3 weeks. Last workout was 4x20. Just finished my recovery week. Was supposed to be hitting another 3 week block of sweetspot but like I said, it just wasn’t appealing to me and I just had no motivation to load up my 3x30 workout. Ended up doing a mixed workout because it sounded more fun. It was 7min at 105, then Mat Haymon’s Paris Roubaix workout below which had some tempo low cadence, then sweetspot with bursts. I know I’ve just said I didn’t want to do more sweetspot but it was something different that I’ve wanted to try and just mixing it up seemed to help.
so yeah, i agree there’s probably not much value in continuing, if you’ve hit 4x20, you’ve hit the time in zone and any exercise in doing longer single intervals are basically just doing the same thing (to my understanding) because in theory if you can do the time in zone and you can the single effort, so it’s not like you’re getting any additional progressive overload, so it’s better to do more intensity and do stuff like threshold or over-unders or even vo2 specific work
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FYI, TR does have similar SS workouts, select “Sweet Spot” / “With Bursts” in Workouts lib.
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I’m with you here. I respond very well to sweetspot workouts physically but mentally I just get bored to death. I live in northern Europe and the winter / indoor season is very long, like 6 months long.
For me, breaking the training season (approx. 8 months) into two parts makes things more palatable. Basically, I do roughly 4 week blocks progressing from base and strength → tempo/threshold → vo2 → race specific.
This keeps things moving constantly and there’s only 6-10 hard workouts in each block which I find more tolerable than doing sweetspot over and over again. After the first full cycle I do some kind of test event(s), rest a little bit and then start over.
Hope this helps!
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For boredom… are you on trainer or rollers?
First year structured training here but I was starting to get bored and annoyed with z2 and SS on a KICKR
These are much more fun on rollers because of their much more dynamic and engaging experience.
Trainer. I don’t like rollers. I know some people swear by them but I always hated riding rollers. To me, it’s like the worst of both worlds. I’m still not going anywhere (stuck in a room) but I have to focus more than I do riding outside. I tried them a few rides and it was pure torture.
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Gotcha. All good. In my case the additional focus to balance etc. On rollers serves as a better distraction than just music, movie etc. And time flies.
But of course this varies from person to person.
Good luck man!
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