Evidence supporting High Volume/Low Intensity Training

Stephen Seiler and Espen Tønnessen have an intesting and lengthy article about the benefits of high volume/low intensity training. They argue against the implications being drawn from reasearch on high intensity training (HIT). Their claim is that the training of elite athletes represents something close to the ideal training approach. They find that elite endurance athletes do about 85% of their training at low intesity (<2 mMol lactic acid). This intensity corresponds roughly to the often mentioned conversational pace i.e. a pace where you're not breathing so hard that talking becomes difficult. If you're into heart rate based training it's staying below 85% of your 30minute time trial pace.

Their research is based on looking at elite athletes who have essentially unlimited time for training. The cyclists they studies were doing around 25-30 hours per week. It's not clear what the ideal approach is if you have limited training time. What is the optimum intensity mix then? It's clear that there are benefits to be gained from low intensity work. Perhaps tempo training is a good way to get the adaptations of low intensity training in a shorter time. Tempo pace is sometimes referred to as "comfortably hard" and is between 85% and 94% of your threshold heart rate (determined by 30min TT).

I generally spend about 6 hours a week doing training of some form. I'm looking to increase the volume of training to about 10h per week with more Tempo workouts.