I was always under the impression that @Nate_Pearson and @Chad founded TrainerRoad with the time-crunched athlete in mind which is why they focus on promoting the Sweet Spot approach. Fascat (Frank Overton) is the same. After doing years of Traditional Base he found that he made quicker, better gains going with the Sweet Spot approach. It’s not a blanket recommendation, it’s a recommendation based on experience that @chad has from years of riding and running his own studio. It’s what works best for MOST time-crunched athletes. Of course, you can modify plans and experiment, but there’s a lot of anecdotal support from various coaches to suggest that a Sweet Spot approach to training is VERY effective for time-crunched or athletes that are new to structured training.
Regarding base…
Kolie Moore has an interesting podcast episode about Base, and what is it. The notion that base is only or best built with long slow rides could be a myth. When in face we’re building base with every ride we do. You should give it a listen:
They all yielded good gains. I would be curious to see how only doing 4x8min @ 105% translate to improving your 4-min power versus doing some 4-minute intervals as well.
You can bet your butt I’m doing 4-min intervals at a higher percentage of my FTP if I know a race I’m targeting has a couple 4-minute climbs.
You have to touch the edges…so I would believe a combo of 4x4, 4x8, and 4x16 would absolutely be beneficial over the course of a season and depending on what your goals are.
Maybe a new thread for this, but it might be interesting to construct some experimental designs to answer specific question and then ask if people either have appropriate data to train a model, or if people would be willing to generate specific datasets to test an existing hypothesis for a different phrasing.
Have not put thought into experimental design but can quickly come up with some hard to control for issues and some interpretation issues.
But stuff doesn’t have to be easy and love the idea of crowd sourced experiments using motivated individuals (like many of the folks on TR Forum). FWIW, although ML/AI might be useful eventually, I bet focused longitudinal experiments today could answer many questions and be more direct than data mining. No reason not to do both other than activation energy.
-Mark
p.s. By LT testing, 75% of current MLSS nails my LT1 (as defined by 2 mMol jump). For those collecting data…
Lactate testing - I do my own testing. You can find people to test you but they usually run suboptimal protocols, charge too much to do it frequently, and often don’t know how to look at the data and just run a canned software analysis.
Short story is about $500 to get the meter and associated disposables to start-up. Once you cover the equipment expense, each future test works out to about $2 to $2.50 per data point. From there it depends on what protocol you run.
I charge buddies $20 per test. But that is a terrible business model (LOL)
I think of us as in some way time crunched but in other ways we have more time than the pros. Like, I can just keep slow building my mix of intensity and duration, on and on and on. I’m not having to pack pu and ship off to Volta al Algarve right now and begin a long racing season.
Exactly, it’s the blanket statements; not statements about yourself, from your personal experience and in the context of YOUR goals. I wouldn’t presume. I realize it’s a weird pet peeve but it is what it is.
LIke, if you accept that not all TSS is created equal, you cannot also advise people, “do this because it builds TSS”. Like it might be the right thing for their fitness, it also might not.
I actually made a topic a while back where I suggested crowd generated research, not many takers then. I think a retrospective analysis with established criteria is easier than getting people to adopt training prospectively
Cool - I don’t recall it but great that you tried. I’d probably propose a hypothesis and design and then see if I could get a few people “in” and if they could help recruit others. Expand the reach to find the motivated lab rats!!
Yeah I’d love to give it a go if enough people are willing. Personally, given all the back and forth, I’d like to compare those who do 10hrs of polarized vs those who do high volume sweet spot, control for age, some sort of proxy measure of experience level. I think more realistically we’d have to get mid volume folks, but I since high volume is purely sweet spot that it would be better to study, especially since there seem to be a lot of people who remain skeptical about the benefits of training in that zone
I am going to do that soon! Hopefully I have enough data to control for age etc. properly. I only started asking for DOB a few months ago and its not required so we will see.
Where’s the sweet spot!? 
