colnago62

For those of you that do sweet spot training, how many times a week do you devote to it? I ride 4 times a week in the winter and was thinking twice a week. The other two days would be devoted to endurance work.

Rides4Beer

I've been doing it 2-3 times a week for the last 10 weeks and have been seeing good results.

Cypress

My coach had me doing it 2 times a week.

Monday: Off
Tuesday: SS work
Wednesday: Tempo work
Thursday: Z2 endurance
Friday: Off
Saturday: SS mixed into a long ride
Sunday: Z2 endurance

It should be noted that all of the SS and Tempo work is buried in long bouts of Z2. Only 2-3 hours of a ~13-hour week was spent at SS wattage.

Rides4Beer

Good point, total time spent at SS is what's important. I've doing the same, 2-3 hours of SS wattage per week.

redlude97

you should do it as many times a week as you can recover from, then work on extending and connecting sweetspot intervals to increase time in zone

AdkMtnMonster

Same here.

MagicHour

Check out Fascat site/podcast some good info there on SS:
https://fascatcoaching.com/tips/how-...spot-training/

A typical week in a Sweet spot training plan looks like what Cypress posted.

canklecat

2-3 times a week, depending on weather and how I'm feeling. Usually about 30 minute warmup (I'm very slow to warm up and stabilize my heart rate, which tends to peg at the slightest effort until I'm warmed up), 60 minute workout ride, and 15-30 minute cooldown while heading home. Sometimes I'll do a local group ride. Since those are mostly younger guys, their "no-drop casual/recovery pace" is my tempo or sweet spot/threshold pace. I almost always get dropped but it's a good workout when I need a little more motivation. Hazard of being the old guy in the group.

I do intervals and recovery spins indoors. Too many interruptions outdoors for proper interval training. And I find it difficult to do a proper recovery ride outdoors. Works better for me to stay in zone 2 on the trainer while watching movies or TV shows. I'll usually do 1-3 hours that way once or twice a week.

As warmer weather approaches I tend to slack off the intervals and instead try to add a longer solo or group endurance ride outside, up to 50-60 miles. Beyond that an old C1-C2 neck injury tends to become too uncomfortable so I don't do many full century rides anymore. Sundays in warmer weather there's a small group of guys and gals my age who do 50-60 mile tempo pace rides (which for me is 15 mph on our roller coaster terrain with many short, steep hillettes). So occasionally I'll join them, if I can get out of bed early enough. I'm not a morning person.

caloso

Agree with the others that 2 or 3 times a week works well.

colnago62

This is very similar to my plan except no long ride after the sweet spot session and one extra rest day. At 58, make haste slowly is my motto to building my fitness. When it gets closer to spring, I plan to replace a sweet spot session with a high intensity interval day and do easy miles after and build from there.

colnago62

I find that the majority of riders at organized event rides do the shorter distances. By the time I get back from the 100 miles, the food they promised is gone. Some friends and I did a double metric century ride that touted pizza and beer at the end. By the time we got there, they were packing up. We got no beer and a single slice of pizza. I was so mad 😂😂

WhyFi

Another good argument for staggered starts

colnago62

So, this what was maddening; They did stagger the starts, by 30 minutes 😳🙄. Like that is going to even out the time difference between riding 100k and 200k