How to Find the Sweet Spot

How to Find the Sweet Spot

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.

Endurance Exercise - Does it makes us older, or younger?

These two articles seem to contradict one-another.

The first, by Mark Sisson, was published on Slowtwitch.com. It suggests that aerobic endurance exercise (running, cycling, triathlon) accelerates aging, as opposed to intense anaerobic exercise (weight lifting, sprinting), which allegedly slows down the aging process.

Training Is No Guarantee of Health

The second appeared on the front page of today's Washington Post.

Exercise Slows Down Aging

It reports on a study of 2,400 British twins, the results of which suggest that exercise slows down the aging process, and that the more you exercise the younger your cells appear.

I'm inclined to believe the King's College study over Sisson's half-baked theories, but that could just be me wanting to justify my lifestyle.

What do you think?

P.S. -- I won't get into Sisson's provactive statements regarding testosterone therapy, or its implications for amateur age-group athletes.

Addendum: I recently ran across a more comprehensive article on exercise and aging, courtesy of Havard Men's Health Watch.

Exercise and aging: Can you walk away from Father Time?

The bottom line is that endurance exercise, resistance exercise, flexibility training, and balance exercises all play a roll in staving off many of the effects of aging.

Remember: 40 is the new 30, and, as Mark Twain put it:

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. ~Mark Twain