At 220, your SS is 185 - 213 (84-97% FTP). 90% would be 198.
I held it for 75min a couple weeks ago just on water. I could hold it longer, but that was just the workout. I bet I could squeeze out 2hrs if I actually fueled the workout lol.
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In the summer when fit, I could probably do 1.5-2 but thatās quite unpleasant. Few seasons ago, I rode 85% for 3 hours.
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Itās almost more of a representation of the type of racing that people are doing because a lot of the PRs in these kind of durations are basically unrealized parts of the power curve.
Would I do sweetspot for 4 hours in my local 1 hour race ? Clearly not.
Or in a road race ? No you sit up the second you can in the draft to save energy
Or in any realistic situation on the road? Probably not. Maybe you can normalize it in a harder road race, but for me even the toughest 3.5h races are usually around 84% of FTP.
Outside of a specific exercise to test that exact thing or some kind of ultra distance race most people will probably never know.
I know itās a training modality that has been suggested by some coaches in the last year to improve TTE, for me this is kind of a solution to coaching athletes that donāt race because once racing starts a lot of people improve their TTE by doing the first couple of spring races and then go from there.
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Why would I wait for racing to improve this aspect of my fitness? Seems much more practical to start the season in a good spot already by pushing out your TTE during training.
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Only so much TSS in the year what always ends up happening in my case is that once the roads open up Iām suddenly getting sucked into these group rides which of course I canāt wait to ride outside and as a result instead of doing specific build interval days with my available TSS iām being social and catching up with the guys that need the 5h endurance rides because they werenāt riding trainer full time during the winter. ]
Point is the TSS in the month of april and end of march is pretty sacred and I wouldnāt waste the paincave time doing long sweet spot intervals when you can accomplish that later in the year in your preparation races . IMO itās not possible to bury yourself doing 30/30s outside like you can on the trainer.
Usually the last couple of workouts are brutal sets like sierra, sonora, clouds rest, terere, etc and I have a few custom specificity exercises that I try to do each year which are like 10 minute intervals with 6 minutes of high sweetspot sandwiched between 2 x 2 minute 6.5 w/kg portions. The goal with that is to average a 10 minute power PR and be able to do the repeat V02 work on either side of a hard continuation effort, the IF of this workout is usually 0.98 at least.
Iāve managed an IF of 0.87 for a 5 hour ride. That was outdoors.
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I can do 85% for 3 hours, perhaps longer if I kept eating - itās quite a sustainable intensity. It takes a few days to recover from though so Iām not sure itās effective training - more of a race effort.
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This is the main reason most people quickly switch to doing FTP intervals to stretch their TTE instead of SS. Itās a very similar stimulus and adaption but the total KJ burn is much much less so itās easier to manage on a regular basis in a training block.
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I see the complete opposite of that. The advantage of sweet spot is that you can drive similar adaptations while still recovering from the effort fairly quickly. An hour of threshold is going to leave a mark while 90 minutes of sweet spot is easier to recover from (even though itās more TSS). Iām not saying FTP training isnāt valuable, it just needs to be managed more carefully than sweet spot. If Iām looking to extend TTE, doing 60+ minutes of FTP work would certainly help that, but how often can you do workouts like that without tanking your other training? 90+ minutes of sweet spot is going to be more TSS and Kjās and likely driving more adaptations without leaving you wrecked.
This is all the classic duration vs. intensity trade off. If you are short on time, you should have a bias towards intensity because you arenāt likely digging a hole on low volume training. But if you have more time and want to maximize TSS and adaptations, itās pretty well established that you have to back off the intensity in order to productively push big TSS week after week. Not saying high intensity training isnāt important for high volume plans, it just becomes a smaller and smaller contributor (by percentage) to overall training stress as the volume increases.
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Most of my training is polarized, so endurance and threshold>higher. I donāt generally train in tempo or sweet spot, aside from races or all out solo efforts to see where Iām at.
Closest I have to that zone for a long duration was a 100k solo ride a few weeks ago where I held 88% NP of FTP for 3 hrs 10 mins.
Hmm, IME if the 90min at SS is easier to recover from itās because either youāre not riding to your TTE at that power or your FTP is slightly too high. But for me, if I were to do an FTP workout to about an hour of TiZ (with a TTE of ~1hr) and a SS workout also to the limits of my TTE then the SS would be more fatiguing because Iād burn almost 2x as many calories. But maybe thatās an individual thing.
IMO, FTP training isnāt āhigh intensityā and the intensity between SS and FTP isnāt different enough to consider them contributing hugely different amounts of fatigue. But, for me, the 2x time to TTE of SS does because of the ~80% higher calorie burn.
I do it either 2x per week or 1x with another 30/30 type workout depending on the block focus (and a lift day that also counts as a āhardā day).
Sure, but IMO SS vs FTP just isnāt different enough for that to matter. And if your FTP is high enough than the extra calorie burn from the SS just isnāt as sustainable.
When you get to end of your sweet spot progression and do the longest interval is your ftp still the same as beginning? Makes it pretty hard to compare. Iāve only done 90min + 30min, 5min rest.
Yeah, different strokes for different folks. But my experience (and I think the big reason sweet spot is so often prescribed) is that itās easier for most to absorb on a āper TSSā basis. Just like Z2 is easier to absorb than Z3, is easier than Z4, etc. Again, Iām not debating the value of work in higher zones, but you can only do so much of it before you can no longer generate productive TSS in those zones. When it comes to building a big aerobic engine, TTE, durability, etc., volume has always been king. It would be great if we could generate 1000TSS every week doing 10 hours of threshold, but it just doesnāt work that way. The more TSS you want to drive, the more you have to lower the intensity and extend the duration to get there. The mix is very individual, but I donāt think there is any debate about the time vs. intensity tradeoff. Finding that individual balance and fitting the training to the type of events being pursued is basically the cornerstone of endurance training.
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Depends on the person. For some people yes it could improve some, but for some people theyāre just pushing out TTE without impacting FTP. Depends on how close you are to your āthresholdā for FTP development, if youāre off the couch or very well trained, etc.
FTP is two dimensional, it is not just a power value.
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I have a different opinion on that, people do this because there are certain coaches who prescribe it, before that they were prescribing V02 overload weeks, and Iām sure once people get bored of the long SS TTE stuff they will find a new flavour of the month training.
Iāve been a coach and an educator my whole life and the most important part of the cycle in my practice is building up the subject to eventually go their own way, whether that is youth soccer and pushing players up to the next division or tutoring a 9th grader in math and teaching them how to tutor themself so that they can eventually remove the coach from the relationship and internalize the process.
This is why I like Trainerroad so much because it helps you fire your coach and make that next step, If you donāt you will end up with placeholder workouts which are essentially just there to fill the time and appear novel.
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None of these concepts are āflavour of the monthā though, just different pieces of the puzzle to improve an athlete.
You push out tte to improve fitness and muscular endurance, you do vo2 blocks to break through a plateau and give an athlete more room to grow their ftp again.
I donāt know of any coaches that only prescribe tte blocks or only prescribe vo2 blocks, itās all just small pieces of the overall training puzzle.
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Possibly true, but this idea of being able to punch through plateaus on your A race when the best guys are leading you up the mountain (or whatever) is more in line with how a lot of racers are thinking.
You eventually run out of ways to improve an athlete if they donāt race, at that point the training becomes the A race and you end up with massive SS blocks which are in lieu of massive events, massive races, etc.
I suspect itās because many highly trained people are starting to enter into the long term management phase and when you donāt give your coach an event to peak for they have to keep getting more and more creative to entertain you.
I am a bit confused as to what you mean?
I would never do a vo2 block right before an a race as it incurs significant fatigue that you need to recover from. Similarly with extending tte, you are not doing any of these right before a race.
A good coach has to properly structure these so an athlete can come into racing in good shape. I am extremely sceptical that they are having riders skip races to go ride endless SST.
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