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Re: Sweet spot only for a half? [buzz]
buzz wrote:
I'm curious about this, and it extends to my confusion in general about sweet spot and HR/power/RPE......I can 100% do it, but I'd have to dial back for a day or two before, and fuel/hydrate properly, and dig deep, a race level effort.

Or is the sort of thing I should be able to get up from my desk and just bang out......?

...confusion I have about sweetspot, which I mostly identify by RPE/HR, my power is different from week to week, as I don't want to end up in the wrong zones. I TT at 180bpm, and I try to keep my sweetspot 150-169. .....somedays I'm at 80% of FTP, others 90. I do 3 or 4 X 20 on 2 mins rest and could do it multiple times a week. But I see articles saying SS is 95%, which confuses me.


Couple of things here and I'm going to jump around in my answer a bit, probably.

If you look at the wko/TRWPM training levels I believe tempo is 76-88% FTP, sweetspot (SS) is 88-95% and FTP is 95-105%. Physiology is on a continuum. When you're on the edge of a training level such as 93-97 or 103-107% you're working both levels

It seems that you're using your hrm to check/dictate your power efforts. The problem with that is if you live in southern AZ, FL, DC etc it's hot as fuck and/or humid right now. Why would this matter?

Your HR for the same ride is going to be 5-10-15 bpm higher than in cooler and/or drier conditions. Your cardiac drift (or decoupling if you're trying to be cool, don't be cool kids it's not cool..at all) is going to start to drift sooner and drift to a greater degree than in cooler/drier conditions due to environmental factors. Layer in caffeine, sleep or lack of, fatigue, stress etc and of course your power numbers will be different week to week if you're basing it off HR. They aren't going to be 15w different though, maybe 4-8w.

I tell my athletes power/pre then HR. The question I'd ask is do you think changing your thinking to how does my PRE/HR stack up to previous recent efforts at this power and not the other way around will lead to better results?

Think about power as what you're doing (objective observation), PRE and HR (subjective observations) as how stressful it seems. This and your power numbers will also change as duration, physiological stress, environmental stress increases. Your 30 min peak power when you've ridden for 30 min then knocked out a 30 min effort will be higher than when you're 3000 kJ & 4hr into a ride. In the latter example your partially dehydrated, glycogen depleted etc

Given that FTP is a range from ~95% -105%, remember physiology is a continuum and today's 95% may be harder/easier than tomorrow's, this is why even though it may be harder, you're still getting benefit. let's say your 95% is 250w. If you downgrade that to 85% (or around 225w) bc your hr/pre is higher than normal the question is are you still getting the same training stress? I'd argue no and I could make an argument for yes with a caveat.

No: you're targeting a workout to increase your FTP at 95% but downgrading to 85% may not be enough training stimulus to increase your ftp.You need to do work ~FTP to raise it. If you downgrade that to 85% I can argue yes bc now to do the same amount of work in kJ you've got to ride longer. That should make sense bc at ~250w you're producing more kJ per minute than at 225w. Extending duration at high levels of work is a very powerful training stimulus. The question becomes which is better for raising FTP? Higher watts or longer duration? (ahh that classic exercise physiology conundrum)

The answer depends on where you are in your season, what you're trying to do/accomplish, where you're strengths/weaknesses are etc. If you can ride 2h @ 85% but only 30 min @ 95% then reducing your watts to increase FTP doesn't make sense. Increasing the amount of time you accumulate at FTP makes sense even if you're breaking that into 6x7 min of work vs 3x10 min of work.

If you can't ride 75+ min @ 85% then extending the duration or total time of SS intervals may be a very effective way to increase your ability to ride higher watts for longer. Success at half and IM racing relies on on being able to do this and not have it ding you too much on the run. You can think of the opposite of this as your classic over biking scenario.

In my years coaching the number of athletes who came to me for coaching or consults with an FTP that was too high outweighs those who had a FTP too low by at least 10 and probably 15 to 1.

Why would that be?

Shorter tests tend to lead to higher FTP numbers. The shorter the ramp test the higher the number. If you do a ramp test w/ :30 increases you're going to get a (much) higher peak wattage to calculate FTP from vs a ramp test where the ramps are 4 minutes. Most online platforms have very short tests to determine FTP.

Remember the definition of vo2max is an increase in workload with no corresponding increase in o2 consumption. o2 use plateaus. O2 utilization increases lag increases in intensity.

One thing I postulate is the reason why triathletes like SS training so much is bc their FTP is too high. Their threshold work is closer to vo2 work. If their FTP was set correctly the SS work they do is actually more like threshold work.

If you (try to) do 3x16min @ 100% FTP + 3min ez and your FTP is too high that's probably more like 3x16 where you do the first one, fail about 10-12 min in the 2nd and sooner in the third and/or need much more rest then required. That seems like a lot of failing for set that's somewhat hard yet the only reason is bc of the cumulative amount of time at FTP not the watts assigned.

I also postulate, and this seems to hold up extremely well in my athlete population when they onboard, that most people could knock ~ 10w of their FTP and see better results.

If you made it this far I hope that helps

Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

Last edited by: desert dude: Aug 10, 20 12:07

Edit Log:

  • Post edited by desert dude (Dawson Saddle) on Aug 10, 20 12:07