Substituting Sweet Spot Workouts

Training
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Hey guys,

I was curious if anyone has any input on substituting my 90 min sweet spot ride for a 3-4 hour zone two ride (thinking 60-70% of my VO2max). From some of the journal articles I’ve been reading it seems that this will work just as well as sweet spot, but obviously takes longer.

I assume this is simply traditional base, but does mixing traditional base and SSB, rather than solely committing to a single method, still produce a measurable increase in fitness?

Thanks in advance and sorry if the question is a little “n00bie.”

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“Long and slow” is a good replacement for those sweet spot rides if you have the time, it’s suggested on the weekly tips for most plans that have the long sweet spot ride on the weekend (usually the Sunday ride in most MV cases).

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If you look at many of the plans they explicitly call out replacing some of the Saturday/Sunday Sweet Spot rides with equivalent TSS zone 2 rides. Trick is to make it long enough and keep in it zone 2 for as much of it as possible.

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The Plan notes if you read them for each week give substitutions for you. Going this route actually goes back to what Sweet Spot Base programming looked like 12 or so months ago prior to the Sunday workout’s being changed to shorter “true” sweet spot efforts for 2hrs.

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haha, yeah one thing a read elsewhere was that the hardest part for amateur riders is to not be tempted out of zone two for a hill climb, sprint, or KOM.

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Did they change this? I can’t seem to find the plan notes on my calendar. Only way to see them is to open the MV SSB I training plan and refer to the week I’m on (and even still don’t see suggested substitutions).

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The notes have never been on the calendar. They are only found in the actual training plans right now.

I made a request to get them added to the calendar automatically, but it is still an open request (nothing done).

The post above includes my work around that is all manual.

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You’ll find them here, and Chad explained the rest.

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For mid volume, I just copy and past them into an “Annotation” in the Calendar on Mondays. That way I can read and refer to them each week on the calendar.

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Yup, that’s the work around I have covered in my feature request linked above. It’s a hassle, and you need to remember to shift or edit them if/when you make changes to your plan. So it’s far from ideal, but likely a bit easier than having to jump into the plans all the time to find the info.

It’s a solution, but not a great one.

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Thanks for the suggestions guys!

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