How much sweetspot is too much?

1 Use sweetspot intervals to make those aerobic gains, but remember that fatigue will result and you can easily plateau a few months down the road – and may leave you scratching your head. Sometimes going harder into VO2MAX is the answer, but other times it means taking a break.

2 Sweetspot intervals are not a replacement for the long ride, where you get tired simply from the duration. No, your long ride doesn’t have to be 120 miles, but a ride of three to four hours, once or twice a month, is extremely beneficial and necessary if you want to take your game to the next level.

Sweetspot cycling feels hard enough, so it’s tempting to avoid the much harder threshold work. But you still need that threshold work for increased aerobic adaptations and as part of learning how to mentally ‘pin it’ at 100-105 per cent of FTP. Also, consider some over-unders, with a one-to-four ratio at 125 per cent and 90 per cent of FTP, e.g.two to three sets of 30sec ‘over’/2min ‘under’ for 12.5 minutes.

4 Too much repetition leads to mental burnout. If one workout is good, four of them is better, right!? I’ve seen far too many cyclists doing more than three sweetspot sessions a week, before telling me: “I made gains for a few months, and now I’ve plateaued.” Vary your training and you’ll make more gains, and you’ll last much longer in the sport.

5 Do sweetspot training in a progressive and periodised manner. Frank Overton from Fascat, the creator of sweetspot, commented online that, “timing is everything” urging riders to “switch from base to race” with high-intensity interval training. Sweetspot works best when applied as a progressive overload over six to 18 weeks, with two to three sessions a week.