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It’s December 31st, which means next year is upon us and thoughts are quickly shifting towards the race season. What are you doing to ensure an improvement over last year? What kind of training are you doing? Are you just winging it? There’s a certain combo of art and science to the base building phase of a training calendar, and in Coach Frank’s extensive experience of coaching cyclists he’s come up with a healthy dose of each to help you go faster. What’s the key component? Sweet spot training.
We’ve talked about sweet spot a lot on the show and it’s weaved into almost everything FasCat does, but this week on the last episode of the year, Coach Frank breaks down how and why you should be incorporating sweet spot training into your plan to build a bigger and better base for 2020. He’ll cover:
- What is Base Training?
- Why Sweet Spot is Better than Zone 2 for Base Training
- Power Based Sweet Spot Metrics – Quantitate the SIZE of your base
- How many weeks to Sweet Spot?
- What training plans to do to get your Sweet Spot on
- What Sweet Spot base Building looks like day-to-day in a training plan
And plenty more. Also, for even more sweet spot nerdiness check out our youTube channel and video training tip on Why Sweet Spot training is better than Zone 2.
You may also find the Fatigue Dependent Training Plan Design tip a helpful read.
As always, thanks to everyone for subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, your support this year has been incredible! We’re extremely grateful, and excited about what’s to come in 2020. Now get training!
Yeah that sounds like a good plan. Need to get that base in and good to hit up an interval plan that is specific to your events.
I would take a week rest with some light riding and then you can hit up 18 weeks of sweet spot for your summer training. Then you can do specific interval training to lead into your second goal event.
18 week sweet spot
If for some reason if your goal event was cyclocross we have summer specific cyclocross plans that would work great!
While I’d love to win SBT GRVL and RPI, that really isn’t in the cards; but I’d like to be fast and have fun at both. That said, what you answered above helps and was right along with my thinking. I really appreciate the feedback and dedication y’all show to all athletes here. Keep it up!
Remember right now you want to work on aerobic fitness. You could get a ton of TSS by just doing lots of sprints and anaerobic work, but that wouldn’t help build the aerobic engine that the sweet spot plan is mostly geared towards. So that is why I said stick to mostly sweet spot which is the most advance aerobic work you can do.
I’ll have my kids by myself every other weekend and will be on Zwift. I try to set my schedule up so that I have Thursday and Sunday off so technically I only need to do one ride while they are home. Others can be during lunch hour after workout.
When indoors and they are here I will do 2 hours, maybe 3. But it’s all sweet spot focused. Getting as much TSS as possible. I try to find a good Zwift event to do that helps the time go by faster. Or pick a route where it has several of the longer climbs. Then do climbs at sweet spot and recover between. Bottom to top efforts. This helps avoiding to look at a timer.
Then the weekends I don’t have them I do the longer endurance rides. I also set up my schedule so that one of the weekends I have them it’s a regent riot that week.
So basically it comes down to planning.
Thanks Jake, great feedback. Will focus on maximising TSS using sweet spot when making those minor changes to suit family life.
I tend to get a bit carried away during Zwift events - being diligent and staying in sweet spot definitely easier for me using the long climb approach you mention. Good time to listen to fascat podcasts!
Cheers
M