@stetzphoto

Well, it was certainly a doozy this morning. It was back to sweet spot efforts this time around with more than 30 minutes of effort in this compact 60-minute workout. I knew it was going to be good for me but it would be a bit like eating cauliflower ( good for you in the end, but not great going down).

Sweetspot is one of the most effective workouts for raising threshold power, which is key to the kind of sustain efforts that triathlon demands. Whether your goals are sprints or ironman, and anything in between, it’s a good idea to include Sweetspot into your regular trainer workouts.

This exact workout this morning had was a grab bag of different ways to work on that sweet spot zone between 85-95% of your FTP. The first block was alternating minutes cadence changes of 88% of FTP. With 1 minute of 100 RPM followed by 1 minute of 60 RPM. I enjoy these little tasks within an interval, it gives you something else to focus on beyond the pure wattage numbers. Block number 2 was a brutal 15 minutes of alternating 2 minutes at 94% and 3 minutes of 88% FTP three times. There were no fun tasks here. It was just hard. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty crushed for our third block of the morning. It was a progressive build from 75% to 90% of FTP over 12 minutes. I was especially thankful for those first few minutes, combined with the actual rest period I almost felt recovered by the time things got tough.

10 minute warmup to 75% FTP
1x 30 sec at 95% FTP
30 sec recover
1 x 30 sec at 105% FTP
30 sec recovery
1 x 30 sec at 115% FTP
30 sec recovery
2 minutes easy

5 X
1 min at 88% FTP (100RPM)
1 min at 88 % FTP (60 RPM)

2 minutes easy

3X
2 minutes at 94% FTP
3 minutes at 88% FTP

2 minutes easy

12 minutes progression from 75% to 90% of FTP
5 minutes cool down

The progressive interval was like a slow boil, I felt like a frog being slowly cooked. It was especially the case with the CycleOps H2. With a regular trainer, you would have to rely on yourself to progresssively up the effort. But with Erg mode on you slowly and slowly have the wattage ramped up to it’s peak. Now with limited blood flow going to the brain at this point in the workout it would be easy to jump up to high or stay too low. But with the new generation of smart trainers progression intervals are much easier to execute.

@stetzphoto

Knowing myself the temptation to cheat on these intervals would have loomed large on a regular trainer. So despite the difficult workout I was happy to have a trainer that pushed me to finish the workout the way it was written. And I know as we move through the winter I’ll come out in the spring being that much stronger.