10 effort, roughly 89% of lactate-threshold heart rate. You should be able to chat freely throughout the run. This builds your aerobic engine.
- Hard Zone: 9-10/10 effort, delivered in short bursts where conversation becomes impossible. These sessions boost VO₂ max, raise your lactate threshold, and improve overall race fitness.
- Junk Miles (Zone 3, high-7 to low-8/10 effort) fall in a no-man’s-land—not easy enough to develop aerobic capacity, not hard enough to trigger VO₂ max gains. They consume energy without much return.
Workout Example
- Easy days (80% of weekly mileage): Log most of your weekly kilometers at a conversational pace in Zone 2. A typical week might include five 10 km runs at easy intensity plus a 15–20 km long run at the same measured pace.
- Hard days (20% of weekly mileage): Add 1–2 interval sessions per week. Try 5 repetitions of 3 minutes at 90–95% of max heart rate (or 9–10/10 effort), with 2–3 minute easy jogs between efforts.
Closing Note Test the 80/20 polarised split this week, dialing in your target paces using the Pacing app. You should notice greater strength, better speed, and more certainty in your running—give it a shot.
References
- What is polarised training (and why we should do it) - YouTube (YouTube Video)