Novel stimulus: if your baseline of hours in Z2 is zero or minimal, then, no, you don’t need 2+ hour rides at z2 to elicit a response. That’s something that’s missing from these conversations, too. Sure, eventually you need to push that out, and at that point you’re faced with the philosophical choice on how you distribute your weekly training load. I’m not hearing the 3+ HIIT workouts as “the way” for the time crunched athlete. You can’t fake volume.
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New?
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Agree, but I would also suggest there’s a challenge in getting properly informed and educated on what a good plan choice is. The active threads on SSB naming and Volume > Intensity highlight some of this. I think it’s more than just naming. Part of it is how to get started.
Reviewing some of the threads on the forum, some patterns are starting to emerge, esp. in how to best incorporate Polarized training and to bring in more volume (choose LV and add Z2). I would suggest that there could be a benefit in documenting some of these common strategies and making them visible as documentation so that those of us that don’t want an all-SSB plan have some loose templates.
It’s taken me many hours of reading, going down rabbit holes, to better understand how to assemble a combination of training plans to meet my training goals. Maybe create some common use cases or patterns that forum users have found successful and document those as suggestions for those of us that don’t have coaches and need some guidance on approach their training.
Over time, maybe those become product features, but giving top level guidance in the app, as documentation, can help steer users in the right direction (don’t do HV unless you are …; add more Z2; …).
Just a few thoughts.
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Around same age as sweet spot training. Also a shiny new toy?
As a high-volume rider who rides a lot outside both things would need to be fixed to make TR interesting for me again.
This is the winter of militantly riding Z2. I blame GCN. If I see the word Z2 again, I’m going to cry. There have been so many questions about it not only here but reddit, zwift forum, etc.
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Do they? I mean yes, getting 4-500 people to show up for the BMTR Saturday 160km ride is impressive in terms of raw numbers for a group ride… but across the whole Strava population or even just as a percentage of active users at the time, it is actually a pretty small number.
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I handle these long rides in two common ways:
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TR app running a long workout in ERG mode and then watch a streaming video for fun. I also run Zwift in the background just to get my virtual km’s and my Z experience points. This is the most common use case for me, but I mix it up as follows for some specific workout goals or demands when I want.
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Run just Zwift while riding with one of the Robopacer groups (whatever closely matches my pace demands) and riding to cover the time I have on the TR workout calendar. Essentially I treat this like an outside ride but with Zwift.
As to the others that do long rides in Zwift and such, they sure do exist. I’ve been in a number of those groups over the years. Those are good examples of people going above the typical 60-90 minute range we see from many riders. Even with those riders, I suspect they are the minority when looking at the whole audience. Not nothing, but also well short of even a pure majority would be my guess.
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That opens the discussion about what exactly “optimal” means. Best possible with no restrictions, or best possible within time limits that we see from many TR users. I would guess that the greater bulk of TR users are somewhere between 5-8 hours per week, so that will impact what is optimal, IMO.
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TR selling within whatever they see as their target audience is what it is. It may not be the “best” training in the world, but it may well be darn good within a set of restraints that seem common for a majority of users around here.
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I agree very much with this sentiment. I got into TR with the plan of riding only 45min sessions. I could knock out five or six days of VO2 in a row and then take a day off.
Then I started to follow the plan, spend time at Sweet Spot, and eventually Threshold. Got a bit stronger and started to look for ways to find more time to train (it also helped my kids have very slowly started to sleep a bit better).
I am one that will sit on the trainer for four or five hours multiple times a week if that’s what the weather and my availability combine to present, but I suspect that many TR users follow a similar-ish path of getting into it, and many for various reasons didn’t, don’t, and won’t ride for more than a couple of hours.
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To expand on that, but in reverse…going back to the 4-500 rider group rides. Based on my experience, over half the riders that start those rides drop out before the end. There have been some rides, where in the last 20 miles, I’m looking around and thinking “I’m running out of wheels to hide behind!” 
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What makes you think they haven’t? If anything, their deep dives know that TR has the institutional knowledge to design very sophisticated training plans.
They have publicly said that among other things completion rates factor into training plan design.
That might lead to the following situation:
Plan A: Better on paper and in theory, but less people adhere to it.
Plan B: Worse on paper and in theory, but higher level of adherence.
Which training plan is “better”? As a company that makes plans for thousands, this is a hard problem.
But even if you break it down to one individual, it isn’t so easy. What if I belong to the minority who would also adhere to Plan A? Or if I belong to the minority who actually responds better to Plan B? After all, we are not statistical averages. Here, the main factor is a lack of features that allow for customizations.
PS I am not arguing you or I must agree with their decisions, I’m just saying that we should expect these decisions have been made with the same knowledge and care that they display during the podcast.
If your goal is to make someone faster, do you prescribe them something that is theoretically better, but something they won’t adhere to? Or do you take the human factor into account and prescribe the best plan they actually will adhere to? Like @mcneese.chad wrote, “optimal” is a loaded word that seems easy at first, but is both, crucial and really hard to make precise.
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The term “sweet spot” was first coined by cycling coach and author Andy Coggan in the early 2000s but coggin himself had research papers around that topic in the 90’s. We have to remember that power meters weren’t invented until 1989 by SRM. So while they may have come out around the same time one’s getting more attention.
This hasn’t applied to me but i’m a sample size of 1
My training plan said that I needed 4.5 hours endurance last weekend, so I did it (as I couldn’t get outside) on the turbo, got a badge as well
Good for you but after 90 minutes on the trainer I’m bored and my ass hurts a lot. I think there’s probably a LOT of people in that category.
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Vast majority of Strava user base is outside most of the time.
The term ‘sweet spot’ was first used in training in the late 1970s. It is used to describe a point of optimal performance that takes into account a range of variables, such as workload, nutrition, and guidance.
The long steady distance ride goes right back to the end of the 19th century.
Or I just had a brain fart and mis-typed Strava instead of Zwift. 
I think the point remains, despite the typo.
Anecdata - majority of short rides in my Strava feed are on Zwift and Peloton.
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I personally think the LV plans would be better general use plans if they were two 1 hour interval workouts and one 90 minute Z2 workout, vs how they are now with basically three interval workouts.
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I like that suggestion. It splits the difference between Polarized and non-Polarized.
Proving those who don’t want to go long, go or stay home 
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