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Positive Cycology: Sweet Spot and Flow
Positive Cycology
Positive Cycology is an exploration of cycling and psychology concepts to positively enrich your riding and living experience. Enjoy!
Sweet Spot and Flow
Sweet spot is the optimal cycling training effort, between intensity and volume, for maximum benefit.
Flow is the optimal effort in life, between overwhelm and boredom, for maximum happiness AND performance.
Read on to learn more about sweet spot and flow. Questions are at the end of this page to help you apply these positive cycology concepts to your own life.
Sweet Spot
Sweet spot training is riding at a "medium hard effort." When training in the sweet spot, you are placing your body under sustained stress, but not so much that you cannot hold the effort for a long time.
For those of you who like numbers, the sweet spot is around 78-85% of your maximum heart rate. It is a training intensity between high zone 3 and zone 4, between tempo and threshold, between 84% and 97% of you functional threshold power (FTP.)
Sweet spot training strikes the perfect balance between intensity and volume. Sweet spot training elicits more muscle adaptations than tempo, but less than threshold efforts. Since you cannot continually train at threshold, the better trade off is to ride more sweet spot trainings to build strength. Sweet spot training is aerobic (not anaerobic). The sessions are repeatable and rewarding, helping to keep motivation up versus a painful, lung-busting threshold or high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout.
Making fitness gains is always a balance between intensity and volume, and most athletes are able to do more volume at sweet spot than at threshold. The sweet spot intensity of training provides many of the adaptations that threshold intervals provide, but causes less fatigue and less stress on the body.
Sweet Spot elicits more muscle adaptations such as an increase in plasma volume, lactate threshold, muscle glycogen storage, slow twitch muscle fibers, VO2 Max capabilities and mitochondrial enzymes. Mitochondria are small structures found in almost all human cells. Their main job is to perform cellular respiration – taking in nutrients from the cell, breaking them down and turning those nutrients into energy. The mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell and, by increasing your mitochondria density, you are making your body able to create energy more easily.
Riding with stronger riders will often put you in the sweet spot. Sweet spot is going to help you increase your workload and allow you to get further down the road with the lead group, so that you have more matches to burn when people really start throwing down the pain. If you are making the break but just hanging on, training at 90-97 per cent of FTP can help you increase your long-duration wattage.
You cannot continually train in the sweet spot. You will also need to work on your threshold, FTP, and VO2 max intervals. Your body adapts best to new stresses – you can’t just do the same thing all the time. This holds true for training in any zone; after a while, you need to change things up.
For those who race, sweet spot training increases the tolerance for holding a high intensity over long durations, which means you will last longer in the break. If you are racing riders who are faster and fitter than you, do not expect sweet spot preparation to keep you in the mix; you will also need other workouts including threshold bursts.
Once you can workout for an hour at sweet spot intensity, you will find you can ride much faster than before, but you will reach a plateau. You then want to progress to doing more high-intensity interval training (HIIT). If you are new to structured training, try starting with five or ten-minute sweet spot intervals, before working up to 20 minutes. As your fitness improves, you can increase the number of intervals within a session. Once you’ve mastered 20 minutes at sweet spot, you can build up to 2×15 minutes and 2×20 minutes.
Flow
Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness, a state where you feel your best and perform your best.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced the concept of flow in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Csikszentmihalyi conducted one of the largest psychological surveys ever to study the pursuit of happiness. “The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable of their lives. A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.”
Researcher Steven Kotler in his book The Rise of Superman, studied how flow elevated the performance of top athletes. Flow is available to everyone who learns to tap into it. Kotler and Csikszentmihalyi claim we can improve our performance and happiness by getting into that sweet spot called flow.
The term “flow” is actually a phenomenological description of the experience—it describes how the state makes us feel. Everything just flows along.
Flow refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption, when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Your sense of time distorts (most often it seems to speed up, sometimes time slows down.)
When you are in flow, your mental and physical performance excel. Athletes, artists, musicians, adventurers, writers, and yes, all human beings can experience this peak state of flow.
Csikszentmihalyi identified ten qualifiers for an experience to be considered flow. Kotler identified the last four qualifiers as "triggers" which can ignite a state of flow.
Here are the qualifiers (the last four could be considered "triggers") to states of flow:
1. Action and Awareness Merge. The doer and the doing become one. From the perspective of consciousness, we become the action. In other words, actions feel automatic and require little or no additional resources.
2. Selflessness. Our sense of self disappears. Our sense of self-consciousness as well. The inner critic is silenced.
3. Timelessness. We experience an altered perception of time. Past and future disappear and we are plunged into an eternal present, a deep now.
4. Effortlessness. Our sense of struggle and strife vanishes. The experience becomes intrinsically-rewarding or—in technical parlance—“autotelic.”
5. Paradox of Control. We have a powerful sense of control over the situation. We are captain of our own ship; master of this small slice of destiny.
6. Intrinsic Motivation. The experience is intrinsically motivating. We do it for love not money. We do it because the activity itself is so incredibly enthralling that it’s its own reward.
7. Intense Concentration. More specifically, intense concentration on a limited field of information. Total focus on the right here, right now. Complete absorption in the present moment.
8. Challenge/Skills Balance. The challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds our skill set so we have to push ourselves outside our comfort zone. But not too far outside. We have to stretch, not snap.
9. Clear Goals. These are not big goals (like winning the Olympics in downhill skiing), rather they are much smaller chunks (like getting out of the starting gate fast). What’s critical is we know what we’re doing now and we know what we’re doing next so attention can stay focused in the present.
10. Immediate Feedback. The gap between cause and effect is tiny—so we can always course-correct mid-flight.
Kotler's research identified an ideal "challenge/skill ratio" (Reference #8 on the qualifiers list.) Attention is most engaged (i.e., in the now) when there’s a very specific relationship between the difficulty of a task and our ability to perform that task. If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow channel—the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch but not hard enough to make us snap.
How hard is it to stretch us without snapping? Answers vary, but the general thinking is about 4 percent. That’s it. That’s the sweet spot. If you want to trigger flow, the challenge should be 4 percent greater than the skills. In psychological terms, the sweet spot is the end result of what’s known as the Yerkes-Dodson law—the fact that increased stress leads to increased performance up to a certain intensity, beyond which performance levels off or declines. In real-world terms, it’s not much at all, just enough to get you engaged, experience a sense of accomplishment, and motivate you along.
Sweet Spot and You
1. Do you train according to a structured plan? Do you incorporate sweet spot training?
2. How might you specifically benefit from sweet spot training?
3. How would you train in the sweet spot? Group rides? Intervals? Other structure?
4. Do you know your FTP? Max heart rate? Do/would you use these metrics?
5. Do you know others who use sweet spot training? What are their experiences?
Flow and You
1. Describe an experience you had where:
- Action and awareness merged.
- Your sense of self vanished.
- Mental and physical abilities exceled.
- Your sense of time distorted (sped up, slowed, or disappeared).
2. Review the 10 qualifiers of flow. Describe when and how you personally experienced each one.
3. Focus on the last four qualifiers. How might these qualifiers trigger you into a flow state?
4. Can you identify a 4% increase in challenge to improve happiness or performance in your life?
5. How would your life and your abilities benefit if you could experience more flow?
Notes
Sweet Spot
Flow