Sweet Spot training

Sweet Spot is sustained effort at roughly 88–94% of FTP — hard enough to drive most of the aerobic adaptations of threshold work, easy enough to accumulate more total time at high intensity without the recovery cost. Hence the 'sweet spot.'

The term comes out of Hunter Allen and Andrew Coggan's power-zone framework in Training and Racing with a Power Meter (2006). Frank Overton of FasCat Coaching then popularized it commercially, building much of the structured coaching around dedicated sweet-spot plans. The value proposition is time efficiency: you get a large share of the adaptation of threshold intervals for less of the fatigue cost — which matters a lot for amateurs training 6–12 hours/week.

Typical sweet-spot workout shapes: 2×20 min, 3×15 min, 4×10–12 min, at 88–94% FTP with 5–10 minutes of easy between reps. Weekly volume of sweet spot tends to top out around 90–120 minutes before cumulative fatigue starts to hurt execution.