The last two weeks have felt a little low energy, and so going into this week, I wanted to try a little harder, and do a little better. As such I took a Sweet Spot Training session as my first activity of this week. Surprisingly, or maybe not, this was my first SST session since early February.
In my head I already knew I was going to do an SST session a good few hours before I got on the bike. It’s a hard workout, but not killer. As the little info blurb says inside Zwift:
Sweet Spot Training (or SST for short) will give great bang for buck. Training at around 90 percent of your threshold (aka the Sweet Spot) is useful because you can spend quite a bit of time there without building up undue amounts of training stress. You can do this workout as much as you’d like and watch your FTP rise over time.
And in the past I have taken this to mean that I can do this session day after day, and I shouldn’t end up wearing myself out. Which isn’t to say that after the session I don’t feel fully worked out. I definitely do.
Anyway, when I got on Zwift and selected the workout I saw I’d be doing four repeats of 5 mins at 225w (or 3.4w/kg), and then 5 mins at 210w (or 3.2w/kg), and I relaxed a little. That sounded do-able.
A while back I did an SST session where something went wrong and I ended up absolutely slaughtering myself during the ride, to the point where I couldn’t finish the final five minute block. That kinda put the willys up me ever since.
All in all, though, I enjoyed this one. It felt good to put in a proper workout, and a controlled one at that. With all the outdoor riding I’ve been doing, getting a really efficient workout in any given hour has been impossible, and I’d forgotten just how beneficial these types of steady rides can be.
One other thing I liked about this session was that I’d done a decent amount of calories inside the hour. Or to put it another way, I’d burned more in 50 minutes than I’ve recently been doing in >1 hour. And God knows I do love efficiency.
The question now is: do I do another SST session tomorrow, or should I do an AR type session, and then another SST ride on Thursday? I’m kinda wanting to do it again, and see how I feel. Over the last few weeks I’ve slacked off, so I feel I was on fresh legs. I wonder if doing it back to back would have me regretting my life choices by the end of block one?
