After 1,400+ podcast conversations with World Tour coaches, sports scientists, and the people who actually programme elite athletes, a clear pattern emerges. Coaches do not always agree on the right model. They do agree on what amateurs get wrong. The same mistakes show up, episode after episode, regardless of who is talking.
This article names them. The framing is deliberate: not a generic mistakes list pulled from a coaching textbook, but the specific errors the Roadman archive returns to most often. The "25 coaches" framing is a synthesis count — these are the patterns that recur across the named coaching voices in the archive, distilled into the eight that matter most.
For the broader research view, What 25 Top Coaches Agree On About Improving FTP covers what coaches think you should do. This article is the inverse — what they think you should stop doing.
Mistake one — easy days are not actually easy
The single mistake every coach in the archive raises, sometimes within the first five minutes of a conversation, is grey-zone drift on easy rides. The pattern is universal: amateurs ride easy days at 75–85% of FTP, heart rate above LT1, perceived effort moderate. It feels productive. It is the most reliable way to plateau.
Prof. Stephen Seiler has documented the polarised distribution of elite athletes — roughly 80% of training time genuinely below LT1, and the discipline to police that boundary is what separates pros from copying-pros amateurs. John Wakefield has observed the same pattern from the World Tour side: development riders entering Bora-Hansgrohe are often surprised by how slowly the easy days are ridden, not by how hard the hard ones are.
The fix is not complicated. It is hard to apply consistently. Cap your easy rides under LT1 — heart-rate cap, talk test, or both. The next four weeks will feel different. The hard sessions will land better. The threshold work will produce more without any change to its prescription.
Mistake two — hard sessions are under-fuelled
The second-most-named mistake is in-ride fuelling on hard sessions. The protocol is settled: 60–90g of carbohydrate per hour for sustained efforts above 60–75 minutes, with multiple transportable carbohydrates (glucose plus fructose, roughly 2:1) for the upper end of that range. This is the protocol Asker Jeukendrup's research established, and it is universally applied at World Tour level.
The amateur reality is different. Most working cyclists arrive at hard sessions under-fuelled — pre-session glycogen low, in-ride carbohydrate at 30–40g per hour, total energy intake well below demand. The session then under-delivers. Power outputs are lower. Recovery from the session is slower. The training stimulus is muted by a nutrition gap, not a fitness one.
The fix here is again simple. Track grams of carbohydrate on the next hard session. If it is below 60g per hour, raise it. The performance change usually shows up inside two sessions and the recovery change shows up across the following week.
The full breakdown sits in What Sports Scientists Say About Cycling Nutrition.
Mistake three — strength training is treated as optional
The strength-training position has hardened across the last decade. The coaches in the Roadman archive — Dan Lorang, Joe Friel, John Wakefield — agree on the prescription: two sessions per week of compound lower-body and posterior chain work, programmed alongside the bike plan rather than bolted on. The mechanism is cycling economy, lean mass preservation, and durability.
The amateur reality is that strength is the first thing dropped when life gets busy. Coaches see this directly. The riders who plateau most often are not the ones who skipped a hard interval. They are the ones who skipped four months of consistent strength work and lost the economy gains that the bike training was building on.
The fix is to put the strength sessions on the calendar before the bike sessions. Not after. Two days a week, treated with the same priority as the threshold ride. The block of consistency does not have to be heroic — it has to be persistent across months.
Mistake four — periodisation is missing or superficial
The fourth mistake is structural. Many self-coached amateurs are not really doing periodisation; they are repeating a generic training week with seasonal adjustments. Joe Friel's base–build–peak model exists because physiological reality follows that arc — aerobic capacity is built before it is stressed at threshold, threshold work is consolidated before race-specific intensity is introduced, and the system requires planned reduction phases to absorb the load.
Coaches in the archive consistently raise this. The most common pattern they see is athletes pushing intensity too early in the year, too far through the year, with no deliberate base phase, no deload structure, no taper plan. The result is a long mid-season plateau followed by a late-season decline.
The fix is to plan the next 12 to 16 weeks in phases, not weeks. Where does the base phase end? Where does the build phase start? Where is the deload week every third or fourth week? Where is the A-event and what does the taper look like? Without those answers, the training week is being optimised in isolation.
Mistake five — recovery is what is left over rather than programmed in
The fifth mistake is recovery architecture. Recovery — sleep, fuelling timing, easy days, deload weeks, in-season rest — is treated as a residual category. Coaches treat it as a programmed input.
Lorang has discussed on the podcast how the recovery environment around a Bora rider is itself part of why pros tolerate the load they tolerate. Amateurs cannot reproduce that environment. The takeaway is that the recovery architecture matters more, not less, because the load tolerance ceiling is lower.
The practical translation: seven to nine hours of sleep treated as a training metric, not a lifestyle preference. A deload week every third or fourth week with volume cut by 30–40% and intensity preserved. Fuelling matched to session demand. Stress management treated as a recovery variable when life pressure is high.
Mistake six — intensity is added before base volume is in place
The coaches in the archive are consistent that intensity earns its place when base volume is present. The amateur instinct — to skip the base phase and get straight to "the real training" — produces predictable plateaus.
The diagnostic Lorang effectively applies is whether the rider can complete a long aerobic ride at controlled heart rate without significant cardiac drift. If the answer is no, more intervals are not the next intervention. More easy hours are.
The fix is the order of operations. Build the aerobic platform first. Add intensity as a stimulus on top. The platform is the work that makes the intensity productive. Without it, the intensity sits on nothing.
Mistake seven — FTP is chased instead of built
The FTP mistake is the most cultural. The number has become a goal in itself. Coaches universally treat it as a lagging indicator of aerobic fitness — it rises when the system rises, and chasing it directly typically produces spike-and-plateau patterns rather than sustained gains.
The pattern coaches see: amateurs retest every two to three weeks, build training blocks around the test rather than around aerobic development, and arrive at the next test under-recovered because the previous block was structured around the wrong target.
The fix is to plan the next block around aerobic development and disciplined intensity, not around the retest date. Use the FTP zone calculator to set zones from your most recent reliable result. Stop retesting for at least six weeks. Train. The number will move.
The full coaching consensus on FTP is in What World Tour Coaches Agree On About FTP.
Mistake eight — amateurs train alone without an outside check on their data
The final mistake is the structural one most amateurs underestimate. Self-coached athletes are operating without an outside reviewer. The plan might be sound. The execution is unmonitored. Drift accumulates without a check.
This is what coaches see most reliably from the outside: an athlete who trains seriously, has decent knowledge, and does not realise that one specific element of execution has been off for months. Easy rides drifting two beats above LT1. Strength sessions skipped more often than logged. A deload week skipped because "I felt fine." None of these are visible from inside. All of them are visible to someone reviewing the data.
This is the structural gap Roadman coaching closes. Not by writing a better plan — most self-coached athletes already have a reasonable plan. By providing the daily review and weekly adjustment that catches drift before it becomes a plateau. The programme is called Not Done Yet, it is 1:1, and the highest-return move it makes is the simple one most self-coached athletes lack: an outside check on the data.
How to act on this list this week
If you read this list and recognise more than two mistakes, the work is to pick one and fix it before adding anything new. Five practical steps:
- Audit the last four weeks honestly. Mistakes one, three, four and five usually surface from a clear-eyed review of training files, calendar, and sleep tracking.
- Pick one mistake. The biggest single-input change is almost always either easy-day discipline (mistake one) or hard-day fuelling (mistake two).
- Fix it for four weeks. Do not change anything else. Run the same training schedule, change only the one input, and observe.
- Retest at week eight. A specific number — sustainable power at heart rate, threshold session quality, recovery between sessions — will tell you whether the fix worked.
- Then move to the next mistake. Sequential fixes accumulate. Trying to change four inputs at once usually produces no clear signal and no sustained change.
If self-audit is not producing the answer, that is the structural mistake — and the one a coach solves fastest. The Not Done Yet coaching programme is built around catching exactly this pattern.
Where to go next
For the long-form mistakes companion, The Most Common Training Mistakes — From 1,400 Podcast Episodes is the broader article. For the FTP-specific consensus, What 25 Top Coaches Agree On About Improving FTP maps the positive prescriptions. For the World Tour-tier-specific view, What World Tour Coaches Agree On About FTP goes deeper.
The summary, if you only take one thing: most plateaus are caused by one of these eight mistakes. The one you cannot see is usually the one costing you the most. Get the outside check.