Given that goal, I don’t think you can get the equivalent benefit in 2 hours, but 3 might get you close.
I think a fasted 3 hour ride like Ptarmigan with a carb mouth rinse (Redbull) instead of consuming carbs probably gets you as close as you are going to get, especially if you did it first thing in the morning.
I just want to reiterate that I know a 5 hour z2 ride has great benefits. I’m not saying 2 hours of sweet spot is better than that.
I’m wondering at what point does a 2 hour sweet spot ride + Z2 at the end equal the aerobic threshold benefit of a 5 hour Z2 ride.
As far as I know we don’t know the answer to that. If someone does, or even has an educated guess I’d love to hear it!
Yes, you understand me 
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We have a place that tests aerobic threshold in our same office park. I should do one like every training block and see what happens.
I’m going through a full phase progression so it would be neat. It will be hard to keep consistent with my travel though so I suspect that if I just maintain fitness some months I’m going to call it a win.
I know this wouldn’t prove anything but it would still be interesting.
Heck…we have a medical grade lactate tester so I should just have Chad administer it to me once a month. I forgot about that!
But…this other place has a metabolic cart and I could check out how well I’m burning fat at the same time…
This is strictly anecdotal, and draws from many others’ attempts to translate Lydiard’s “bread and butter aerobic” into wattage terms (Charles Howe and Coggan made many posts about this over the years in the Google Wattage group).
If you can’t do 15-18 hours just under AeT in zone 2, then do a lot of your 10-12 hours a week just over AeT – that 76-80% FTP riding, where HR is in the lower half of Friel zone 2 (my AeT HR is 123, and in this kind of training I’ll be at 125-130 for most of the ride).
From my own training, I haven’t seen a difference in what my watts @ AeT are in the years of high volume (600-700 hours for a 50+) vs. moderate volume (500 hours). The differences I’ve seen in the last two seasons (both higher volume) are that I can do more over 4 hours, and that I’m better at consistently negative splitting 2-2.5 hr zone 3 rides.
I am about to finish SSBHV2 with a long Z2 ride today and want to share my experience in the last 12 weeks with SSBHV. To put everything in the right perspective, here is a little summary about me as a cyclist:
From WKO5 i got the following stats for the last 90 Days, which ist approx. the period since i started SSBHV in the 2nd week of Oct after my season break (only one week of doing almost nothing):
I am really happy with the last 90 days of training. I never did such an “overload” of Sweespot intervalls in the past seasons and to be honest i was really curious what this would do to me. So here are my key takeaways / Conclusions
Now on to an easier week and then i will start sustained power build…
+1
I got out for 3.5 hours with friends today instead of 2hs SS so I’m happy and less bored. I did HV last year but this year I am doing MV with a longer Wednesday ride, longer sweetspot/sub threshold on Thursday (like Clark/Frissel+1) keeping the VO2 max and o/u (good they were hard yesterday) and trying to do a 3 -3.5 hour upper zone 2 ride Sunday outside plus a gym session Monday - so less cycling than SSBHV but more variety and certainly more fun…it is working - last year FTP was 278W after SSBHV2 (but then I got ill) this year it is at 295W - although of course some of this is because I did that base last winter. I suppose I am just trying to change it up to see what works for me 
I’m I’m the same dilemma now. I gonna try move around workout so hard legs days aren’t day before hard rides . See if that helps out
Out of curiosity, do they use a metabolic cart measuring gas exchange to get VT1 or is it a blood test using a lactate meter to get LT1? Either should be a similar numbers (watts and/or heart rate correlation) but just curious what is in your area.
They do blood lactate do get mmol/L. They have someone write down when your breathing changes. They also do a metabolic cart for gas exchange to see where your cross over point is.
You and the whole podcast team should go get tested. It would be interesting for us listeners to hear about. All of the testing resources that you guys have done as a team have always been good content.
+2
Ref the Z2 talk on here, do you feel it’s important to be at the upper end of Z2 or somewhere else within the range? IME they feel very different. Great discussion by the way.
We did get tested before. I forget what episode that is.
Thanks, I’ll try and look for it. I’m surprised that I don’t remember it. I thought that I had listened to the whole catalog to this point?!?! You guys put out over 100 hours of entertaining content every year, so I shouldn’t be surprised that I don’t remember everything. Hopefully I can find the episode for a quick refresher.
Well they have it’s called SSBHV1/2 - To get the gains you can do many hours of Zone 2 (like 20!) or 11 hours of the HV plan or use MV and do the o/u , VO2 max and threshold stuff. I don’t think there is any way round that - if there was more SS in MV there would be less TSS and therefore less improvement for the majority of users. “There is no such thing as a free lunch” as they say. I have compromised a bit by adding Andrews for 90 mins on Wed and replacing a Thr threshold session with a 90 min sweetspot/sub threshold session like Beacon as I think it is a bit early in the year for threshold (I don’t start racing until April) but I think you need the o/u and VO2 work if you are only going to do 6 hrs on the bike. Obviously anyone can replace any of the sessions with some SS intervals if they like but I suppose they have to accept they won’t see the maximum gains possible. It is a mental battle - I saw pretty much my max HR at the end of the last 110% part of the last o/u I did yesterday…but I’m now thinking (hoping) it has made me stronger and I was visualising how much faster I’m going to be on my tt bike this summer.
I saw this mentioned on one of the long training peaks videos posted, but can’t seem to find it. But they said it was not better to be at the top of Z2. They recommended staying away from it because it would just add more fatigue without any other benefits.
That’s what I’ve found too, it’s easy to drift into the tempo “grey zone”. Thanks
Yes what you are doing is what I’d likely do too. I just finished SSBHV1 before Christmas but I wouldn’t sustain HV2 with the midweek 2 hour rides which is why I opted for MV2. I’m hoping to tag on some Z2 efforts such as Taku to some rides and do some Baxter variations on free days.
