Zwift Workout of the Week: Spaded Sweetie

by

Wew, tough one today. Tougher than I expected.

Spaded Sweetie was the name of today’s workout, but the graphics below come from Whats On Zwift. If you don’t know that site, it’s by far the best place to find workouts – both built in, and custom ones you can download and import.

The Spaded Sweetie starts off with a 15 minute warm up to prime the engines and ready the mind. Then, we move into a spade interval set starting off very hard, but short, and gradually reducing the intensity while upping the time… Only to go back up again! From there, we will move into a progressive over/under sweet spot interval featuring changes in cadence and intensity that culminates in a 1min FULL GAS effort! This is a tough workout, but feautures a lot of quality time at VO2 and threshold.

Spaded Sweetie at Whats On Zwift

The interesting difference between Zwift and WhatsOnZwift is that you can find out the stress points via WhatsOnZwift, whereas Zwift themselves just tell you a rating out of 5.

So to give some context:

And:

  • Zwift rates the Spaded Sweetie session at 4/5
  • WhatsOnZwift rates the Spaded Sweetie at 75 stress points

An SST session is 50 minutes, whereas Spaded Sweetie was 57 minutes.

In theory this one should be more challenging than an SST session, but you get more time to complete the session… so does that balance it out at all?

I’d say the best way to go into this workout is to know a few things up front.

Firstly, it’s best to break the workout down into three sections.

Why three?

Well, the graph makes this workout look like two sections – so that was what I was expecting.

There’s the initial warm up that’s standard on most Zwift workouts. I don’t include that bit.

The first block of anaerobic work which is the 150 / 135 / 120 / 135 / 150 percentages above FTP.

Then there’s the more pronounced second big block of increasing threshold into VO2 Max blocks.

However, I’d split that last interval from the first four as it’s the hardest of the lot, in my opinion, for a bunch of reasons.

Taking that first block of Anaerobic work, that’s still kind of a warm up. The thing that caught me out on that block was the middle / third of the five efforts. For me that was 1min @ 110rpm, 294W which is somewhat skewed because of the way ERG seems to work on Zwift.

By this I mean on the very short efforts – 15 seconds – there’s a loss of maybe 5 seconds whilst the turbo trainer registers that sudden dramatic increase in power. Whilst it adjusts, you get something of a freebie. Spin fast enough (and it wanted 110rpm) and it takes even longer for the software to stabilise.

What that results in is a 15 second interval really only feels hard for 10 seconds. And you can do anything for 10 seconds – it’s over in a blink.

Of course on a 1 minute effort you’re doing ~55 seconds work, and anything over FTP is going to stretch you. Or at least, it does with me. So yeah, that was when I first thought… eh up, maybe this one isn’t going to be a cake walk.

With a decent amount of recovery in between these first efforts – 1min @ 85rpm, 123W – whilst they were above FTP they were also very manageable. Also, they were the first efforts… so always both physically and mentally easier to swallow.

The real meat of the workout came in that second section.

There were so many little chops and changes in today’s workout at that even after we’d got into that second block, the sidebar still said there were +8 more that couldn’t yet be displayed. Fun times.

Each block followed a pattern of a short endurance block, then a ‘ramp’ up for 30 seconds into the 4 minute threshold effort. After those four enjoyable minutes had passed then it was straight into 1 hard minute at 105% FTP.

Strangely, this final minute was probably easier than the final minute of the 4 minute block. One thing I find is that towards the end of a steady effort my legs are desperate to spin harder and faster. Perhaps I lack control, but I ‘enjoy’ the release. And again, there’s that high RPM / ERG delay that saps a few precious seconds off any intensity change.

A couple of little ‘pro tips’ I’d throw in for this one, if you do end up doing it, are as follows.

  1. For each of the endurance / recovery-ish blocks you get between the 4 minute efforts, you actually get +15 seconds more than what it tells you.
    For example, if it says 1min @ 85rpm, 65% FTP, you get 1m 15 seconds at that intensity as the 30 second ramp blocks are not ramps at all. That leads me on to the second tip;
  2. Between each recovery-ish block and the 4 minute effort, you allegedly get 30sec from 65 to 96% FTP.
    This is not a ramp.
    It’s a step.
    Which is to say that you have 15 seconds at 65%, and then a hard jump to 96%.

There are only two other things I wanted to cover from this one before I wrap up.

Firstly, the final 1min @ 58rpm, from 104 to 120% FTP is wrong. You are at 115rpm for the whole thing… not sure where that RPM value comes from.

Secondly, that final 4 minutes block is hard. It’s not impossible, but it’s a full on challenge.

As I said above, anything over FTP is hard.

After already doing a bunch of work, saving the two hardest efforts right to the end is both mentally and physically taxing. For all the subsequent efforts the 1 minute block at the end of each is 1min @ 105rpm, 105% FTP.

For the final 4 minute effort you are at 105% FTP, though thankfully ‘allowed’ to remain at 95%.

The one saving grace is the recovery between each of the blocks does grow as the workout progresses. You start with just 15 seconds after the first block, but by the last you are up to 2 minutes. And I needed them.

What I do like about workouts like this is they are never boring.

With so much happening over the course of the hour, even though the work is challenging the session passes relatively quickly. Much more so than simply sitting at 160w for 9 minutes, over and over.

My thoughts after this was that yes, Zwift’s abstract 4/5 score is probably accurate. You can get into the nitty gritty, but on a simple scale this felt roughly in line with my usual SST efforts. Different, but equally challenging.

I’d be interested to find one that is rated as 5/5. Not that I wish to do that. The thought did cross my mind several times during this one… and the only thing I can think that’s 5/5 on my scale is an FTP test.

Leave a comment