Number of intervals per week, does this mean sweet spot?

Hi all,

When coaches suggest doing 2 or, at most, 3 intervals per week, does this include sweet-spot intervals?

Are you confusing workouts with intervals? An interval is a block of work within a workout.

A workout normally comprises of several intervals, which can be of varying intensity and duration, depending on the type of workout.

2 or 3 intervals per week won’t get you very far, but 2 or 3 workouts will :+1:t2:

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Sorry, I meant interval workouts, e.g. 2x10 sweet spot.

Thanks. I figure that’s what I’m hearing. A number of coaches/cyclists I’ve seen online don’t seem to consider sweet-spot workouts interval-based, basically anything below VO2max seems to be treated like steady-state workouts, I.e. zone 2.

Thanks. Also I was wrong in my statement above. It’s not that the info I’m hearing is that zones 1-4 are the same, it’s that these cyclists are saying it’s better to spend most time at zone 1 or 2, and then some time in zones 5 and above, skipping zones 3 and 4.

In those cases, it seems like they’re skipping sweet spot which is why I was wondering if their advice to limit intervals to 2 or 3 times a week applied to sweet spot too. Frankly I don’t even understand why they’d suggest skipping sweet spot in the first place.

It depends on how you define your zones. For a typical 7 zone format, zones 1-3 can generally be stacked day after day and traditional base phase builds a bunch of training stress with mostly zone 2 and maybe into zone 3 a bit. Zone 4 is threshold and you can’t typically stack threshold workouts day after day after day (and it’s not typically appropriate for base training). Sweet spot sits just under threshold (straddles zone 3 and 4) and it’s a common “high value” training zone for those who want to squeeze as much work as possible into a tight training schedule during the base period.

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@TRusername Sounds like you might be looking at a polarised approach, 80:20 or 90:10

You might want to read through the polarised threads on the forum. They are long and detailed.

My take on the basics are “do your hard days hard and your easy days easy”. Add to that the testing suggests more than 2 hard days a week is enough so just spend the rest of your time riding easy. You need to limit your hard days so you can recover.

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i wouldn’t skip sweet spot if you’re trying to develop your aerobic capabilities. It’s amazing for that, but use other stimuli as well. said differently, don’t do JUST sweet spot.

Good luck!

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