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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!
I would also add that bike packing would be hella good/fun affffffter your A race event when #FtFP’ing isn’t as important since your goals have already been met!
For example, I’ll be bike packing this Fall after all my goal events. And if you take a mid-season break - bike packing fits right into that approach - enjoy!
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!
I would recommend you doing as much sweet spot as you can in 2 hours. Maybe you could get a total of 60 minutes of sweet spot. We never recommend you doing 4 hours indoors. I guess unless you were only 3 - 4 weeks from an A race that was endurance based. But even than it would be a lot to ask.
Here is a great thread on this very subject:
Indoor training:
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.