I’m doing it.
Everything except two half an hour sets a week is fishwife chatter slow.
On the plus side I’ve had more conversation with my mates than I’ve had in a while
On the negative side it’s going to be a couple of months before I find out if it’s doing any good.
…and of course, you need to do quite a lot of it.
yeah, I’m getting in about 10-11 hours a week. of which 9 is ‘80’. I hope this is enough.
What were you doing before? Depending on your fitness level now & where you want to end up (knowing roughly what your times are), I’d say you’d need to be doing close to 20h every week to get a good effect from the ‘Maffetone’ method.
Based on my own experience of regular 12h weeks (16h/week peak phase for IM), with similar ‘base’ volumes, I’m not getting a quicker on that, as it’s just not enough volume; plus we’re not getting any younger.
YMMV
It’s not Maffetone though is it. It isn’t all long slow distance, it’s 80% low intensity work, which includes lower level tempo workouts (as defined by Coggan) and then up to 20% really hard work. Maffetone, as I understand it, is all effectively VT1 or below until you plateau and then start adding some intensity. If you’re doing 10-11h/wk then 2 hours of hard work is quite a lot, 2 hours that includes some hard work might not be.
IIRC Seiler also mentioned being strategic about how you spread it so you might do the high intensity work one day and the next do your longest ride/run. You start with some fatigue and that helps to promote the adaptations you want from it.
Really embracing this at the moment.
Hitting big hours now… can’t really tell if it’s working after a few weeks …?!
My heart rate monitor is stuck on 138 bpm it seems
Did a 3.8k swim PB yesterday…?! No idea!
ah ha, that is the whole reason for the switch!
I’m only doing about 9-10hours a week of easy stuff but I’ve had a really bad 18months of training with poor recovery, some definite over reaching and mixed performances as a result.
I realised I’ve been following earlier training plans that have quite a lot of intensity work and I can’t cope with it anymore (in the same way).
I think - and this is a very broad brush - it’s because I had about 3 years of very aerobic focused training (2011-2014) before I switched programme styles and started a lot of ‘strength focus’ (paddles, low cadence, hill work) for a couple of years which gave me brilliant results. (2015-2016) culminating in a sub 11 at Wales.
Then I had nearly a year of poor to no training because of injuries (2017) and with hindsight when I started training again I had lost the overall aerobic base. I used the more intense programme which I got away with for half distances in 2018 but couldn’t manage for full distance volume in 2019 (despite great success with it before).
Hindsight is a wonderful teacher! 
Where would sweet spot training fit into this equation?
If I understand what’s been said so far it would be too high for the 80% but too low for the 20% so in the grey no-go area?
IIRC it’s one of the things Coggan/Liversedge used to beef about on ST with the latter coming from the polarised side and saying there was no real place for it.
exactly. (in the grey no go area)
What’s just popped up on my FB feed; a GTN video about sweet spot training sessions. A few different variations but nothing about why.
I can’t comment on the science, but sweetspot advocates say it it a time efficient way to get nearly as much benefit as lots of slow & steady. If you are a pro and training is your full time job, then lots of slow base training is the way to go. If you are pushed for time, then you can’t do enough base to get the benefit and sweetspot gets you most of the improvement in less time.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Yeah thanks, in a perfect week I do about 8hrs total SBR (plus a couple of hours bike commuting).
I tend to do a sweet spot session on a Tuesday, as I run on Wednesday and it doesn’t leave me walking like John Wayne, then on a Thursday I do something more intense as Friday is a rest day.
You’re right that the lower end of sweet spot fits in the grey zone but IIRC according to Seiler’s figures, of the 20% out of the ‘low intensity’ zone, 5% of that is in the grey area and 15% around or above threshold.
But I was thinking about this since posting yesterday. The thing with the Seiler 80/20 is that it is descriptive across the year, not prescriptive. He is saying that this is what most elite endurance athletes are doing, which is really 80/5/15. Also, it isn’t what you should do every week but across the year, so there maybe weeks where you’re doing more zone 3 and some zone 2 and weeks where it is almost all zone 1. It just depends on why you’re doing it at that point in time. But I would argue that doing 72-96 minutes of your 8 hours a week at or above threshold is a fair amount of time working hard.
If you look at what he does himself, he builds up to some fairly hefty, upper end of sweet spot (around threshold) intervals, building quite a bit of time there. Personally, I find the shorter, VO2 max stuff like 6 x 4 min @ 120-130% FTP or 10 x 1:1 (work:recovery) best effort, leaves me less fatigued over the following days than a 2x20 sweet spot type of session.
I’m not saying to do or not to do anything BTW, I just love exercise physiology.
Age is a big issue, on the one hand you cant recover as well so more easy stuff seems a good option BUT due to muscle atrophy from mid 30’s onwards then there is a school of thought that more intensity can help offset this loss (alongside increased weights and mobility work) As always “it depends”
sweetspot is good bang for bucks but leaves you fatigued. Its like Threshold and VO max, great aerobic benefit but you cant do it day in day out. This is where the time crunched athlete formulae can come in. 7 hrs a week some people can get away with more in the grey zone upto VO2 max intervals which builds the mitochondria and gives great aerobic gains, downside is you don’t get the hours in the saddle you still require for an endurance event taking 4-12 hours. You also need more carbohydrate to fuel those sessions and don’t work in that “fat burning zone”. Could work for a just finish half or full Ironman or a good standard distance race though.
Read through this thread and trying to see how I can apply this to my training, bearing in mind I’m at a pretty low level so maybe none of it is relevant and I just need to keep doing anything consistently.
At the moment I do a long run & bike at the weekend, an easy (recovery) brick session on a Monday and two club swims a week on Saturday & Wednesday.
This leaves me with 3x1hr sessions on Tues, Wed, Thurs which are currently bike, run, bike as I can run in the afternoon on Wednesday at work (but couldn’t bike).
My question would be how best to use these sessions. I tried a bit of an interval run last Wednesday but that kind of rules out hard bike sessions on Tuesday or Thursday. An easier run would leave me able to do harder bike sessions on one or both days either side but would mean I’m not doing any harder running at all. Friday is a rest day so Thursday would seem ideal for my hardest session.
Any suggestions re getting best value from those sessions as part of the overall week’s structure. Thanks
Ps. I commute @2hrs per week by bike, all easy.
I am sure that the coaches here will have something to say. However, I would move things a little
Sat - Long run + Swim
Sun - Long Bike
Mon - Intervals
Tues - Bike
Wed - Run + Swim
Thurs - Hard Bike
Fri - Recovery
The biggest conflict is Saturday, I always struggle swimming after a run (altough I still do it)
You could do intervals on Thursday, but this means running 2 days in a row. I definitely wouldn’t swim after running intervals. Maybe I am strange, but I do like to ride the day after running intervals, otherwise I get realls stiff. Also recently I have started to run 6k at a slow pace after my intervals, this seems to help my recovery
Thanks Matt, the Saturday seems to work OK. The run is first thing and swim isn’t until 5pm so I get most of the day in between (I actually do S&C after the run at the moment too)
My only concern would be running intervals after the weekend. Whilst the weekend sessions are low intensity, does the duration not create a certain fatigue requiring an easier session on Monday?
Also re-read the thread, and read a bit online today to learn how the 80/20 idea is defined, as wondered if my training matched.
As becomes clear towards the end of this thread, how they define 80% would be what I would find some quite hard sessions. Prolonged time at top of zone 2 (based on most 5 or 7 zone systems) would be challenging for me to produce every day especially running, and would leave me too fatigued to deliver quality Z4/5 sessions. Complete guess work but reckon I’m probably pretty close to 80/20 split, with lots of the 80 being low zone 2. That’s me needing to become more of a diesel engine, given I find top of Z2 hard for long periods.
Thought relevant to check/reply given recent chat about IM pace, and value of running slower than IM pace.