Why You're Not Getting Faster (Despite Training Hard)

Sarah (0:00)

Well, hello all you beautiful cyclists. Now, there's a particular kind of frustration that I think almost every cyclist has experienced, I certainly have. You're training consistently, you're getting your sessions done, you're very diligent, you're following your plan, you're keeping an eye on your power numbers, everything's dialed, but you're not getting any faster. Your FTP hasn't moved in months, you're struggling to hold power numbers that you thought would be getting easier by now, and somehow, those people that you ride with, they're improving, but you're standing still, and that's annoying. So naturally, you assume, well, I need to start training harder. I'll do another interval session, or you know what, I'm gonna do loads more hours on the bike. But what if training harder is actually the last thing that you need? What if the problem isn't how much effort you're putting in, but how you're approaching your training?

Okay, so we see this a lot when we have clients come into our coaching program not done yet. And that is that you're making your easy rides too hard. It sounds super obvious, doesn't it? But easy rides are supposed to be easy.

But yet for some reason, and I've done this, us cyclists seem to have this extraordinary amount of difficulty accepting this fact. We'll head out for a zone two ride, route is planned, heart rate zones are sorted, and absolutely every intention of keeping things controlled. But then something happens, like someone overtakes you and suddenly your zone two isn't a priority anymore because you've got your reputation to defend or you reach that hill. And instead of backing off, you think, well, I'm going to hold my usual pace because I don't want my average speed to drop. And before you know it, your easy endurance ride, well, that's turned into a moderately hard session. Now, when I say moderately hard session, I'm kind of talking about zone three. Zone three is this gray training area. It's, some people would refer to it as junk miles because it's not hard enough to be a proper interval workout, but it's certainly hard enough to create way more fatigue than you intended. This is where the research and training intensity distribution gets interesting. Of course, we probably at this stage all know the original gangster, the OG exercise physiologist, Stephen Seiler. In 2010, he published a review looking at how successful endurance athletes distribute their training. He found that many elite endurance athletes, well, they performed around 80% of their sessions at low intensities with a much smaller proportion dedicated to genuinely hard training.

That doesn't mean every amateur cyclist should blindly follow an 80-20 split because the research was largely based on athletes that were training substantially more hours than most of us have available. But the underlying principle is really important. The majority of their training was very controlled. The hard work was really deliberate. It was really hard, but they weren't trying to turn every single session into an opportunity to prove how fit they were.

A 2014 study by Thomas Stogall and Billy Sperlek took this even further. They compared four different approaches to endurance training over nine weeks in 48 well-trained athletes. One group followed a polarized approach, so they combined substantial low-intensity training with some high-intensity work. Other people in the group focused on threshold training, high-intensity intervals or higher-volume training. The polarized group showed the greatest improvements in several key measures, including VO2 peak and peak power or speed. Now, that's not proof that polarized training is always superior for every cyclist. It was a relatively short study and it involved already well-trained athletes, but it does challenge the idea that spending more time riding moderately hard in this gray zone or this kind of zone three, well, that that's automatically the best way to improve. And I think this is particularly relevant to recreational cyclists like you and me because a lot of us have a tendency to ride at the same intensity all of the time. We go out, we push a little, we come home, we're wrecked, and we assume that we've had a productive session. But that tiredness isn't unfortunately a measure of training quality. You can finish a ride absolutely exhausted without having achieved what that session was supposed to achieve. Personally, I spent a winter last year of this type of training and the benefits were absolutely incredible.

It was really hard to stick to my 115 beats per minute for those super long rides at the start, but now I absolutely love my Zone 2 spins and I trust that this type of training really, really works. So here's something worth asking yourself. When was the last time you finished an easy ride feeling like you genuinely could have kept going? If every ride that you're doing is a hard ride, I promise you, you're not training as effectively as you think. So as I mentioned, you guys already know we have this coaching side to the business called Not Done Yet. And again, we see this thread within clients that come to us for help. And one of them is that you're kind of collecting training sessions instead of following a plan. And there is a big difference between training a lot and training well. That's the distinction that is really easy to miss because cycling has become very good at giving us things to do almost. There's online racing, group rides, private challenges, training apps, FTP tests, hill repeats, and probably about 100,000 different interval sessions that you can find online. You could spend every day doing something that looks productive. But just because a session is really difficult, doesn't mean it's a session that you need. So let's say your goal is to improve your sustained climbing power. You probably need a combination of aerobic endurance, which is actually something I'm currently focusing on improving, appropriately targeted, harder efforts, and enough recovery to adapt to that work. But instead, and let me know if I'm calling you out here in the comments, you spend Tuesday doing a random VO2 max session because you saw someone on Instagram saying it's the secret to getting faster. Wednesday, you've got your fast group ride because your mates are going, which is fair. Thursday, you're like, oh, do you know what? I'm going to jump on and do an FTP test because I haven't checked it in a while. And then Saturday, of course, turns into the usual unofficial race when it kicks off at your group spin. Now, individually, none of those sessions are necessarily bad, but together they might not form a particularly effective training program. And this is where the principle of progressive overload comes in. So to improve, your body needs a training stimulus that develops over time. That might involve gradually increasing the volume, changing your intensity, extending the duration of particular efforts, or improving the quality of the work that you're doing. But it does need to be organized, otherwise you're just accumulating fatigue and hoping that something useful happens. And there's another issue as well, because we tend to judge our training by what we did today rather than what we've achieved over the last eight or twelve weeks.