Evidence-based guides on cycling training, physiology, nutrition and recovery — written for athletes who train with data.
Most cyclists plan their training week to week or month to month. Very few plan their full year deliberately from January to December. The ones who do, consistently perform better at their target even…
Read more →"Build your base." This is the most commonly dispensed advice in cycling training, and also one of the most frequently misunderstood. The concept is simple. The execution is where most cyclists go wro…
Read more →The 20-minute FTP test is the most widely used power test in cycling. It is also, for many athletes, producing a number that is 5 to 10 percent higher than their actual threshold power.
Read more →You have been training consistently for a year, maybe two. Your FTP improved steadily for the first six to twelve months. Then it stopped. Months of training later, the number has barely moved. New se…
Read more →Altitude training has been a cornerstone of elite endurance sport preparation for decades. The principle is well-established: at altitude, reduced oxygen partial pressure stimulates red blood cell pro…
Read more →Periodisation principles are largely derived from professional athletes who control their schedule around training. For amateur cyclists working full-time, managing family commitments, and riding as m…
Read more →If you have spent any time in cycling training communities in the past five years, you have encountered the polarised training debate. Coaches, podcasters, and data-oriented athletes have argued its m…
Read more →Sweet spot is not a new idea. Coaches have prescribed sustained efforts between threshold and tempo for decades. But "sweet spot" as a named training zone and methodology has been formalised and popul…
Read more →Threshold training is the session most cyclists do, argue about, fear, and fail to execute correctly in roughly equal measure. Done well, it is one of the most effective training stimuli available. Do…
Read more →A training camp is one of the highest-leverage investments a cyclist can make. A well-structured week of dedicated riding in good conditions, away from the noise and interruptions of normal life, can
Read more →Most cyclists structure their training week by feel: a hard session when they have time and energy, a long ride at the weekend, rest when they are tired. This approach produces improvement, particular…
Read more →There are approximately twenty different VO2 max interval protocols in common circulation. Norwegian 4x4. The 30:15 protocol. 40:20s. Long 10-minute efforts at 95% VO2 max power. Short 30-second burst…
Read more →Zone 2 is having a moment. Coaches, podcasters, and physiology researchers are all talking about it. But spend an hour on social media and you will encounter a genuinely alarming number of cyclists wh…
Read more →The debate about indoor versus outdoor training used to be simple: indoor was a necessary evil for winter months, outdoor was always preferable when conditions allowed. Smart trainers and virtual plat…
Read more →Every cyclist has them: the sportive you trained for all winter that fell apart in the rain. The criterium where you were dropped before the first prime. The time trial where your legs simply were not…
Read more →Your first major sportive or gran fondo is an exercise in managing unknowns. The distance is longer than any training ride you have done, the terrain is unfamiliar, the fuelling requirements are highe…
Read more →Riding in a group is a fundamentally different skill set from solo cycling. The aerodynamic and physiological benefits of riding in a bunch are enormous, but they require specific techniques and tacti…
Read more →Uploading your race file and staring at the power trace is satisfying, but most cyclists do not know what to actually look for. A race file contains far more than a peak power number and a headline av…
Read more →Set a race date in any online training platform and it will generate a plan working backwards from that date. Most of them get the final six weeks wrong.
Read more →The training block is over. You have accumulated the fitness. What happens in the final week before your target event determines how much of that fitness you actually express on the day.
Read more →The time trial is the purest test in cycling. No drafting, no tactics, no one to hide behind. Your power output, your pacing, and your ability to sustain effort over a defined distance are the only va…
Read more →Climbing is where road cycling races are decided, where sportives reveal their hardest sections, and where many amateur cyclists lose time they could recover with better technique. Improving your clim…
Read more →The most common mistake masters cyclists make is training exactly as they did in their 30s and being confused why it is not working as well. The second most common mistake is assuming the physiologica…
Read more →Power meters have transformed how cyclists train. They have also created a particular problem that coaches see in data-driven athletes more than almost any other: the tendency to let numbers override
Read more →The most important training variable is not zone distribution, interval structure, or recovery protocol. It is consistency. An athlete who trains regularly at 80% of theoretical optimal will outperfor…
Read more →Ask ten cyclists what cadence they should ride at and you will get ten different answers. Some will say 90 rpm because they heard a coach recommend it once. Others will say "whatever feels natural." A…
Read more →Cyclists obsess over power meters, aerodynamics, and recovery protocols. Almost none of them think about how they breathe. This is partly understandable: breathing is automatic, and any intervention t…
Read more →There is a metric buried in your ride data that most cyclists never look at, and it tells you more about the state of your aerobic fitness than almost any other single number. It is called aerobic dec…
Read more →Every cyclist has been there. An illness that stretches from days into weeks, a family commitment that pushes training out entirely, or a deliberate off-season break that becomes longer than planned.
Read more →The gut microbiome is the collection of trillions of microorganisms living in the human digestive tract. It has attracted extraordinary scientific attention over the past decade, with research linking…
Read more →If you have spent any time reading about cycling training, you have encountered both "lactate threshold" and "FTP" used as though they are interchangeable. Sometimes they roughly are. Often they are n…
Read more →"Improve your mitochondria" sounds like supplement marketing copy. But understanding mitochondrial biology is one of the most practically useful things a cyclist can do, because the training choices t…
Read more →Ask any cyclist why some riders seem built for the mountains and others thrive in a sprint finish, and they will usually say "body type" or "training history." Both matter, but the more fundamental an…
Read more →Your power curve (sometimes called the power duration curve or critical power curve) is one of the most information-dense outputs in cycling analytics. It shows your best average power for every durat…
Read more →Every morning, before your first coffee, your body already knows whether today should be a hard training day or an easy one. The problem is, most cyclists have no way to hear what it's saying.
Read more →Active recovery rides are one of the most misunderstood training tools in cycling. They look easy on paper (just ride slowly) but are frequently executed in ways that undermine their purpose. Understa…
Read more →Ice baths have been a staple of professional sports recovery for decades. Social media has amplified the narrative significantly, with coaches and athletes across cycling and triathlon photographing p…
Read more →Compression socks and tights are ubiquitous in endurance sports. Professional cyclists wear them on the bike, in the team bus, and at the hotel after stages. Amateur cyclists pull on compression socks…
Read more →Foam rollers are one of the most purchased pieces of fitness equipment. They live in training rooms, under desks, and in the corner of every cycling-adjacent gym. Whether most cyclists are using them
Read more →Training plans are written in an abstraction. They assume a hypothetical week where work is manageable, sleep is reliable, children are not ill, travel is not required, and psychological energy is ava…
Read more →Coming back from a forced break is one of the more psychologically demanding experiences in cycling. Whether you have been off the bike for two weeks with illness or four months with a knee injury, th…
Read more →Athletes obsess over marginal gains. Lighter wheels, aero helmets, specific tyre pressures, legal supplements. They will spend hundreds of pounds chasing a one or two percent performance improvement.
Read more →There is a particular moment in a training block that confuses almost every cyclist who experiences it for the first time.
Read more →Overtraining syndrome does not arrive suddenly. It builds gradually, across weeks or months, through a series of signals that are easy to dismiss, rationalise, or miss entirely if you are not looking
Read more →Caffeine is the most studied legal performance-enhancing substance in sports science. The evidence base is unusually robust compared to most supplements: hundreds of studies, consistently positive eff…
Read more →Electrolytes have become something of a marketing category, with a bewildering array of products claiming to optimise your performance, prevent cramps, and support recovery. Cutting through the noise
Read more →For years, the sports nutrition consensus was clear: the human gut can absorb approximately 60 grams of carbohydrates per hour. Push beyond that and you get GI distress, nausea, and potentially a very…
Read more →Every cyclist knows they should drink on the bike. Most do it reactively, drinking when thirsty, stopping when not. This approach leaves performance on the table even in moderate conditions, and in ho…
Read more →The bonk. Hitting the wall. Whatever you call it, the experience of severe glycogen depletion during a long ride is one of the most unpleasant things that happens in cycling. Legs stop working. Thinki…
Read more →Most cyclists eat more or less the same things year-round and adjust portions slightly based on how much they are training. That approach works reasonably well. But it is not optimal, and the gap betw…
Read more →Plant-based and vegan cycling is more common than it was a decade ago, and the research has clarified what is and is not a concern for plant-based endurance athletes. The short version: performance on…
Read more →What you eat before a ride shapes your performance more than most cyclists realise. The difference between arriving at a key session properly fuelled versus underfuelled can affect power output, perce…
Read more →Protein is discussed far less in cycling communities than in strength training circles. This is partly justified: cyclists do not need the protein intakes of bodybuilders. But it has overcorrected int…
Read more →You finish a hard session. You are tired, probably a bit damp, and the last thing you feel like doing is thinking carefully about what to eat. So you have a shower, make a cup of tea, and figure you'l…
Read more →The sports supplement industry generates billions in revenue by selling cyclists products ranging from well-evidenced to scientifically worthless. Knowing the difference saves money and prevents the c…
Read more →"You need to do more core work." Cyclists hear this constantly, and most of them know it. Many have tried it, done a few weeks of sit-ups or planks, noticed no difference on the bike, and quietly aban…
Read more →Your glutes are the most powerful muscle group in your body. They are also, for many cyclists, almost completely switched off by the time you clip in.
Read more →Most cyclists who lift weights are doing it wrong. Not dangerously wrong. Just inefficiently wrong, in a way that leaves most of the potential benefit on the table.
Read more →Lower back pain. Anterior knee pain. A pedal stroke that feels like you are pulling rather than driving. A persistent inability to get comfortable in the drops over long rides.
Read more →The off-season is the most underutilised period in most cyclists' training year. Without the pressure of upcoming races, the structure of a training plan, or the motivation of daylight and good weathe…
Read more →Most cyclists warm up on the bike. A few easy minutes at low watts, gradually picking up to working pace. It feels adequate. For short sessions, it might be. But for rides that require maximal power f…
Read more →Most cyclists train their aerobic system thoroughly. Zone 2 for the base. Threshold for the engine. VO2 max for the ceiling. This covers the majority of what determines cycling performance, and if you…
Read more →"Marginal gains" became a cycling cliché after Team Sky's success in the 2010s. The concept is sound: many small improvements, each negligible in isolation, accumulate into meaningful performance adva…
Read more →Cyclists spend thousands on marginal aerodynamic gains, deep-section wheels, and ceramic bearings. Many of them are riding on a bike that does not fit them correctly. A poor bike fit can waste 5 to 10…
Read more →The cycling computer market has expanded dramatically. Devices now record GPS, power, heart rate, cadence, elevation, temperature, navigation, live segments, CIQ apps, and more. Feature lists grow lon…
Read more →A power meter transforms how you train. Heart rate is a lagging indicator of effort, affected by fatigue, heat, caffeine, and stress in ways that make it imprecise as a real-time training guide. Speed…
Read more →Smart trainers have transformed indoor cycling from a tolerable necessity into a legitimate alternative to outdoor riding that many cyclists choose even when the weather is good. A quality smart train…
Read more →For many cyclists, tyre pressure is a number they inflate to once and forget. They pump their tyres to whatever the sidewall says ("inflate to 80-120 psi"), ride on that pressure for weeks, and never
Read more →Most cycling training research has been conducted in male subjects. The majority of training plans, periodisation frameworks, and performance guidelines were developed based on male physiology. This i…
Read more →For most of the last century, cycling training science was built almost entirely on male physiology. The way the menstrual cycle interacts with training was largely ignored. That has begun to change.
Read more →The conversation about cycle-aware training tends to focus on which sessions to do when. The more important conversation, and the one with the stronger evidence base behind it, is about fuelling.
Read more →If you train with, coach, or partner with someone who has a menstrual cycle, you are already part of how cycle-aware training works. The athlete is doing the work of tracking and noticing. The perform…
Read more →Drowning in power, heart rate and readiness scores from five apps? Here is how AI cycling coaching cuts the noise into one clear signal and tells you exactly what to do today.
Read more →Looking for the best cycling training app for iPhone? We compare Strava, TrainingPeaks, Intervals.icu and AI-powered VeloCoach, and explain what each does well.
Read more →You have a power meter. You are uploading rides to a training platform. The numbers are there. But if you're honest about it, you are not entirely sure what most of them mean or what to do when they c…
Read more →Fitness, Fatigue and Form (what other apps call CTL, ATL and TSB) are the three numbers that define how ready you are to perform. Here is what they mean, how they are calculated, and how to use them to train smarter.
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