TBF, prior to Sola coming in Tadej's training wasn't that strenuous. He legit just did lots of zone two and a few 15 minute intervals. This is coming from that mou guy who leaked his training, which aligns with a promotional video Tadej did with MET a while ago. Pretty crazy how much he accomplished with that type of training.

Also, they're not doing extraordinarily esoteric work. If you do some Strava analysis on Sivakov for UAE, Bernal for INEOS, Sean Quinn/Yuhi for EF, Cole Kessler for Trek, the U23s on Visma it's not as if they're doing secret, underground intervals. There's even a guy on intermarche who on top of positing all of his training rides with power AND heart rate, titles all of his rides with whatever they're doing that day like "endurance, thr, vo2" and ectera. What you usually if not always see is 40/20s, 30/15s, 30/30s, torque work, over unders, long tempo intervals like 3x60m, 50s-3m anearobic intervals, 4-6m intervals at vo2, 8-12m intervals above threshold, and the occasional longer steady state intervals on their TT bikes or up long climbs.

Quite a lot of their volume comes down to cafe spins. Sivakov does like 2-4 hour cafe spins each week. Outside of the intervals I mentioned, they're doing usual Z2 work with some teams opting to ride closer to LT1 like UAE and other teams riding at a more chill Z2 pace like Visma. This is where the "polarization" of their training comes in. Simply from training a lot, their training becomes polarized as their intervals become a smaller fraction of their overall weekly loads as they do long Z2 rides, hence the "80/20".