I wouldn’t ever give it unless it was race-specific. 4x30 is fine, or “go get 2 hrs at 90% on a 3-4hr ride in the mountains”.
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I guess my dismay was a result of my own training history, which while structured has never involved 90% efforts in excess of 20 minutes.
As with many things this seems to be all about specificity.
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Long tempo/SST efforts in base are where it’s at, man. Welcome to the club. 
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Kolie Moore would disagree with you. So would anyone near their genetic limit of FTP. Once someone is highly trained raising FTP even 1% is quite hard. Extending TTE at high percentages of FTP is much more achievable. Being able to hold 90% for hours is huge.
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Hi fellow riders. I was wondering if you do your SS progression at different power. My sweet spot intervals are always at 94% of FTP. i see a lot of comments of people that do it at 90%. Should i do it at 90%FTP.? For me it is doable 3x15 or 3x20 at 94% for 2 or 3 workouts a week. Is there any physiological difference. All i need it sustainable power for longer time. I can recover from that, so i think it is good for me to continue.
The choice of power target is based on a few things:
-Available time to train. If you do 90% for example eventually you’ll need to do >2 hr rides to keep progressing TTE. If you don’t have time for that then up the %FTP, lower your time, and start progressing TTE again
-Total intensity / fatigue. Training at a low %FTP will be easier to recover vs high of a %FTP. Is non-linear. This the term Sweet Spot for 88-95%. It’s trying to balance training stress and benefits / time. The harder you go, the more recovery you need.
-Specificity. As you get closer to your events, you should focus on the intensity that most stimulates your events.
-It’s good to not always train at the same power. You can get in a mental rutt. Vary things.
You can look at your modeled power curve (intervals.icu, Golden Cheetah, WKO) to get a good idea of your expected TTE at different power.
Also, if you ever find that you can’t extend TTE by 3-5 minutes over last time, that’s a sign that you’re fatigued, sick or under fueled. Every TTE workout should progress.
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Personally, I don’t believe that you’ll see much difference as long as your FTP is well calibrated. Let’s face it, 90 and 94% are almost the same thing.
A negative scenario would be a poorly calibrated FTP where 94% is going above threshold and maybe 90% is at threshold.
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I’m definitely aware of that, and am a big fan of the EC podcast and their ideas! Their views on TTE are essential for FTP making any sense at all. I just don’t believe that every person is going to be able to craft the exact same power curve shape. If we’re calling FTP the inflection point where lower powers fatigue much slower and higher powers fatigue much faster, it seems to me that there will be a lot more variance in what happens above and below that point than perhaps is given credit for. I’m not trying to debunk anything - just thoughts and observations from an untalented endurance athlete during successful sweet spot progression haha.
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Yes, I’d like to see the short power of the guys doing more 120m of 90% straight.
60 min is just bare minimum
90 min is competent
120 min is a serious effort
More than 120 you are just a triathlete (joking)
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If you only need to do 60 minutes at 94%, then that’s fine. But why are you targeting the very tip-top of sweet spot? There are tremendous benefits to riding 90-120 minutes at 88 or 90%.
Even 70.3 triathletes aren’t riding 2+ hours at sweet spot, unless you consider 85% sweet spot, and even that is like the tip-top end of 70.3 bike leg pacing by the strongest cyclists/runners. IM athletes are typically doing 70-75% for 4-6hrs.
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Just wanted to brag about this bad boy, big progression for me personally to get here. Mentally kind of a miserable workout but doable.
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Probably because that’s what TR sweet spot seems to be when you get to a certain progression level.
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I did wright peak and trainer road said we will increase your ftp for you doing that, 10 days prior to my actual ftp test date. That is so nice of them.
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It’s crazy to me that doing 3x30 at 90% automagically means your FTP went up. Computers. 
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Yeah, a bit weird to have that assumption 
it probably works well for newer riders as doing ftp/SST work can raise ftp but when your more well trained that largely stops working in my experience. For instance I just finished a block with a 2x60 at 90% but when retesting ftp it remained the same as the start of the block, my tte just went out by a lot.
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I’ve seen it go both ways: you can do 3x30 or 90min at 90% because FTP is now higher and that 90% is really 85%… AND because you can just legit sit at 90% for 90 min now, but if you tried to ride 40 min at 105% of the current FTP thinking your FTP had gone up because of that, you’d blow up. So yeah, it’s a bad assumption for some people, IMO, as you mentioned particularly people who are already pretty highly trained.
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Yep, when I first started years ago I would have that experience. Do a lot of SST and have my ftp increase, now all it does is push out the tte and I need a block of higher intensity vo2 work to get that bump in ftp.
Had the same thing last season and attempted to see if my ftp went up, my spectacular explosion part way into the test showed me that no, no it had not gone up 
.
However I was much more able to hold that same ftp after a longer ride or after lots of higher intensity in a race than before pushing out tte.
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I tend to think of it this way… if you have well developed fitness then you avoid the vo2max slow component and 90 minutes isn’t an issue. Those with less well developed fitness might have 1x90-min at 90% interrupted by the slow component.
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To use your phrase, I’m not a “super advanced endurance athlete.” But can show you examples of 1x90 and 1x120 at 85% without an increase in ftp. And 1x50-70 minutes at FTP - without an increase in FTP.
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I like to think I have decent fitness. Last week I did do 3x30 at 90% and nailed this 3x30 @90-92% today after my highest tss week of the year. Maybe there are other factors at play I’m not aware of. Either way stay on the grind everyone
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