![Cycling workout of the week #11: Sweetspot blocks [1hr] – AKA ‘the best bang for your buck’ training](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/4ryhWaHnYThD9aeTapR3Y4-1200-80.jpg "Cycling workout of the week #11: Sweetspot blocks [1hr] – AKA ‘the best bang for your buck’ training")
Sweetspot has often been referred to as “the best bang for your buck”. It allows us to accumulate the greatest amount of training stress in the least amount of time in a sustainable way. With this session, you are really making the most of the time you spend working on a turbo trainer.
Working close, but not above, critical power means that the effort is sustainable for periods of up to one hour. It is also useful to improve our pain threshold.
After a 10-minute warm-up, you’ll be sitting at the sweet spot (88-92 percent Critical Power) for 15 minutes. Then it’s an easy 10 minutes before repeating the 15-minute sweet spot block.
The training
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Golden Rule
It’s important with these efforts to start with the right intensity and not go too hard. For the first five to ten minutes, this effort will generally feel quite sustainable, but as the duration of the effort continues, the rate of perceived exertion is likely to increase. Try and hold a cycling cadence 85 to 95 rpm while keeping your body stable and your breathing controlled.
simply explained
Sweetspot is a level that is top cycling training zone three and bottom zone four when using a six or seven zone power model. You may also hear it referred to as an effort between ‘tempo’ and ‘threshold’.
Using physiological domains, it is the region just below and around Critical Power, in the high intensity domain. This means that theoretically the stress can be maintained almost indefinitely as long as fuel is consumed and heat stress is controlled.
It is often used as a cycling workout to pack a large amount of training stress into a short period of time. For example, when we only have an hour available to train due to other commitments.
Let’s get excited…
(Image credit: Future)
Physiologically, this session causes a lot of training stress and can also be useful for cyclists with little time to improve their fitness. Exposure to a high level of training stress is useful for gains in aerobic training, including mitochondrial biogenesis and angiogenesis.
Another benefit of working out at this intensity is that it relies heavily on fueling carbohydrates over a long period of time, so it can help improve our ability to break down and use carbohydrates at a higher rate.
However, it must be balanced with different training stimuli and a problem with sweet spot training is that it is often overprescribed, which can result in a fitness plateau due to the lack of variation in the stimuli.
Another benefit of sweet spot training is that it improves our resistance to pain while cycling at an intensity very close to threshold. This is hugely beneficial if you’re making a long-range attack in a road race, as you’d like to maintain sweet spot intensity for the entirety of that breakaway.
Even if you’re just aiming to complete what is usually a two-hour loop on your local roads as quickly as possible, probably the fastest way to get there is at sweet spot intensity. This is because the effort will be sustainable as long as enough fuel is fed at all times, but it won’t be so hard as to cause a higher level of fatigue that can’t be sustained for two hours.
Sunny? What if…
(Image credit: Future)
These efforts are fairly easy to complete outdoors, whether it’s up a climb or a long stretch of road. The intensity should be maintainable on steady descents, but it will be important that you find a stretch of road that isn’t too technical and doesn’t have too many junctions to negotiate. Just make sure you’ve brought enough food and drink, especially if you’re doing a longer version of the cycling workout that’s longer than 90 minutes.
Looking for another? What if…
– Cycling Workout of the Week #1: 20/40s [50 mins]
– Cycling Workout Week #3: MAP Effort (Maximal Aerobic Power) [1hr 5 mins]
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