Polarized Training has become quite popular over the past 5 years or so, but after talking about training modality this with many athletes and upon reading and listening to discussions, I believe it is often widely misunderstood.  So what exactly is it and why the confusion?

The concept of polarized training was “invented” over 20 years again by sports researcher Dr. Stephen Seiler.  Dr. Seiler looked at training data of successful professional endurance athletes and saw a commonality.  To over simplify it, they trained either really hard or really easy.  Both of these terms are relative terms, of course.  And they training really easy about four times as much as really hard.  He found that it fell into a breakdown of about 80% low intensity and 20% high intensity.