Ah, I gotcha! You all are so smart. I’m glad I got the courage to ask how my plan looked!
What do you think if I progress with the longer sweet spot intervals as @anthonylane has laid out and to jazz it up a bit add some shorter intervals at threshold? Orrrrrr could I squeeze this progression in to a smaller amount of time?!
If you will introduce threshold workouts you can stack the workouts, so one day threshold and next day SS work. But be careful with number of hard days. Usually more than 3 is considered hard to mantain in longer term (with this long SST I would also think about it as hard days).
Squizing the progression in a shorter time frame will be super intensive but potentially super rewarding. But you can also crash and burn 
there is a lot of factors contributing to this but this is recommended for experienced cyclist. Here is thr article that should help you with this:
Break Through Your Performance Plateau By Increasing Training Density
Awesome! Thanks for the guidance 
Thanks for the article @jarsson. This was a great read and something that I really enjoyed reading as I am currently wanting to increase my FTP and TTE. I have created some workouts that go along really well with this part of the article you have just posted. Happy to share the workouts around for anyone that is interested in having a crack at them.
Perform the following thought experiment. Is doing one 20min interval once each week, at 95% FTP, enough to increase FTP? My answer is a firm “no.” Doing one day of 2x20min intervals will likely be better, 3x20min even better than that. Doing 60 minutes of FTP training per day is almost definitely better than doing only 20 minutes.
Time is generally the limiter. You could adjust your workouts so you’re doing fewer, but longer intervals. 2x20, 2x30, 1x40, 1x60, etc. Take a 1x60 workout, add a 7.5 min warm up and a 7.5 minute cool down and you have 60 minutes at Sweet Spot in the span of 75 minutes. That’s a lot of bang for buck.
It’s all about adjusting to what life gives you. I’m currently trying to figure out how to maintain a 8-10 hour week while my kids are back in home-school. It’s not looking doable, but it’s late in the season and I can stay sharp on 5-6 hours as long as I have 2 days of intensity and one long (3-4 hour) day per week.
@jarsson downloaded workout creator. It’s so easy and great to use! Folks have made it sound so cumbersome…I like it! I think it may be easier to use than Zwift’s workout creator even!
Thank you for the advice!
Based on the guidance from this thread and a few others, I made a full set of custom workouts for sweet-spot progression. I think these are available to everyone; and if they’re not, but they could be, please point me to instructions on how to make them available to everyone. I’m happy to share.
All these workouts have the following traits:
Rest intervals are at 50% of FTP.
9-min warm-up: 2m @ 50%, 2m @ 70%, 2m @ workout power, and 3m @ 50%.
5-min cool-down: starting at 50% and ramping down to 35%.
Workout names all look like SS90/40 4x10. All start with SS, the “90” means work done at 90% of FTP, the “40” means 40 minutes of Time In Zone, and then 4x10 obviously describes how those 40 minutes get distributed.
SS90 workouts get rest intervals that are 3 minutes long.
The following SS90 workouts exist right now:
Comments and suggestions welcome. Hope they’re useful to others as they’ve already become for me. In the workout tab, you just have to type “SS9” into the search box to get the list.
I also started making a set of workouts like these at 85% of FTP, but I find that I don’t use those much… I tend to either work harder at 90%, or just ride outside at either endurance or tempo pace. I’m gradually gravitating to two hard workouts a week on the bike, and one endurance ride.
Should I be devoting more time to the 85% workouts? Am I likely to see better training adaptations over time using longer work intervals at 85% than what I can hold at 90%? Or can I forget about 85% and just keep implementing my SS90 series?
I’m convinced that the 4 weeks I just spent on sweet-spot progression, reaching 2x25 @ 90%, were THE biggest driver in my phenomenal FTP result this Monday, when I increased from 199W to 212W (6.5%).
So thanks again, y’all. 
To share them, I believe you need to assign them to a Team:
and the team can be either Private or Public, with or without control over who can join:
Done. The “More Sweet Spot!” Team is ready. 
I think there’s 25 workouts in there right now, all with intervals at 90%.
Thanks very much for setting this up! Really appreciate it.
The question I have now, and after reading the Pro thread on these forums, is how many sweet spot sessions a week to improve FTP? Is it better to run your own sessions like the ones that have been set up by @AgingCannon or just do the Sweet Spot base program on TR? Maybe even swap out a session in the SSB program for one of longer SS progressions that have been made by @AgingCannon?
You link seems wrong… Here is legit one.
I think a key factor here is how much the 90% intervals fatigue you. You can only do so much in a week. I find the 85% intervals are low enough where I can ride for long durations with low fatigue. I usually do these at low cadence. It’s worked pretty well for me in building my endurance.
I do the higher intensity stuff also - usually outside on long climbs. Eg ride 50 mins uphill as fast as I can. These I finds to be a lot more fatiguing than indoor sessions at 85% on the trainer.
Thanks @AgingCannon
After about 12 total months of training on TR I found that the sweet spot workouts in the Sweet Spot Base plans didn’t have long enough intervals, save for the weekend rides. I have since followed my own series of workouts and or cherry pick from the plans.
Don’t be apprehensive to change it up, there is nothing magical or scared about TR plans. They are very well structured and take out guess work, but sometimes you might need a more challenging (or easier) workout.
I recently watched a TR podcast where Coach Chad emphasized that one should train with the “minimum effective dose”, meaning train only as much as you need in order to keep improving. That will be different for each person, and will change over time for each of us too.
For me, right now, it seems like the right dose is two one-hour sweet-spot workouts per week, and one Zone 2 ride. What’s right for YOU is something that you’ll have to figure out with a little trial-and-error and a little experience, unless you have a coach.
You’re obliquely answered my question. I have trouble sitting on a trainer for more than an hour, and don’t have many hours per week to train… so two hours a week of 90% workouts is, at this point, “what I can do in a week.”
If anyone else has done one of these progressions, how long did you take to run through the whole progression? I plotted out a plan using the progression that @AgingCannon posted above, and used 10 weeks to get up to 90 minutes @ 85%, doing two sweet spot workouts in each up week and just a light V02 workout in each of the two recovery weeks.
I just don’t know if I should do 10 weeks at 85% and then go right into the same 10 week progression at 90%, or put more variety into the weeks and lengthen each progression out to 12-14 weeks or so. Using V02 or some suprathreshold work just to change things up a bit.
I am targeting gravel events in June, so I think I have almost 38 weeks until the first race, so plenty of time.
TL;DR: What I built is not a sequence or plan, it’s just a set of tools like different sizes of screwdrivers. Use one, some, or all as best fits your needs, in conjunction with the rest of your training plan.
@wiscokid, please note that I’m not an expert, and take my advice with a grain of salt. That said, I would definitely not suggest doing a progression at 85% and then doing another one at 90%. I see 85/90 as either/or, just as we discussed with @DaveWh one or two posts above: you may prefer 85% and longer intervals because they fatigue you less, or you may prefer 90% and shorter workouts because you have less time available (or your tail hurts, like mine). I’m not doing ANY workouts at 85%, personally… but I’ll add them to the set of workouts over time because someone else may find that “tool” more useful.
These workouts are intended to offer you choices… they’re not intended as a single sequence. I still get saddle numbness after about 30 minutes on the trainer, so I need a short break and thus haven’t done anything longer than 2x25 yet. I also fully expect to skip 3x20 because 2x25 → 2x30 seems more intuitive to me; but many people like 3x20 so it’s there as an option. And you neither need to start at 4x10 nor go all the way to 1x90. And, I’ll continue to add choices over time just for fun and in case it helps someone.
Beyond which of these workouts to do, there’s also whether you’re doing only these (which I wouldn’t… I’m doing two of these in one week and one “long steady” Zone 2 ride each week, sometimes even less), or swapping these in for other workouts on a TR plan, or how you’re applying them.
And though it may seem obvious to some, you don’t necessarily need/want to spend only one week at each level: for me, 2x25 was enough of a jump from 3x15 (due to the longer intervals) that I spent two weeks on that.
@AgingCannon and @Bbt67 Thanks for the input.
I think I will stretch out the progression to 16-18 weeks, and use the 90% workouts. I’ll do two hard workouts a week, sometimes two sweet spot, sometimes one sweet spot and something else. Some lower tempo work will be a moderate workout if I am feeling good.
This would be the ideal structure:
Monday - Off
Tuesday - Sweet spot workout #1
Wednesday - Tempo (not sure if 85% will be too high, maybe 80%?)
Thursday - Zone 2
Friday - Zone 2 or off
Saturday - Sweet spot workout #2 w/ added zone 2
Sunday - Zone 2
Maybe swap Wednesday and Thursday around if I need an easy day between the sweet spot and tempo.
I’ll probably throw in a VO2 or some suprathreshold intervals every other week or so.
Added:
I think that covers the 90% workouts… we have:
Have I missed anything that we really should have in the set, up through 2 hours in zone?
(This oughta keep @wiscokid busy… )