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Sweet spot is roughly 88 to 94 per cent of FTP: hard enough to drive real adaptation, easy enough that you can do a lot of it and back up the next day. It suits indoor training particularly well because it needs steady, controlled power, which is exactly what a turbo is good at.
Sweet spot sits just below your threshold: around 88 to 94 per cent of FTP, sometimes described as "comfortably hard". You can talk in short sentences but would rather not. It is sustainable for long blocks but you are definitely working.
The appeal is the ratio. It produces much of the aerobic benefit of threshold work for considerably less fatigue, so you can do more of it and recover in time to do it again.
It suits indoors for a simple reason: it demands steady, controlled power with no coasting, which is hard to achieve on British roads and effortless on a turbo. Outdoors, junctions and hills constantly interrupt it. Indoors, you just hold the number.
Warm up for ten to fifteen minutes easy before each, and finish with five to ten minutes easy.
2 x 10 minutes at 88-90% FTP, 5 minutes easy between. About 45 minutes in total. A good first sweet spot session.
3 x 12 minutes at 88-92% FTP, 4 minutes easy between. About an hour. The bread-and-butter session for most of a winter.
2 x 20 minutes at 90-94% FTP, 6 minutes easy between. About 70 minutes, and a proper piece of work. Build to this rather than starting here.
Two sweet spot sessions a week is plenty for most people, with easier riding around them. Three is possible in a focused block but is a lot, and it is the point at which people tend to dig a hole.
The caveat worth stating plainly: sweet spot is popular partly because it is convenient, and it is easy to end up doing nothing else. A diet composed entirely of moderately hard riding leaves you quite good at moderately hard riding and not much else. Keep some genuinely easy riding and some genuinely hard, short work in the mix.
If you are training for something specific, a coach will structure this far better than a web page can.
Roughly 88 to 94 per cent. The boundaries are conventions rather than physiological cliffs, so do not agonise over a couple of per cent.
Not sensibly. Two sessions a week with easier riding around them is a reasonable load for most people.
It works well, because the main risk is drifting below target as you tire and ERG removes that possibility.
That is the problem we are actually trying to solve. Turbo Trainer Games turns your watts into the controls of a browser game — your power flies the aircraft, climbs the mountain, pulls the sledge. Nothing to install, and it works with a smart trainer you already own.
It is in closed testing at the moment, so there is nothing to play yet. But you can put your name down.
Ask for early access