Hannah Otto joined us to discuss Tempo and Sweet Spot training, but we also dug into her XCM World Champs experience, motivation, and recovery weeks.
Enjoy!
// TOPICS COVERED
(0:20:11) Is It a Good Idea to Do Sweet Spot Block Training?
(0:41:10) Do Pro Cyclists Do Sweet Spot Training?
(0:46:53) Why Is the Tempo Zone Ignored?
(0:56:42) Managing Your Breath During Intervals
“SSB HV would be amazing for them”, “kept doing that block in perpetuity”. Can’t help but think you’re referring to me here @Jonathan. It’s got me back surpassing previous PR’s.
I’m very curious to hear about the new developments and looking forward to whatever they may be. Great podcast, thanks.
Great episode, Hannah Otto is always so clear, concise and knowledgeable.
Great question about doing an early FTP builder block. I’m doing that myself but using Plan Builder. I always used to do the sweet spot plans, and had good power early in the year. But then always plateaued and burned out. This is my best-of-both-worlds approach.
In regards to “long endurance rides” (4 hours plus)… have to disagree on the take. I know Jonathan mentioned that the TR data suggest that those that do them seem to have a lower ceiling than those that don’t (would love a podcast that digs into that a bit more). But the long endurance ride (or run) is really what drives the ceiling up in my experience.
That said, I do agree that “over-cooking” the endurance rides, where they are fatigued for weeks on end, is detrimental. To me that’s not “endurance” but rather they did the “race” before the race (time trial) due to insecurities, and that’s the problem, not necessarily the longer rides.
In regards to long endurance rides (when training for an endurance event), they are the cornerstone of training IMO. When done properly, I just can’t see physiologically how that would negatively impact performance.
Great episode, love Hannah Otto, always so clear and matter-of-fact when it comes down to the realities of training, racing, and coaching.
Man, this episode has me thinking about doing a small sweet spot FTP build on January myself. I did what was supposed to be a 4 week block two seasons ago and when I saw HUGE gains in FTP (165 to 191) I decided to just take a week off the bike (still hit weights 
) between and hit it over and over again. What happened was I was so blown out by the start of the race season in March-April I didn’t even want to get on the bike for fun and had to take like two weeks off to recover from base training… it was not good. It definitely works but I will just try it in a small prescribed fashion going forward.
PS major FOMO for the Sugars, not able to make it down this year but raced Little last year and had a blast! Good luck to Jonathan, Hannah, and everyone else racing these next few weekends! Choose your tires carefully!
Great podcast, really insightful. Also can’t wait to see what new features are coming along 
How do you implement a plan with plan builder.
Ie what do you put in as the parameters?
Building endurance? Sustained power build? Raising FTP? Etc.
Hannah Otto is my favorite guest. Even though she is a pro she always makes a point of saying something helpful to time crunched folks who don’t get paid to race.
IMHO you are conflating your N = 1 experience with what is true statistically? The latter does not invalidate how your body reacts, but your individual data point also does not invalidate something that is borne out by the statistics contained in TR’s data set.
I found the turn of phrase “pull up from the ceiling vs. pushing up from the foundation” very compelling.
That’s not been my experience. What long endurance rides historically have done for me is give me the ability to recover more easily from hard workouts, giving me the ability to push up my FTP through sweet spot and/or polarized blocks (I typically combine both). But doing only endurance work leaves me “blunt”, i. e. I struggle to rev up my engine above FTP.
I can see how they could be damaging to training very easily, and that’s fatigue. A 4-hour endurance ride, even in the lower end of Z2, is not an easy workout to most athletes and you need to be able to recover from them.
To give you an example, last season I had too much life stress and as a result, I struggled with my training. It wasn’t that I was struggling with workouts (on average), nope. I was just sick for 3.5 months in total (sick = time off training).
TR’s user base is wide enough that it is not limited to time crunched athletes. Spin would imply that they start with a conclusion and then sift through the data to come up with ways to support that conclusion. That doesn’t make much sense to me. Its user data is TR’s crown jewel and not making use of that would put them at a disadvantage. Hence, I think it is unfounded to call it spin.
Just to emphasize one point: in my most successful year, I did do a lot of Z2 riding (I put the kids in our bike trailer and went out for a few hours). The difference between @Jolyzara’s and my experience were the adaptations we saw from long endurance rides (“driving up the ceiling” vs. the ability to recover more easily from hard interval workouts).
I’m not sure whether your N = 2 means you saw the same adaptations or that it simply led to better performance. If it is the latter, then none of us disagree.
Appreciate the discussion and that others have different experiences. That is the great (and sometimes frustrating) thing about training… everyone is different!
In my post you referenced, I was reflecting on not only my personal experience but my observations as a cross country and distance coach for the past 25 years. I am not arguing against TR data but rather why the data seems to say that. As mentioned in the podcast, Jonathan excluded the professionals as part of the data set. Why would the long endurance efforts be beneficial physiologically for those at the pinnacle of the sport but a limiter for everyone else? I think it is important to point out here that while long endurance may not be good for that individual at the time due to time availability, life stress, etc. it doesn’t mean long endurance rides are not beneficial for maximizing performance in general.
I don’t think I expressed my thought clearly in reference to “driving up the ceiling," but I 100% agree that it is the VO2 and Threshold that “pulls up” FTP. Not arguing that. But in my experience (as an athlete and coach) it is the endurance that, to put it simply, makes those efforts “easier” and fade less throughout the event.
I don’t think it was ever mentioned that only doing only endurance would boost FTP (we are in agreement here that it doesn’t) but rather disagreeing that long endurance, when done properly, will somehow limit performance.
We are in agreement here and I said as much in my post. Long endurance is hard and you need to recover from it.
I think it is important to clarify that I am not talking about people trying to simply be fit or finish an event but rather athletes who want to maximize their performance in a long endurance event. As a running coach I don’t believe that you need to “run a marathon to do a marathon.” But I do believe you absolutely need to do long runs. Taking the marathon analogy a bit further… if you max out your runs at 30 minutes, you may be able finish but it is going to be really hard late in the race and you are not maximizing performance.
Is the TR data showing that endurance athletes do not need to do a longer endurance effort in training and in fact harms performance? Or is there likely something else in play here? (I am going with the something else).
All you need is a statistically significant number of people to verify that. Given that TR has >> 100 million rides in their database and (to my knowledge) tens of thousands of users, I am fairly certain they do have a dataset of people who are not time crunched.
I don’t think you need to listen to it twice, @Jonathan’s bit was straightforward I thought. You and I don’t have access to the data and can’t independently verify his claim, though, so we will have to take his word for it — or not. From what I can tell TR isn’t married to any particular approach, and tends to follow the data. As far as I can tell they have no interest in slowing people down just out of some irrational attachment to dogma.
The argument that long endurance rides cause too much fatigue has merit and is consistent with my experience. Whether the benefits of long rides outweigh this for most people, I don’t know. If you can’t recover from long rides fast enough to hit your interval sessions hard, then I can see why you may not be faster.
FWIW during the time period I was referring to, I peaked at 4.7 W/kg (348 W FTP) at age 41, so I am hardly average (although nowhere near of the same caliber as Hanna Otto). I don’t spell out these number to brag, but simply to say that I wasn’t average and a training plan that worked for me is probably not a good idea for someone else.
Still, personally, I’d like to see TR add the ability to ramp endurance rides by time instead of just intensity in order to make it a better tool for a broader spectrum of athletes, which means that its algorithms have more flexibility to optimize training.
Here is my guess as to why:
The tricky part of your sentence is the very last bit: what do you mean by “maximizing performance in general”? Precisely that is the tricky bit.
It may be true that it is the right thing only for a smaller group of people and might give worse overall results (because the benefits do not outweigh the downsides) if you did long endurance rides instead.
One thing I certainly agree with is that long endurance rides become necessary at some point if you want to push performance (think aiming for a time at a marathon vs. merely finishing it).
Yup. That’s what I meant when I wrote that long endurance rides helped me recover more quickly both, within a workout and across workouts.
I just understood “drive up the ceiling” differently than what you expressed in your follow-up post.
I completely agree with what you wrote, because you added “when done properly”.
I would love to have access to the data and TR’s methodology to understand, dissect and discuss the details! How does TR characterize performance to begin with and do we agree with them?!
If I had to guess, they likely see a few factors that speak against long endurance rides for the majority of athletes:
When Jonathan said he was excluding the pros, the impression I had was that he was excluding them because we know they put in higher hours, and that a lot of that is going to be endurance pace so they can recover. He was talking about people that put in about 12 or less hours, I think, wasn’t he?
Not to belabor the point and I don’t mean this in a condescending way: do you know a little about statistical analyses?
You can extract cohorts based on certain criteria (e. g. age, sex, FTP, hours of training, …) and perform statistical analyses within a single cohort or comparing different cohorts to one another. As long as the sample size is big enough, TR can look at athletes who are e. g. not or less time crunched.
That means that biases within a larger dataset need not be present in smaller datasets extracted from the bigger dataset (think sex, I’d have to bet that TR’s database skews male, but you could generate a dataset made up of only female athletes).
Same here. I just didn’t want to assume or be condescending.
So about this shakeout ride in Bentonville for little sugar? Got a crew of 3 that might be down!
Great podcast, as usual. Got me through my TR endurance workout on the trainer this morning!
Just my .02…..
Also agreed.