Finding Your Sweet Spot

A very special thank you to one of our athletes Amy Moritz, who is not only a triathlete but a sportswriter from the Buffalo News. I grew up in Buffalo and I was honored to be interviewed by Amy for the second article in her triathlon series. Read here. And thank you Amy!

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A year ago I took a class from Hunter Allen, author of "Training With Power", where I learned from the man himself all about power, power meters, and being a power head. If you have never trained with power, it really is a terrific and fun way to train.

Before I continue, the statements I am about to make are very simplified. To truly understand power take a class and do some research. Google training with power, or better yet, Google Scholar it. To appropriately define and explain power.... could take all day long!

Back to power.......

Towards the end of the seminar (which was about 8 hours long) I started to feel lost as equations and mathematics swirled through my mind. It took me a long time to begin to process it also. Enter Coach Trevor Syversen, who really helped me to do that. Process Power.

Power meters are expensive, they can give you a big headache, they have a learning curve. I believe you can effectively accomplish the same thing training with other modalities. We train our athletes with what they have available to them. There are a bunch of varieties out there, Google power meters and see what you find.

It just so happens the athlete who made the biggest jump in 2007 happens to have a power meter. Everyone wanted to know what Kevin did, what was his secret.... and many began to feel inferior because they didn't own a power meter.

It was all well and good that Kevin had this device. But what others failed to realize was that it really wasn't the power that caused the improvements, it was consistent workload..... optimal stress + optimal rest = optimal progress.

Kevin has been a four year evolution. Not a one hit power meter wonder.

Coach T is really smart, smarter than I will ever be. He is a damn engineer and if you know an engineer than I have to go no further. Coach T helped me understand how power relates to me and how to best use it to help make me a better athlete.

Power for me is two fold.... in training I work in the sweet spot a lot. The goal is to raise my FTP. In races I use power to hold me back from blowing my wad.... as I have done so many times before. My uber strong bike will be back, we've quieted it down for a bit to improve my run. The culmination will happen, it's not too far away.

Working in the sweet spot / at 88-94% of your FTP is fun. What's the benefit of working in that zone? It allows you to begin to improve your Functional Threshold Power....... without doing workouts that are impossible to recover from.

"In a nutshell what it says is: Spend a lot of time training in the 85-95% range to get the best balance between Functional Threshold Power increasing training effect and recovery ability or training time."

Here is a graph by Dr. Coogan to illustrate this point:

The black line, where it peaks, that is your "sweet spot". Hard enough to be hard, but not devastating. On the trainer it makes an hour pass by quickly. It gives you something to focus on, something to measure, something to watch. As your FTP increases, so will your sweet spot.

Now we know that physiological adaptations to training take roughly 6-8 weeks if you have found your proper training load. So it is wise to retest for your FTP every 6-8 weeks. Hunter Allen has a terrific protocol on how to test in his book, which is absolutely appropriate for the trainer. However, if you are training longer distances, I would recommend the 60 minute time trial. It will give you a truer picture of what your FTP actually is.

Yes, I whine about the 60 minute time trial as well. Which is funny for a girl who has spent no less than 4 hours racing in the past several years. I do believe for indoor training that the 20 minute TT works just fine. Just think about retesting when you do hit the roads.

In my opinion Coach T says is best here, referring to all tests and exactly what we do with this data:

Just to set the baseline.... what we (or I) most want to determine from of these tests (for all Swim, Bike and Run) is your functional threshold pace (speed or power). Why? Because we know that these FT paces are a very good predictor of endurance race performance for races longer than say 15 mins. And we know that the best way to improve FT is to train at FT.

FT is defined as the Power, Speed, Pace that you can hold for about an hour (for bike and run) and 30 mins for swimming.

So the most accurate way to determine your FT for each sport is to give it your best evenly paced shot for each sport for those times.

However there's been shorter tests developed based approximations, rules of thumb and experience to obtain quicker results or reduce the stress on athletes. But like all approximations they can and will be skewed for several reasons.... athletes motivation, athletes training specificity ( i.e. training long and slow for a marathon and we make them run a 5K for a test), athletes level of fatigue, athletes pacing ability....etc. That's all.

So if one test is done we just have to check and recheck to make sure the result makes sense. I don't have a problem with the shorter tests but we have to keep the factors above in mind so we know we have the most accurate data available.

Training with power is fun, it is effective. Just like any training program, whether it be heart rate based, even perceived exertion based, it works only if a few things happen;

• You have to train consistently
• You have to train with purpose (easy days easy, hard days hard)
• Optimal Stress + Optimal Recovery = Optimal Progress
• You have to have good form and technique
• You have to commit to your goals and your training program.

You can't have one without the other. Have all of that, and it won't matter what device you use. You will see the improvements in the results.