Curious on your views of doing advanced aerobic or “SS” work at 85% vs 90%. Assume I’m pushing out time-in-zone, and that I don’t have high enough load/fitness to need to the stimulus of doing 90+ minutes in a single workout.
Nothing wrong with it at all. I use 80-85% for a lot of my ultra athletes because it’s incredibly relevant. It might not be sweet spot, nor “threshold” work, but like riding tempo for 2hrs can advance your threshold.
The criticism of riding at that intensity is that a lot of people will go out and SMASH a 4hr ride and come back with a .82IF and say “I did tempo!” but really they did a bunch of junk, a bunch of REALLY hard stuff, and they just made themselves tired.
If you can go sit at tempo for 3hrs, that ride serves a purpose and has tremendous aerobic adaptive capacity… it’s just gonna make you a lot more tired than your standard 4hrs at 65% would, so there’s a time and a place… guy like you who doesn’t race, you could do big tempo rides a lot. Racers can do them more in the offseason in lieu of “proper” intensity.
All that said, if you’re keeping the load under 90 at that intensity, there’s a tradeoff. It’s not going to be quite as effective, but I do use shorter tempo rides paired with my sweet spot progressions too. Those are usually anywhere from 60-120 min of time at tempo.
Oh no yea that was my takeaway as well. My only concern was doing too much really. But it seems if I wasnt really pushing the bounds of what I could do with sweet spot during the week…meaning, a lot of the workouts felt like work, but werent exactly challenging, I was probably doing too little.
You hit the nail on the head - I think 2x intensity a week might suit me better!
Would absolutely welcome your thoughts!
Switching to 2x intervals and the rest endurance has been HUGE for me in what I can handle without burnout so far this off season. I guess we’ll see where the year takes me, but 3 interval days a week was mentally and physically draining for me personally.
My view as an outside workout rider:
- 60-80% ftp is endurance, flex it depending on the other work being done
- 80-85% is tempo light, if I’m feeling off that day and take it easy
- 85-90% is tempo, still fully aerobic, and bigger bang for the buck until I have enough fitness
- 90-95% is bigger bang for the buck when fitness is up, HR still controlled and likely still mostly aerobic - not pulling down the glycolytic/anaerobic battery (see paper below)
That last point I can see in WKO5, and feel by monitoring breathing and HR during or after (HR only) the workout.
Came across this the other day:
Interesting read.
Thanks for the reply!
My 2nd Fondo (and last main event for the year) is Mt Ventoux the first weekend in June, maybe worth training towards that instead and training ‘through’ the Mallorca event to give more time? Mallorca is typically 167km, 2000m of climbing mainly made up of 1hour climbs for around 6hours in the saddle. Mt Ventoux is 122km/3600m elevation with Ventoux itself being 2+ hours climbing. Doing both events with someone that’s quicker, so all efforts will be sustained long climbs trying to keep up (no punchy attacks etc.).
All of my enurance is done at either .7 or .75 (typically either 1.5-2hours at 70-75%).
For context, I’d still like to knock a little weight off and the VO2 done six months ago wasn’t a block just part of the usual TR plans (1x a week alongside the threshold and SS). The SS block was my first go at a specific training block.
Nothing against a block of 3-5 weeks of 1x VO2, 1x Threshold TTE extension, and replace the sweet spot with a proper long endurance ride. Back in the day TR said they put those 2hr SST workouts in in place of the long endurance sessions because more people would do them. If you’re doing fondos, you need to do the long rides. Then supplement with some endurance time during the week as well.
But you could also do a VO2 block described here in other threads, and recover and do threshold work after and endurance time and see what that does. You’ve got some options, all roads lead to Rome.
Once you reached SS 100min+ and using TR workout library, it might be good idea to use Marcus Baker series (1, 2) and Pendleton. Those workouts have intervals intensity spread 88-94% within single workout. Middle 94% interval helps you to understand whether your FTP has increased along with TTE (usually is but not always).
Last night I did 1 x 60 at threshold after doing a SS progression (90% target) over the past 6 weeks up to 90 min in zone. I used to dread SS and threshold workouts. I’m stoked 
I do wonder what the standard practice is for ppl doing this progressions. After I finished my 1h Tiz @ 90%, 4x15, 3x20, 2x30, 1x60…, I increased my FTP. So now that I’m in my 90min Tiz phase, every SST workout has 30min more of Tiz and it’s also at a higher wattage. So a double whammy.
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I finished my second workout of the 90m Tiz progression, decided to add another step (4x 22.5m), with the hope that I can do the 3x 30m, 2x 45m and 1x90m outside.
Hi, I have a question regarding the sweet spot progression week by week. What participants in the thread mean when they say something like 3X15>3x17>2x25? Is that your weekly progression lets say you do 3 sweet sport sessions a week each 3x15? After 1-2 weeks you progress to 3x17? I just dont get it 
. I want to make my own SS progression and i am trying to undestand the basics. Is it more like personal decision or you follow some kind of order? Thank you.
You should be able to add more time to each subsequent workout. No need to do the same one (e.g. 3x15) multiple times. If you can’t progress each workout when doing 2 (or maybe 3) per week, you’re likely fatigued.
Thank you, that makes sense to me. i will take a note
Well… did threshold progression to 1x72. Did a vo2 block. Ftp went up ~10 watts. Built back to 2x33 at the new threshold. Did some races, took a rest week, and decided to do some sweetspot today. Did 3x30. Not really sure where to go from here. Only upcoming target is a hilly crit + climbing road race weekend. Maybe it’s time to get a coach.
anaerobic work, 1min efforts (7-10 of them), 5ish min 30/30 intervals (totally on anaerobic/totally off). work on the top end a bit
Why? What indication did you base it on?
How long till those events?