Quite well for my purposes, which I think is important to note. You won’t be sharp after this, but it gave me muscle endurance for days. I’ve started to sharpen with a VO2 block now (which suuucked at first), and will report back how it goes. Very happy so far with the increase in durability and the lack of burnout.
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I tried to roughly follow a SS progression based on the Training peaks recommendations.
2x20
2x25
1x45
4x20
1x60
(planned 1x75) however the weather was too good, so did a 2x20 after a drop ride.
Overall I would say doing 1x45 is not as difficult as many make it out to be, if you can complete a 2x20 and 2x25, 1x45 should be manageable. Next time I will work towards 1x90.
In terms of results, definitely notice an improvement in endurance with the longer SS work.
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I’m jumping whole hog into sweet spot. I had a plan on the calendar from months ago that had short power build on it. I got through the first half, and just didnt have the heart tk endure the second half with no racing on the calendar yet. So I’m diaing down the intensity a bit, and going to focus on jacking my FTP up. Just started SSB high volume.
I’ve responded well to sweet spot before, but never have done this much before. Just did antelope this morning…and man it is soooooo much less stressful than trying to bang out a short powet build workout. Maybe I’m getting too old (41) or something for short power.
Also…I just enjoy sweet spot more. It’s uncomfortable…but I can push that into thr back of my head and enjoy the feeling of going fast on a bike, or just watch a movie or something on the trainer. . VO2 or 50/40s…it’s just PAIN lol.
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+1 on this. One complaint I have with the standard SSB HV plans is that some of the sessions have very long recovery intervals. There are variations of Hunter that have rest intervals over 10 minutes. I like a little rest as much as the next guy, but if I’m not ready for the next SS interval after a 5 minute rest, I’m not going to be ready after 10 minutes. I really question whether anything longer then ~3 minutes is helpful. I always struggle getting the engine going again after a 5+ minute break.
I did Juneau -1 tonight which has 2 minute “mini” breaks within the intervals, but 7 minute breaks between interval sets. I found the first interval of each set (after the 7 minute rest) felt harder as I had to get back in the groove and get my HR back up. The 2nd interval of each set actually felt a little easier (and resulted in a little higher power) because the 2 minute break is a nice break, but not enough to cool down.
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Had similar thoughts doing Hunter yesterday. I found it harder than it should have, and decided the 15 minute rest periods were too long … not that i skipped ahead and shortened them though! Makes for a very long workout for 3x20 of SS
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1 answer i’m still looking for is how does the training peaks compare to a progression more akin to let’s say SBHM with shorter intervalls but more overall time spent at sweet spot?
E.g. how does a 4x20 compare to a 9x10?
If i do want to add volume to my workout am i always better of adding time to my intervalls compared to spending more time overall in the intended zone by adding extra intervalls?
As far as I remember from this episode of empirical cycling podcast, 10 minutes is the minimal interval lenght of threshold to make your cellls “uncomfortable” and elicit some adaptations. With SS 10 minutes is probably too short interval time as they were referring to threshold work.
60x1 min was told gives you something like 25% of 1x60 min. So basically longer is always better but then is the matter of recovery.
Which is interesting if you look at how popular of a workout Antelope is with tr users.
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I agree - with 20 min SS intervals more than 5 minutes is too long in my opinion.
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That is why I started to do custom workouts as I find the steady work in TR a little too easy. Since that workouts like 4x20@90% I treat as a recovery ride, my FTP went 50W up in 4 months and everything is better on the bike. I was doing threshold progression and there are no workouts like 2x30 at threshold that is why workout creator has become my best friend 
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Yeah, Tim likes to keep the number of intervals down and the durations up.
I know this was an old post but a good one.
Personally I try to keep mine in the 2 - 5 minute region. So I agree.
If I need more recovery, either my FTP is going in the wrong direction, the intervals are too long (progressed to quickly / targeted too much TiZ) or I’m targeting to closed to FTP ~92 - 95% and on that day I am actual doing Threshold intervals (by mistake.)
It worked out well for what I wanted - 1. Improve my ability/comfort to grind out long climbs and 2. make my training more sustainable.
On #1, I live in Colorado and have a lot of long climbs where I’m grinding at low cadence. I’m stronger this year than last - in particular towards the end of longer climbs. Note: in every workout, I did at least a portion of the workout at lower cadence e.g. 70rpm.
On #2, I was able to do more Indoor sessions on my SS progression than the TR workouts in the low volume plans. For example, SS base 2 and sustained power build have a lot of threshold workouts with shorter intervals. My longer (20+ mins) lower intensity (85-90%) intervals were more sustainable for me (while still getting the TSS).
My FTP increased by about 4% over 12 weeks (as measured by the TR ramp test). That’s neither impressive, nor unusual for me. The main difference I noticed was my comfort level on long climbs improved. I didn’t consistently set new PRs on climbs - so I wasn’t faster across the board vs prior years (overall about the same), but I felt a lot less wiped by the end of the climb (separate note - the max HR I see during climbs has also come down vs prior years, while still riding as fast).
I was hoping to do some long races this year (6-10 hours) and see how I did vs prior years, but they all got cancelled.
I have a 150 mile gravel ride with 12k feet of climbing next weekend - that’ll be a good test vs. last time.
For future years training, I’ll do similar - Modify the TR plans to replace their workouts that have shorter threshold intervals, with workouts that have longer SS intervals.
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I do 4 min rest intervals between SS work intervals. If the work interval is more like a threshold interval, I need longer rest intervals.
For sweetspot, if it’s really sweet spot, you don’t need anything more than a minute or two. You might not even NEED to stop or break it up into intervals at all, except maybe for a mental break, crack open a gel, take a swig of sports drink.
TR might be adding those longer rest intervals not because they are necessary but rather as a backdoor way to getting more zone 2 endurance into your legs.
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for ya’ll who have done a sweet spot progression long-term, how has it worked out for you?
I have had big gains in sustainable power in the past from doing tempo and sweet spot, even back before sweetspot was really a thing and power meters all cost a LOT of money. But they didn’t continue year over year.
I think a reason is that i have a pretty high glycolitic capacity, so can make big initial gains by training those fast twitch muscles to act more oxidatively.
But once that taps out, that’s basically it, and i think i find that i might have been better off working on overall aerobic capacity vs. training the fast twitch.
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This is exactly how I did my early season base. I really found a lot of benefit from longer-duration SS interval workouts (3x15, 2x25, 3x20, 2x30, etc). Even 1x60 isn’t that bad.
For me, there’s way more to be gained from doing longer intervals. Especially when it comes to real-world riding.
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This is important. The recovery length can impact the effectiveness of the prior and subsequent work. FastLabs had a recent podcast episode with Sebastian Weber. It’s worth a listen because it hits on this very observation.
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This is because it’s a prescribed (not self selected) workout and it’s easy in terms of an introduction to Sweet Spot work.
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Sure is included in a TON of popular plans, which means it will get lots of use:
