If you’ve been doing your sweetspot sessions, you should be beginning to see some good gains in fitness and your sustainable power.

While these sustainable sweetspot sessions are still key to completing the Etape du Tour in a fast time, you can start to incorporate harder sessions now aimed at really boosting your threshold power and climbing speed.

‘Pure’ threshold development training is at a slightly higher intensity than sweetspot work and as such can’t be performed as frequently or in such large volumes. If you know your power or heart rate based training zones (and you can find out here), begin with short efforts with limited recovery, such as 4×4 minute zone four intervals with two minutes easy spinning in between. As these intervals are quite short, after a few sessions and as you get used to this higher intensity, you can increase the duration of the intervals, aiming for 3×10 minute intervals in zone four with 5-10 minutes easy pedalling in between as a good, solid session that will still allow you to work on other aspects of your fitness.

Keeping it specific – two training sessions for the Etape du Tour

In keeping with our theme of specific training for the Etape, and the climbing that the event involves, another good session is to introduce some higher intensity zone five training to replicate the harder sections of the climbs. While the majority of your climbing will be spent in zones three and four, there will be times where you may have to push hard over your threshold power and then recover while still riding hard up a climb, such as through a series of steeper hairpin bends.

With that in mind, a good introduction to zone five training is to incorporate short bursts of zone five work within a longer zone three tempo effort. Try riding for 20-30 minutes at your zone three power or heart rate and then ramping up the intensity with between 30 second and a minute’s effort in zone five, before dropping back down to zone three to continue until the next high intensity burst five to ten minutes later. This type of effort can easily be into a commute (traffic and road layout allowing). Alternatively, and just as with your sweetspot training, this is a great session to do on the turbo, ramping the front wheel up higher for climbing specificity. Choose a slightly lower cadence that might feel natural, increasing the gearing to mimic the steeper parts of a climb during the zone five efforts.