Regular racing during plans

Training
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I am currently in a medium SSB2 plan, and will progress to either a general build or short power build.

I am wanting to race each Sunday, or go on a group ride. I am wanting to know which workout I should substitute for, the sweet spot or the threshold?

I am wanting to keep the workout that gives me the most benefit to do on the Saturday, and freshness for the race does not matter (learning race craft, first season). The racing and group ride is for psychological benefit, getting outside in the sun!!

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If this is the case, then just keep the scheduled Saturday ride and swap out the Sunday ride for outdoors. This is a very common substitution.

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what @julianoliver said. Just be careful to not dig yourself into too deep of a hole. Sometimes those Saturday rides end up being pretty intense and can compromise the intervals the next week which can create a pretty bad spiral of fatigue.

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I’ve done this. For races that I consider B or C or hammer fest group rides, I sub the threshold workout. I try to keep the overall weekly TSS within 100 of what TR prescribed by shortening the Sunday ride.

If any of your upcoming events are A events for you, then do a dedicated taper week that week. If you can sync that with the rest week of the various blocks of base and build that would be ideal.

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So is the general theme that it does not matter which workout out of the sweet spot and threshold that I’m substituting for? That is ultimately what I’m trying to work out, which has the most benefit

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I’d usually switch it back and forth. I noticed mid way through lastw inter I was skipping a lot of the Over/under type workouts and felt that was suffering. So I changed up which one I would skip in lieu of skiing!

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That’s a good point! So I may also need to look at the overall week to ensure that I’m not skipping the only occurance of that session/ workout type. Thanks

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You should replace the ride that is most similar to what you are doing outside. The sweet spot plan I’m doing (high volume) is 100% sweet spot and endurance paced rides - so I don’t have many options.

If you’re doing low or mid volume you have some higher intensity stuff mixed in - so given your high level description of your outdoor rides it is likely that those most closely align to what you’re doing outside. As such you should probably make an effort to do all of the sweet spot workouts and then replace the indoor higher intensity workouts with the high intensity outdoor riding and racing.

If, however, you want to go on a nice four hour coffee shop ride some Sunday - I’d replace your endurance paced ride with that effort

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Thanks mate. I was leaning towards dropping the threshold effort originally, and that was considering the efforts that wound often occur in the races / higher intensity group rides. Where there are longer pulls around threshold, then some sitting in. I guess I’m not at the level where I fully understand the benefit of sweet spot vs threshold, and which will help most with my plans.

Tried searching the blog posts and didn’t quite find what I was looking for. I might need to do some more research!

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Perhaps a simpler way to think about it is, ‘what is the goal of this plan’ as opposed to ‘what is the goal of this workout’.

You’re in base phase, so you’re trying to adapt your body to long(ish) efforts so you’re trying to build strength and endurance to prepare you for build which is an attempt to increase your FTP through more varied efforts but with more consistent time spent at and above threshold.

Thus, the primary goal for where you are now is the foundation for more important threshold efforts in the near future. The reason you’re doing some VO2 max and threshold work in the lower volume sweet spot plans is to supplement your comparatively low volume and still build your aerobic base. So…do whatever will further those goals while still permitting you to have fun on the bike on your outdoor rides

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And that is where I slip up! As someone who constantly looks at the micro vs macro, my head gets stuck with - which workout helps to get me to the larger goal of the plan. I would think that spending longer time at threshold would assist in building muscular endurance and raising threshold power (more than sweet spot), but I feel that could be a narrow way of looking at it due to my relatively new introduction to this type of training.

Choosing to move to mid volume was definitely the best choice for my training, but this factor was just something I hadn’t planned when moving from low to mid!