FasCat style Sweetspot

Thanks for the reply. Yes I had seen your subsequent comment showing the structure for the weeks. My question was more general as to whether you preferred it to TR’s SSB plans? Would you recommend the Fascat plan? Thanks :+1:t2:

I’m probably not a good person to ask. I haven’t stuck to a TR SS plan in quite a while and I see a lot of comments that suggest it has changed since the AT release. Hopefully someone else will chime in!

What I did really like about the FasCat plans was the “SweetSpot Outside” long ride that I mentioned above. Basically they just say “do as much SweetSpot as possible in X hours until you reach Y TSS”, which I feel gives you a lot more freedom and encourages riding outside as opposed to trying to find the right roads to do a more specific interval workout. This is a lot more like the way I prefer to ride to avoid burnout and stay motivated. Intervals during the week, long outdoor rides on the weekend. What I didn’t like about the plan was that it was pretty “just do the plan and don’t improvise” focused. I like how TR encourages you to pick alternate workouts when needed.

There’s a big caveat here though…I don’t race. I just want to stay strong and ride a lot.

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That’s great cheers dude. I am very wedded to TR as a platform and like you, I am a fan of the flexibility offered with alternate workouts. I am a huge fan of AT too. That said, the FasCat plan looks great and I have heard good things. I suppose what is always possible is just subbing the TR weekend workout for a long sweet spot TSS ride, especially now that you have the experience after the FasCat plan. They have good content on how to do these TSS rides on the podcast/youtube too. Thanks for the insight mate, much appreciated. ps I don’t race either, I just like riding my bike and want to be fit and fast!

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for what its worth, I bought a bike, loosely followed the CTS Time Crunched Cyclist approach for 2 years, then 2 years TR, then 6 months FasCat, then FasCat coach. The CTS and FasCat plans are similar, and both delivered a bigger aerobic engine and more power versus TR. My biggest surprise was how more endurance + fewer intervals delivered such big gains on a little more time/week (I did 5-6 hours/week TR, and 7-8 hours/week CTS & FasCat). Average genetics, mid-to-late fifties with stressful job, and 7 years cycling experience. I just like riding my bike, slow climbs in the mountains, and some fast group rides.

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I know you know FasCat well, and you always have great input on plans. Do you know if they’ve gone exclusively to the subscription model? I ask (not only because I personally wanted to buy another plan) because I was going to recommend to him to buy a plan on the Black Friday sale to see what he thinks. Even if you never use it, at 50% off, they’re cheap enough to just buy one to compare, contrast, and learn…but if you have to buy into optimize/all access, that changes the equation.

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To be honest I don’t know. I own a couple plans (18 weeks SweetSpot, Weight Lifting, Road Racing Intervals) but those were purchased in 2019.

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Good feedback. But let’s be honest. 7-8hr per week is not 'a little more time" then 5-6hr per week. That’s roughly 35-40% more time on the bike. That’s significant.

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You can buy FasCat plans without the subscription model at TrainingPeaks, not FasCat site.

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Thanks!!

I’ll add that, at least on the Podcast, Frank often talks like you really should be trying to up the hours from what those of us on TR plans are used to. Please don’t take this as an exact quote, but he says things like “you can absolutely train on 8 hours a week”, but soon thereafter says things like, “just work your way up to 12”. Again, not a quote, just the general gist of how it comes across to me.

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If you want to and have the time then that sure is good advice.

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Sure, but at the time I had no clue. Back in late 2017 I read a few TrainerRoad articles, and listened to a few podcasts. TR convinced me to try a more structure / less time approach. TR worked ok for base, but I crashed and burned on build. A lot of HTFU and follow the plan encouragement on the forum, so I tried again for a second year. Definitely felt better when following TR Traditional Base 1 and 2 before TR SSB, but at the end of the day the pre-AT SSB and Build plans had too much intensity for me.

Even now with AT, from where I sit it still looks like threshold approach (TR) vs the pyramidal approach from coaching companies (FasCat, CTS, Velocious). With AT it looks like TR eased off threshold a bit, but there are still some basic differences to the approaches.

To be honest I was blown away by how much fitness I developed averaging 7 hours/week by doing a lot of endurance and some intervals (4x8, 4x12, 3x15, etc.) and then being able to go out and do stuff like 45+ minutes at threshold. Muscular strength endurance seems to be one of my strengths.

More structure didn’t win for me, and to be clear my first TR plan was SSB HV 1 which is 8-10 hours/week. I even started down the path of TR CEO one-year of SSB, but I started getting slower and abandoned that.

Hope that helps, my only goal is to get faster on a reasonable number of hours per week. If TR or any other coach/company convinced me that 4 hours of low endurance with 30 second full gas sprints would make me faster, I’d try it.

Find and do what works for you.

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Don’t get me wrong, I agree with your conclusion; don’t overdo high intensity. Max two intensity days and the rest endurance pace is my mojo as well.

Its just that I would definitely expect performance improvement if time is increased (sustainably) with 35-40%>

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Wish that back then, someone on the forum would have been more insistent on that point. Instead it was HTFU, base/build/specialty, and more structure / less time works. However as a result I learned a lot in the process. No regrets.

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I’ve done some Fascat plans. To me the big difference was that those extra hours generally come from longer weekend rides which, while they usually have a target goal (e.g. X time in sweetspot or ride until you get to X TSS) they are not full of intervals. I liked that both because it more fit the way I was actually riding on the weekends (ie. Group rides) and my old masters body seemed to respond better.

Since Fascat in no way is tied to indoor trainer workouts, overall the intensity seems lower even though you may be getting more total hours in per week. You still have hard intervals/workouts but I was starting to feel (at the time, things may be different now) that TR was just beating me up because it had me for an hour a day, not because that level of work every day was necessarily best for me.

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Thanks. The optimize annual subscription is only 150 USD at the moment, and includes a ton of stuff including coach support. I am tempted!

If TR or something else is working for you, keep riding that wave!

Personally I’m a relatively slow responder and try and give myself a longer timeline to figure out what works. Trying to evaluate an approach on as little as 3 or 5 months doesn’t make sense to me. Last week I heard an interesting Empirical Cycling podcast where Kolie Moore interviewed coach and WKO product lead Tim Cusick. If you are interested in self-coaching its worth a listen.

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This one and the Coggan conversation are both worth the time.

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Thanks for the reply. Another point really is that I like to train 4 days a week rather than the fascat prescribed 5 days. TR allows a little more flexibility in that respect.

Huh? Plans are made to be modified and adapted. No matter if it’s TR or FasCat or …

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