Sweet spot
Sweet spot is the intensity just below your threshold — hard enough to push your threshold up, easy enough to stay there for quite a while. It is popular because you get relatively much training stimulus for relatively little recovery cost.
What is sweet spot?
Sweet spot sits, in the common breakdown, between tempo and threshold: just below the effort you can still hold under control for a long time. For cycling, around 88 to 94 percent of your FTP — your threshold power — is often quoted. It feels "hard but doable": you breathe deeply and in control, talking works in short sentences, and after a block of ten to twenty minutes you are tired but not wrecked.
The appeal is in the ratio between return and cost. Just above your threshold fatigue rises fast and you need days to recover; just below it you hold far more minutes and it costs you considerably less. For anyone with limited time, that is an efficient way to move your threshold and your durability upward.
How do you train sweet spot — and when not?
The classic form is a block session: after an easy warm-up, two to four blocks of ten to twenty minutes in the band, with a few minutes of easy recovery in between. On the bike you steer on watts, running on pace or heart rate. Finishing a long endurance ride with a short sweet-spot block is another common variant: you place the stimulus on tired legs without making the whole session heavy.
The trap is that sweet spot trains too pleasantly. Because it stops just short of wrecking you, it tempts you into the same middling intensity every session — and then your training goes grey: your easy endurance work gets too hard, your hard work too soft, and the sharp VO2max stimuli never happen. Sweet spot is a means to a specific end, not a default intensity. Keep the majority of your hours genuinely easy and leave room for the occasional truly hard session.
How Trimetra personalises this
Trimetra plans sweet-spot work as one of several quality stimuli, with watt bands built on your own FTP — as a standalone block session or as a short finish to a long endurance ride. Whether such a session fits on a given day is not decided by a fixed weekly template but by your load build-up and your recovery signals; if the build-up is too steep or your recovery points the wrong way, the stimulus moves. The app also rotates within the same physiological need, so sweet spot does not become your only quality session.
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