4 Day a Week Training for Time-Crunched Athletes?

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  • #56252
    Jon44
    Participant

    I seem to remember Stephen Seiler had a rough suggestion for how you can achieve reasonable fitness with 4 days a week by sticking to a semi-polarized approach. But, unfortunately, can’t find what the recommendation was (read it originally in his “MAPP” pages–which you can still find using the “Wayback machine”. Or in email correspondence he’d engage in before he became a star…)
    I’m mostly interested in what the principles of designing such a program would be–say you built it around one “over-distance” workout and one moderate intensity interval session. Do you these both count as “hard” and then your other two days are very easy recovery efforts of moderate to low duration?

  • Participant
    Shashi on #56303

    I am not familiar with the “semi-polarized” approach so won’t comment on that.

    I have had weeks with four days of training and I tried to manage it with a longer workout on one of the days (over the weekend) than increasing intensity.

    Depending on your training background and if it is feasible, can you do a strength session in the morning and an aerobic workout in the evening? This might allow you to train for the same hours over four days.

    If am/pm sessions are not possible, then I would do one strength session and three aerobic workouts over four days with rest/recovery days in between. Hope this is helpful.

    Inactive
    Anonymous on #56361

    Jon:

    Like you I was a fan os Seiler’s way back when he was still in Texas or just arrived in Norway. But I don’t recall the Semi-polarized term or it’s meaning. However I think your approach can work depending on your state of fitness. The one OD workout/week is a tried and proven method. The one Z3 interval session wold be quite useful if you have a very good base of aerobic capacity. Doing the 2 other days as Z1 is good. You can almost always benefit from more aerobic volume.

    So, I think this can be a very useful program. However I doubt it will get you on the podium at UTMB ;-).

    Scott

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