Base Training or Sweet Spot in a Short Winter Week

James. Thanks for pressing play on the WattPlan Podcast. I'm James. Between the family, the job, the odd podium and building WattPlan, my riding comes in small boxes, and I still find time for far too many training papers. Every autumn two bits of advice turn up and flatly contradict each other. Ride long and easy all winter, or spend your few hours at sweet spot. So which is it, when your week is short? Lyra is our AI research voice, and the studies are linked in the show notes.

Lyra. Both camps are right, for different riders, and the thing that decides it is your hours, not your ambition. Easy riding works through volume. If you've got lots of hours, riding them easily is a big stimulus. If you've got five, it's a small one, and some harder work earns its place.

James. So the pros riding twenty five hours a week can afford to potter, and the rest of us can't.

Lyra. Pretty much. A professional riding that much gets an enormous aerobic stimulus from riding almost all of it easily, and would be destroyed by doing otherwise. Scale that down to five hours and the arithmetic changes. Five easy hours is far more sustainable than five hard ones, but a rider who never goes near threshold all winter is probably leaving adaptation on the table, because their limit is total work, not recovery.

James. Which is the case for sweet spot. Just under threshold, lots of work per minute.

Lyra. Right. It sits high enough to drive real adaptation and low enough that you can do a reasonable amount of it without needing days to recover. But I'd be lying if I said the trials settled it. They're less decisive than either camp would like.

James. Go on, then. What's the evidence that hurts my case?

Lyra. The first one. It's a crossover trial in the Journal of Applied Physiology by Craig Neal and colleagues. Twelve male cyclists did two six week blocks in random order. The polarised block was about six and a half hours a week, mostly easy with some very hard and nothing in the middle. The threshold block had more than four tenths of its time in the middle. Both improved, but polarised improved more. [1]

James. By much?

Lyra. Peak power went up 8 percent after the polarised block, against 3 after the threshold one. And that was on about an hour a week less riding. So a short week doesn't rule polarised out.

James. Hang on. That sounds like a straight win for easy plus very hard. Why would anyone short of time touch sweet spot at all?

Lyra. Because of what actually lost. That threshold block spent a big slice of every week in the middle, week after week. That isn't one or two sweet spot sessions in a mostly easy week. Nobody tested that. And the bigger picture is much less one sided.

James. Which is the second study?

Lyra. A 2025 network meta-analysis in Sports Medicine by Michael Rosenblat and colleagues. It went back to the individual data from 13 studies covering 348 endurance athletes. Overall it found no difference between polarised training and pyramidal, which is mostly easy with a bit more in the middle, for VO2max or time trial performance. There was a hint that recreational participants did better on pyramidal for VO2max, and competitive ones on polarised. [2]

James. Recreational doing better on the one with more middle. That's most of us, isn't it?

Lyra. Most of the people listening, probably. It's a hint, not a verdict, but it does sit nicely with sweet spot having a place in a short amateur week.

James. Wait, if it's a draw overall, doesn't that mean it barely matters what I do?

Lyra. That's not quite what it says. The paper starts from the fact that endurance competitors do most of their training at low intensity, and then compares ways of arranging the rest. The draw is between those arrangements. The easy riding was never the thing being argued over. So it matters a lot that the easy riding stays easy. It matters much less exactly how you split the rest.

James. So the answer's just cram in as much sweet spot as I can?

Lyra. No, and that's where people go wrong. Sweet spot costs recovery, and it piles up fatigue quietly. A rider who fills every available session with it reaches February stale rather than fit. The polarised camp's real warning is about easy days drifting up into the middle, so you get the fatigue of hard training with the stimulus of moderate training. What fails is a week with no genuinely easy riding left in it.

James. So how does WattPlan make the call for my week?

Lyra. From your availability rather than a philosophy. Fewer than four days, or under four hours, and you get one hard day a week. Four or more days and at least four hours, two, unless you've told it you're a beginner. In the base phase those hard days are sweet spot, never back to back, and a recovery week has none.

James. And my Wednesday chain gang? Because that's hard whatever anyone writes down.

Lyra. Then tell it about the chain gang. A hard club ride you've added counts as one of those hard days rather than adding to them. Sweet spot is treated as costing the same recovery as threshold work, so the week doesn't stack them.

James. Okay, three riders. Someone new to this, three evenings, about five hours.

Lyra. One sweet spot session and two steady rides. That's the whole week, and if you're a beginner it stays one hard day however many hours you add. Don't add a second hard day because the week looks empty. It's correctly sized for the recovery you've got.

James. Someone who trains with power, five days, eight hours or so.

Lyra. Through the base phase, two sweet spot days with genuinely easy riding around them, and a long ride at the weekend if you can get one. If you train with power, the discipline is on the easy days. Keep them under the top of your Zone 2, because that drift is exactly what the polarised trials punish.

James. And someone racing next season, putting in ten hours or more?

Lyra. If you're racing on ten hours or more, the traditional advice starts to apply properly. A long, mostly easy base block will serve you well, still with sweet spot on the hard days. Then as the plan moves into build and peak, threshold and VO2max work come into those hard days.

James. What can't the studies tell me about my own winter?

Lyra. Quite a lot. Neal's trial was twelve men over six weeks. The pooled analysis compared polarised training against other patterns, not a five hour week with one sweet spot session against a five hour week without. Nobody has tested the short amateur winter properly yet. We're reasoning from the pattern.

James. Then how do I know if my week is the wrong shape?

Lyra. Both approaches fail the same way. The week stops being sustainable and the rider quietly stops completing it. So watch your Form through December and January. If it drifts steadily negative for weeks, the shape is too hard for your hours, whichever philosophy produced it. Then count how many sessions you actually finished.

James. Practical bit, then. What does someone do this week?

Lyra. Check that the days and minutes in your training schedule are the ones you'll really ride this winter, because that's what decides one hard day or two. Then at the end of each week, look at Form on Today and the sessions you finished on the Progress page.

James. So my hours pick the shape, sweet spot gets one or two days, the rest stays properly easy, and if Form keeps sinking, the week's too much for me.

Lyra. Put simply, earn your sweet spot with easy days. The hard session only works if the rides around it are easy enough to let it.

Lyra. The full article and every study we mentioned are on the WattPlan blog, linked in the show notes. And if you've enjoyed this, follow the WattPlan Podcast wherever you're listening, so you don't miss the next one.

James. And if you want a plan built around the time you've actually got, get WattPlan on the App Store or Google Play. Thanks for listening.

Voices produced with ElevenLabs. James's voice is a clone of his own, Lyra is an AI voice, and James reviews every episode.