I’m thinking about possibly switching my scheduled threshold workouts for sweet spot and wanted to ask how bad would that be for my FTP. I mostly want to do that because I really enjoy sweet spot and don’t really like threshold rides. I can still complete threshold workouts (except for the rare times when I’m overtrained or have a lot of work stress), they’re just my least favorite or enjoyable type of rinding.
For context, I’m male, 44 yo and have been using TR for little over a year with some decent increases in FTP. My FTP is at 244 now and has been slowly increasing it this year. I don’t have a sense for what my limit is but I’m not feeling close to my plateau yet. My masters plan has two hard and two endurance rides per week: Mon (hard), Wed (endurance), Fri (hard), and Sat (2-3 outdoor Z2). I don’t race but want to be in good shape to enjoy long (100+ mi) road rides.
Has anyone tried this before or have context for how detrimental this may be to my plan? Thanks in advance!
@Jolyzara I plan to keep doing TR’s VO2 workouts as scheduled. I only do hills when riding on events (centuries, etc), which is about twice a month in Summer; so not much. Been ramping up endurance rides in the last couple of months. My goal is to do 3-4hs consistently every Saturday on the weekends when I’m not doing 100mi rides.
The stimulus for physiological adaptation is roughly intensity * duration.
You’ll need to spend more time in zone at sweet spot than you would at threshold to generate the same stimulus.
I don’t know the exact ratio, meaning if you had 30 min at 100% of FTP, how long would you need to spend at 90% to get the same stimulus?
Maybe try to match KJs from time in zone? Meaning if a threshold workout at FTP is 100KJs from 30 min TIZ, do enough sweet spot at 90% to get to 100 kjs.
Yeah, agree. I do threshold either 95-97% or 102-104% to be certain which side of lactate production/clearance I am on. IMHO, only reason to ride at 100% of FTP if you are 40k TTing and want learn to suffering and balancing being on the edge.
My FTP didn’t increase as much as I thought it would, but man did my endurance and feeling fit go up.
This year I am not skipping threshold lol.
My reason for skipping threshold was to prevent burnout. However, since I do outside workouts my risk of burnout is now less than if I was only doing trainer rides. My target races where months out so I was trying to not peak too early and then not be fit for my races.
I will say trust the process and do the workouts.
I’m a little worried you’re joking, but just in case, here it is. The implied question being “how are you identifying your ftp?”, because if it’s THAT hard to do an FTP workout, it’s probably not your FTP.
As others have said, it really depends on what kind of threshold workouts you swap for what kind of SS workout.
If you do both out to TTE (Time to Exhaustion) then you probably wouldn’t notice a massive difference. However, IMO, the biggest benefit of doing FTP intervals for SS for most people is because you can get those similar adaptations in a much shorter amount of time. For me, if I can do like 3x20 at FTP then it would take like 4x30 SS at minimum to hit the same TTE. 3x20 can fit into a 90 minute weekday workout but 4x30 is gonna be 2.5 hours at a minimum. The first is a reasonable mid-week workout, the latter is getting pretty dang long.
The hit to your FTP is hard/impossible to say. If you’re beyond ‘noob gains’ then FTP intervals usually don’t do a ton to increase your FTP. They tend to push out your TTE vs increasing the wattage number.
However, for the goals you outlined, they’d probably both get you there. It’s not like doing SS instead of FTP will be the difference between you riding 100 super enjoyable miles and you completely blowing up at 75 miles. You may be a bit slower but either should get you to your goal of enjoying a big day out (while also maybe enjoying your weekly training more).
Also, this isn’t an all or nothing thing. Maybe you alternate 1 week FTP, 1 week SS or something and you probably wouldn’t notice a drop in fitness and may even feel better because you enjoy the training more.
Oh this one, indeed I knew it. Thank you anyways!
It reminds me about another reason to not scrap all TH workouts: If you do them with some kind of regularity, you at least know your FTP. And with it you have one marker of progression.
Aka “training is testing and testing is training”.
