Too Many Sweet Spot Cycling Intervals

Full post here that includes the benefits, and issues, with Too Many Sweet Spot Intervals.

https://www.evoq.bike/blog/2019/1/11/...

00:00 Welcome to EVOQ.BIKE
00:20 How To Use Sweet Spot Intervals
00:42 What is the Sweet Spot Zone
01:20 Sweet Spot Heavy Plans
02:23 Problem with Sweet Spot Workout
04:35 Plateau
05:13 Not a Replacement for the Long Ride
06:10 Avoiding Hard Intervals
07:37 Burnout - So Common!

Why Do Sweet Spot Cycling

Let’s first ask, “Why Should I Do Sweet Spot Intervals In Cycling?”

Sweet Spot provides many of the adaptations that Threshold Intervals or FTP Cycling Intervals provide, but there’s less fatigue and stress on the body. It’s the balance between intensity and volume, since most athletes can do more sweet spot than threshold, because the stress it is less than threshold cycling intervals.

The physiological gains that are made with sweet spot cycling are increased plasma volume, increased mitochondrial enzymes (power!), increased lactate threshold, and increased glycogen storage. These are all very important to cycling success, but your body will stop adapting to the training stress if this is all that you do!

Sweet Spot allows you to push out how long you can ride at a high intensity, which will allow you to last longer in the break during a road race of your peers, but also in races where you are “racing up”, versus more talented riders. That being said, take heed, that if you are racing faster people, do NOT expect sweet spot cycling to keep you in the mix; you will definitely need threshold bursts and max aerobic / vo2max cycling intervals to stick around and not get dropped.

The big key is that you can recover faster from these efforts, which allows you to do more of them in a week, which has created this craze and overprescription of sweet spot.

The Problem With Too Much Sweet Spot Cycling

1) Use sweet spot intervals to make those aerobic cycling gains mentioned above, but remember that there is higher fatigue associated with these, and you can easily plateau a few months down the road. The thing that is awful about plateaus is that it’s hard to see what’s going wrong. You’re doing this pretty hard sessions, but no more gains are occurring, so you’re left scratching your head with what to do.

2) Sweet Spot intervals are not a replacement for the long ride, where you get tired simply from the duration. No, your long ride doesn’t have to be 250 miles, and neither is ours. But a ride of 4+ hours is extremely beneficial and necessary if you want to take your game to the next level.

3) Sweet Spot cycling feels hard enough, so we avoid the much harder threshold work. We still need to add on threshold work for increased aerobic adaptations at your FTP max, while also learning how to mentally pin it and mentally push through at 100-105% FTP, which truly pushes the FTP up after you’ve made beginner gains from Sweet Spot intervals.

4) Too much repetition leads to mental burn out. This one is so common on the sweet spot heavy internet plans. I’ve done almost 300 Power File Analyses now for people around the country and UK (our biggest blog readership is from the USA and UK), and everyone that has done the 3+ times a week sweet spot cycling plan says the same thing over and over again: “I made gains for a few months, and now I’ve plateaued, and honestly don’t want to get on the bike.”

This point #4 can go for any energy system: if one day of VO2Max is great, 4 is NOT better!

Vary your training up and you’ll make more gains that way. Do it in a progressive or block periodized manner and you’ll stay fresher and sharper than just repeating the same intervals at the same intensity over and over and over again.

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Let’s Crush,
Brendan

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