Hard training days should be hard and easy training days should be easy. You can call this approach 80/20 training, polarized training, or even just a basic strategy for load management. We've all heard this saying in one form or another. Unfortunately, however, few individuals in the Crossfit community do this well. Seldom do athletes give up their active rest days without a fight and those who perform low-intensity ‘aerobic base’ training often use arbitrary heart rate zones to determine what low intensity is for them without considering how much physiological stress they are imposing.
Just because an individual is working in the 120-140 BPM heart rate range and it subjectively feels easy does not mean they’re doing low-intensity work, facilitating cardiovascular adaptations associated with improved efficiency, or speeding up their recovery. In some contexts what individuals perceive to be their low intensity is one of their most significant stressors in their training week.
Heavily m…
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