No, I’m not talking about finding your partner’s erogenous zone!
As the graphic below illustrates, sweet spot training refers to a steady-state effort level that balances gains in fitness with fatigue. At higher effort levels, fatigue accumulates more quickly and requires more recovery, thereby preventing you from achieving an equal effort level the next day. Sweet spot workouts, in contrast, can be repeated two or three times per week without overloading yourself.
Graphic courtesy of A. Coggan.
It is important to remember that your sweet spot is defined by your functional threshold power (FTP). FTP is – by definition – the average power you can sustain for a one-hour effort.
The sweet spot is an effort level between 75 and 90 percent of your FTP.
Therefore, your sweet spot is relative to you – and to your fitness at a particular point in time. As your FTP goes up over the course of the season, your sweet spot will go up as well. So, if your current FTP is 290 watts, your sweet spot would fall between 220 watts and 261 watts.
If you’re not using a power meter, or haven’t yet determined your FTP, then the sweet spot can generally be described as a tempo or high tempo effort. In HR terms, it falls between zones 3 and 4 on a 5-zone scale. If you do the efforts at the high end of the range, they will be uncomfortable but not unbearable.
The ubiquitous “2 x 20 minute” workout is specifically targeted at the sweet spot. By breaking the effort into chunks, with a short (less than 5 minute) recovery in between, you avoid boredom and still achieve a high-quality workout.
More on sweet spot training can be found in Allen & Coggan’s book Training and Racing With a Powermeter and on the TrainingPeaks website.
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