I am for sure not listening through random podcasts to find the exact place you might have misunderstood when you listend to it 3y ago. If you believe what you are saying it should be easy enough to cite the exact statement you refer to which I then can refute or also not.
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@empiricalcycling tagging you to respond lol
What I’m about to say is assuming fixed amount of time to train per week, which in my case is roughly 6-10 hours/week. And assuming we ignore the “easy” fitness gains from returning to training after a season or other break, and ignoring the easy newbie gains.
My ftp is already at a very high % of vo2max. And given my time limits, ftp is pretty constant throughout the year.
More sweet spot gives me more muscular endurance, but does very very little to help raise my ftp. Because my ftp is already at a high % vo2max, and the other thing a lot of sweet spot training can do is raise your ftp as % vo2max. So if you are the opposite of me (ftp is lower % vo2max), you very well could see sweet spot pushing up your FTP because you have a lot of headroom.
My viewpoint is that base is mostly about conditioning, and the more conditioning I do, the harder I can train later. Sweet spot gives me the muscular endurance needed to do the more rewarding threshold and above threshold work, the work that actually moves the fitness needle for me.
Those are the basics in my own mind. Happy to be corrected. I’ve got a lot more thoughts on the subject, just keeping it simple.
I’m in the camp that you need to do VO2 to raise your threshold (assuming your volume and threshold work are also sufficient). But I have also have seen how volume and “sweet-spot” can also raise it.
I ran my fastest ever 3k when in marathon training. Not that the training helped my speed per se but more that I was pretty much able to redline the whole race and not fatigue. While that is more VO2, the same applies. You need something in the tank for that hour-ish (give & take some minutes based on your personal definition here) all-out test. And all the VO2 isn’t going to get you there without the other pieces.
Thanks hub… I think. @Slowwithouttwitch it’s actually not driven by substrate oxidation, it’s about maintenance of energy state. While lactate is used as a marker for FTP, in metabolic reality there’s no causal link with it. As for your flippant stating of “progressive overload” you’re going to have to define the substance of what you mean since there are a few potential ways to apply overload, and we can clear this up instead of watching all of you talk past each other.