When doing sweet spot intervals, is there a benefit to being on the higher end of the sweet spot range? For example, if I could do 5 x 10 @ 95% of FTP or 6 x 10 @ 88%, would one of those be better? They both end up with roughly the same TSS, but I’m curious as to whether the harder intervals might have some other intrinsic benefit.
I know this is getting way into the minutiae of training, but I’m an economist, so that’s how my brain works…
You are going to get the same physiological gains by riding at the top end compared to low end. But there would be slightly more gains to be made at the higher end. Since it is a relatively small range it is not much. But if you get comfortable riding at 95% of your FTP come race day and you are pushing lets say your FTP it’s going to feel much closer to where you were training at than say 88%.
The important thing when doing intervals like this is completing each effort strong. You don’t wan the last effort to be at the low end or just below because you went out too hard. Or extra fatigue built up to where it makes the next day workout too hard. But most likely that won’t happen with sweet spot riding and that is one the many benefits of riding in sweet spot. Just the ability to recovery from each effort and day to day. Also you though you don’t want to be holding yourself back by just riding at the lower end. This because more important when you are doing Vo2 max and anaerobic efforts, i.e. Full Gas Efforts. Push yourself.