How To Train At Sweet Spot For Cycling | Triathlon Training Explained

You may have used sweet spot workouts in your training before, but do you know what it’s doing? Or, how to use it to it’s best advantage? Mark answers these questions and gives you 3 sweet spot workouts to try!

Sweet Spot - as the name suggests, this refers to a specific training intensity that aims to deliver the ultimate ‘bang for your buck’, where the training effort and volume are ideally structured for maximum physiological gains. This makes the idea of sweet spot training particularly appealing to triathletes with limited time for training.

But to work out this sweet spot intensity we need to know our Functional Threshold Power, or FTP for short. This is our best sustained effort for 60 minutes, essentially our Lactate Threshold, the point at which lactate begins to accumulate in the blood faster than it can be flushed out.

So, knowing our FTP, we can work out our training zones. Our sweet spot is the area just above tempo and just below threshold. It kind of crosses into the upper Z3 and lower end of Z4, when using the Dr Andy Coggan 7 Zone system. It’s defined as being between 84% to 94% of our FTP or 75% to 85% of our maximum heart rate.

If you’re riding by feel, your sweet spot is ‘moderately hard’ - it’s a tough but sustainable tempo just short of your upper threshold.
You might be able to hold a short conversation with your riding mates, but to be honest, you’ll probably want to save your breath for the effort.

The beauty of sweet spot training is that it has the same physiologically benefits and promotes the same adaptations as doing threshold, but it’s far less taxing on the body you can do more of it and recovery quicker from it.

Have a go at the workouts in this video and let us know how your get on in the comments below 👇

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[gtn]

Do you include sweet spot training in your weekly training plan?

[adrianmarsh]

Nice to see you got me in the video at 2:55. Thanks GTN and GCN

[EricAbbottTri]

I love how sweet spot covers the top of my tempo and the bottom of my LT so I can you the sweet spot for just about any workout I do.

[wadewitbooi]

I love these sessions. I find that a 10min foam roll to be the cherry on top

[owenhexley]

Great video, I will add this to my training

[santhoshsmile]

Nice video.. should we have to keep in mind any specific cadence for this workout?

[mustaphab.]

Yet another great video, thanks mates

[dnomyarsamoht]

Can you compare aerodynamics and comfort of cervelo P5x vs. Diamondback Andean or other top triathlon bikes?

[lashramtinilam]

How much of these should we do in a week?

[jakobwk]

Great instructional video. I really enjoy many of your videos but I also miss a few more scientific approaches to the training video, especially data driven videos that actually shows improvement (as promised in this video). I know that makes the video-recording and planning a bit more time consuming but there are many instructional training videos and only few of them actually uses data to prove their point. So please - if you can find the time - include som data in your video. Best wishes!

[shawnberry]

How much time do you allow between sweet spot sessions?? A week? 2 weeks?

[goop]

I just got a used tri bike for a spectacular price, and it's the same size as my road bike. I slammed the stem as far as it would go only to find that I need to go 3-4cm lower to be a position I would like. Any ideas?

[evanmacdougall]

Is there an easy-ish way to work out our FTP or Sweetspot using RPE or HRM without having a power meter?

[travismcgarry]

I see you've flipped your bars after the James Cunnama interview..

[antonabuzeid]

Can this training be done on rollers that have no resistance?

[taufikabidin]

I wonder why triathlon bike don't put the brakes on the aerobar and just delete that "wing". Mechanical groupsets could also put the STI shifters on the aero bars. Shouldn't that be more aero?

[trbeyond]

If I can hit 3x30’ at sweet spot, I know I’m 70.3 race ready!