My plan has 45 minute Threshold workouts on Saturdays. My plan doesn’t have any Sweetspot workouts. If I occasionally replace short Threshold with a 2 hour Sweetspot will I see similar fitness benefits or are those short Threshold much more valuable? My A event is an Everesting so I need to get a lot of time in the saddle to prepare.
If you do btwn 1.5× and 2× the interval durations at 90% of FTP, then you’ll probably be getting near enough the same stimulus, I reckon.
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Sweet spot and threshold are essentially interchangeable, just make the ss duration longer than the threshold, obviously.
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SST and Threshold both train essentially the same thing but SST allows you to do more time at a higher intensity. I would not neglect riding at FTP but if you can get a good chunk more tiz at SST, especially doing longer intervals I would do that before moving up towards riding at ftp. This also avoids any issues with a potentially over estimated ftp or any day to day fluctuations.
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Given the A event, I would go so far as to say replacing every 45 minute threshold workout with a 2 hour sweetspot workout would be beneficial.
Consider some cadence variations in those sweetspot workouts too. e.g. Tray Mountain +3: do the first block at your normal cadence, the second one at 10 rpm lower than the first, the third at 15 rpm lower than the first and the last one back at your normal cadence. Afterwards, look at the way cadence and HR interacted and think about the RPE of each block.
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Thanks everyone! I’ll probably do the short threshold 1 week and longer sweet spot the next for a while and see how that goes. Not sure I can mentally handle another 6 months of threshold every week.
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You’d probably get even more benefit by substituting with 3h tempo and yet still more with 4-5h z2…
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