I don’t recall the age 40 years old thrown out. I seem to recall this coach saying that instead of sweet spot she’d rather see masters athletes doing 1 minute intervals.
Of course, it depends on the particular athlete. Reading between the lines, I think she was suggesting that masters athletes do more of a polarized training approach. Shorter, sharp stuff to raise VO2max rather than riding in the middle all the time.
I thought this episode was interesting from an coaching Q&A point of view. I can’t say that there were any major training revelations.
Anecdotally, I’ve been thinking that I should do the same - more polarized. My FTP is 86% of VO2max so I think I need to raise the roof.
“… probably all he needs to do is enough stuff to maintain his mitochondrial density for the race that he is doing. He doesn’t really need to do stuff like Sweet Spot. Particularly for older athletes, I don’t think Sweet Spot is really a beneficial zone for anybody over 40. I think that he could probably just ride even easier and enjoy it even more.”
I agree with her premise and here is why… As somebody that recently celebrated my 19th anniversary of turning 40 my own experience from Spring 2020 is that taking 8 hour week and doing 5-6 hours of zone2 and the remainder doing sweet spot resulted in a jump in my power curve.
I believe there is a distinction between TR and other coaches when it comes to base. I’d say TR SSB is threshold and FasCat/Velocious/CTS are pyramidal. In the pyramidal model its a lot of zone2, but since you don’t have 15 hours/week they add sweet spot work as stimulus for both advanced aerobic and muscular endurance.
Since then I hired a coach and on faith did even less sweet spot at my request, wanted to experiment with a more aggressive pyramidal approach. There are some tradeoffs with doing less sweet spot, but muscular endurance appears to come back quickly. Overall I’m happy with this approach, the work is relatively ‘easy’ (I’m not falling asleep at 8pm), however it required more patience to see results although I’m an aerobic hard gainer. Right now I’m seeing good threshold and above-threshold power, and by that I mean 2 to 20 minute efforts while also regaining lost ground (vs 2016-2017) on the sprinting.
Given that it should be no surprise I agree with her premise.
Let’s remember that her premise was for this one particular athlete who competes in sprint tri and cyclocross. He also said he didn’t want to particular get faster. And his question was whether he could just train on feel.
I heard her put SS into a risk/reward context, and that there are reasons to do SS work but generally there are better workouts to get fit when you are over 40.
FWIW I’ll give you a couple anecdotes. About 6 weeks ago I told my coach we should throw a little sweet spot work into the rotation, because I wasn’t used to suffering for 20-40 minutes. Purely mental. And a couple weeks ago, with very very little SS work, I went out and nailed a 35 minute climb and a 17 minute climb. Using the updated FTP from that day, the first climb was at 94% and the second climb was at 105%.
Last year in late January I switched to doing a lot more z2 and a lot less sweet spot (compared to TR SSB). And two months later I had an FTP bump on 20-minute test and a week later went out and did 50+ minutes at my new FTP.
Just sharing what has worked for me, n=1 and all that. Actually my power curve was higher during 2017 after 1+ years of hard club rides and semi-structured workouts using CTS/Xert approach. Then two years of TR where attempting MV plans just appears to have blunted my power curve (I got slower). Now 1+ years where I reduced middle zone in favor of zone2 and harder above threshold efforts. Still not back to 2017 but closing the gap.
Late 2015 I got to ~250 FTP just by doing twice a week HIIT in the gym (75 minute sessions) and an easy outside ride or two.
Keep in mind the magenta modeled FTP is not always accurate because WKO requires max efforts over 90 days. The blue FTP line represents field tests (8-min, ramp, 20+ min) or my own estimates based on power-to-HR.
My walk-away messages from TrainerRoad website and podcasts was the plans were science based, they carefully controlled the horizontal and vertical, you could achieve more on less time (SS vs zone2), and masters plans were coming. So I went with TR approach starting in December 2017 and you can see volume dropped a bit. However the first 3 months of TR SSB (Dec 2017 - Feb 2018) my volume ramped from 6 to 8 hours. Then two months of bad allergies, and blowing up trying to follow the plans along with outdoor riding, and so volume dropped. And my fitness kept dropping until Aug/Sept/Oct, and thats when I added some more easy outdoor rides and dabbled in TR’s Traditional Base.
The data for 2019 (TR) is inconclusive, I did some racing January-March and then injured my thumb and went on a major European trip in August.
One major point of SS (advanced aerobic) during base phase is that you can reduce volume versus only doing zone2. So you can’t say ‘adjust for time in the saddle’ without recognizing that one major reason for doing SS is to reduce time commitment during base. Making up numbers, you might say 8-12 hours of z2+SS instead of 15-20 hours classic zone2 base. Again I’m making up numbers, to make a point.
And hours of experience? I alway laugh and think “why haven’t I gotten back to 2017 my second season?!” Rheotorical question.
I guess this is the disconnect because that isn’t the case. There are physiological adaptations that only come from longer (60 min + interval) SS work with high torque mixed in.
In a macro sense, I actually train similar to you do now with your coach, very pyramidal, but long SS intervals are a critical component certain times of the year for maintain fiber composition for a natural fast twitcher like me.
Fwiw, I don’t think TR is remotely SS, it’s all threshold all the time.
lol except for the not recommended traditional base, and probably the long distance triathlon.
The jury is still out in my mind. In 2016 I did a fair bit of climbing in upper z2 HR (no power meter), around 2.5-3.0W/kg with 11-32 and compact gearing. A lot of torque and 50-70rpm efforts. Along with Wed night rides with crit like power graphs, and weekend club rides on flat terrain that are often 3 hour long upper z2 / lower z3 constant pedaling efforts. Toss in frequent hard 1-min anaerobic capacity efforts (actually those were Strava segment attempts!). You can see from my chart above that the first power meter estimates in late 2016 shows a much higher FTP as a result.
In the next year I’m going to test my theory that I’ll see another bump simply going back to doing upper z2 and lower z3 climbing rides (without all the sweet spot structured workouts). I guess you could call those sweet spot but its not TR sweet spot power.
I’ve been doing almost exclusively sweetspot since Nov 2020 (I’m throwing in some VO2 now that I’m getting close to some races). I’m 45 and I’ve been able to steadily increasing my FTP from around 285w to about 315w over that period of time. At the moment I’m around 4.5w/kg.
I don’t know what else I could do to achieve similar gains with the time that I’ve invested. Is the suggestion that I could be hitting even higher watts/kg with a different approach?
3 sweetspot workouts each week. 90mins Weds. 2 x 120mins on Sat and Sun. Doesn’t feel like a lot to me. My goal was to come up with a plan that was achievable and sustainable.
I need to listen to the podcast. I think with training, you can’t just say a thing works or doesn’t work. It’s highly individual.
Err… yeah. I don’t know how else to explain it otherwise. I do a a bit of running (30-70km each week) but that’s not going to contribute much if anything.
Sounds like they are repeating Joe Friels fast after fifty advice. Looking at what declines with age, that hampers your performance, and oh by the way it’s already happening in your 20s…
and conduct your own experiments and see what works. After an off-season I saw gains running thru certain phases of TR, just not the first time. Disappointing at the time but figured my body was changing and/or I didn’t know how to combine TR plans with outside riding and I needed to listen to more podcast episodes. However with 4 different phases (Spin, Club+CTS/Xert, TR, FasCat) under my belt since 2014, in hindsight you can see some trends. What I’m currently doing seems aligned with the science as I understand it (posted above) and what I’ve read in Friel’s Fast After 50 book. And for context this is coming from a guy that recently celebrated the 24th anniversary of reaching masters 35+ racing category but I got a late start buying a road bike 5+ years ago YMMV.
This is the key… you should understand your own body and how it reacts. Sometimes that means you try the wrong thing, other times you get it right. As I learned that for me, focusing on shorter efforts did in fact raise my VO2 max to levels never seen before, but had marginal impact to my race splits as it seems to have steepened my power duration curve (for whatever reason). I’m reading “The science of winning” again and it seems that some people just have an inherently high VLaMax and it will get back to the natural level when volume and middle intensity work is reduced. It seems the amount of volume to reduce vlamax is such that it is not sustainable, as once your body adapts to that level of volume, it’ll start returning to normal.
This then says that middle intensity work is a key component of flattening out that PD curve, so throwing out SS just because of age might not be the best for particular athletes. For myself, overall volume has a huge impact to my VO2 max, as to quote Melanie herself, “You do the training, to do the training, so you can do the training” and if one is getting ready for an event that is over 1 hour, with significant climbing, being able to have a high durability at tempo/SS power is going to be ideal for your racing preparation.
No one coach is right 100% of the time, so it is in everyone’s best interests to keep an open mind and understand how their body reacts to certain training stimuli.
I’ve just listened to her response to the listener question. I think her advice is probably good for most people. I think my "problem” is that I naturally have a higher proportion of fast twitch fibres. I’ve discovered that the TR ramp test inflates my FTP by at least 10w unless I manually correct for it.
For ageing athletes focusing on the top end probably isn’t bad thing. For me, I don’t think it helps my endurance very much. I think it would compound the issue.
my own experience from Spring 2020 is that taking 8 hour week and doing 5-6 hours of zone2 and the remainder doing sweet spot resulted in a jump in my power curve.
but I got a late start buying a road bike 5+ years ago 
YMMV.