After recording more than 1,300 podcast episodes, a pattern becomes hard to ignore. The World Tour coaches, sports scientists, and professional athletes who sit across from the microphone don't agree on everything. Training philosophies differ. Priorities shift depending on event, athlete age, and season. But on the subject of amateur mistakes, the consensus is striking. The same errors surface, episode after episode, regardless of who is talking.
This article is a synthesis of those conversations. Not a list of vague tips — a specific account of what the world's best coaches observe when they look at how most recreational cyclists train. If you are putting in the hours and not getting faster, the answer is almost certainly somewhere on this page.
The mistakes are numbered for convenience, not ranked by severity. Most athletes are making more than one simultaneously.
Mistake 1: Riding Too Hard on Easy Days
This one came up more than any other. Prof. Stephen Seiler at the University of Agder has spent decades studying the training distribution of elite endurance athletes. His research consistently shows that elite cyclists, runners, and rowers spend roughly 80% of their training time below the first lactate threshold — a conversational, genuinely comfortable effort. The remaining 20% is hard. Almost nothing sits in between.
Most amateurs invert this. Their easy days are medium-hard, their hard days are medium-hard, and the result is a training programme that is uniformly fatiguing and minimally adaptive. Seiler calls this the "grey zone" — the intensity range that is too hard to allow full recovery and too easy to drive the high-end adaptations that come from real threshold and VO2 work.
The practical test is simple. On an easy day, can you hold a complete conversation without pausing for breath? If not, you are going too hard. Heart rate is a lagging indicator on shorter efforts; many athletes use power and find that their "easy" power is 10-15% higher than it should be once they calibrate it against Seiler's model.
The fix is not complicated, but it requires ego. Slowing down on easy days feels wrong. It looks slow on Strava. But the adaptation response from hard sessions is only fully realised when the body has actually recovered between them. Riding at 70% of FTP when you "should" be at 55-60% is not banking extra fitness. It is borrowing against the next session.
Mistake 2: Not Eating Enough Around Hard Sessions
Asker Jeukendrup's research on carbohydrate oxidation established a figure that still surprises many athletes: trained riders can absorb and use 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour (with emerging evidence for up to 120 g/hr) when they consume multiple transportable carbohydrates — glucose and fructose together, in roughly a 2:1 ratio. The gut has separate absorption pathways for each, and using both simultaneously raises the ceiling dramatically above the older 60g/hr limit that assumed glucose alone.
Most amateur cyclists eat nowhere near this during hard sessions. They turn up to a two-hour interval workout having eaten a small breakfast, carry one gel for the whole ride, and wonder why the power drops in the final intervals. The answer is substrate depletion. You cannot hold 95% of FTP for repeated five-minute efforts in a glycogen-depleted state. The session quality collapses, the training stimulus is blunted, and the body's adaptation signal is weaker than it should be.
The same problem occurs in the pre-session window. A meal that is too small, too late, or too high in fat and fibre — all three slow gastric emptying and reduce available glucose — means you start the session already behind.
Reaching the upper range of Jeukendrup's numbers requires gut training. The gut adapts to high carbohydrate intake the same way muscles adapt to load. Start lower, build over weeks, and test in training before relying on it in races. The principle holds at any level: for hard sessions, eat more than feels necessary.
Mistake 3: Skipping Strength Training
Joe Friel has been writing about strength training for cyclists since before most current riders started competing. His position has not changed: it is the most neglected tool in the amateur programme, and the gap between what coaches prescribe and what athletes actually do is widest here.
The argument against strength training is usually one of three things: no time, concern about added weight, or the belief that cycling is specific enough that extra leg work adds nothing. Friel's counter to all three is consistent. Two sessions per week of 45-60 minutes each is sufficient during base and build phases. Properly periodised, muscle hypertrophy is minimal for endurance athletes doing heavy, low-rep work rather than high-rep circuit training. And the neuromuscular adaptations — improved recruitment, greater force per pedal stroke, better fatigue resistance at the end of long efforts — do not come from riding alone.
The most effective exercises are not complicated. Single-leg squats and step-ups address left-right imbalances. Hip hinge movements (Romanian deadlifts, trap bar deadlifts) develop posterior chain strength that protects the lower back and powers the climbing position. Heavy compound work at 3-5 reps per set, not 15-20, is what drives neural adaptation rather than just metabolic stress.
For triathletes specifically, cycling coaching that ignores the run off the bike is incomplete. Strength training is one of the few interventions that simultaneously improves bike power and run durability, because it addresses the structural resilience that purely aerobic training does not.
Mistake 4: No Periodisation
Training without periodisation means doing approximately the same sessions, at approximately the same load, week after week. It is the single most common structure among self-coached amateurs, and it reliably produces a plateau within six to twelve months of starting — often sooner.
Joe Friel's model, outlined in The Cyclist's Training Bible, divides the year into base, build, peak, and race phases, each with a different physiological emphasis and a different distribution of training stress. The logic is sequential: you build the aerobic engine before you ask it to produce power at threshold; you develop threshold before you sharpen race-specific efforts. Mixing all three simultaneously is less efficient than developing each in sequence.
Dan Lorang's approach with his World Tour athletes at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe follows the same underlying principle. Load is applied deliberately, then absorbed. The body adapts to a specific stress only after it has had enough time at that stress level to produce a measurable change. Jumping between different emphases every two weeks prevents any single adaptation from consolidating.
The practical minimum is to plan in blocks of three to four weeks, with a deload at the end of each block, and to give each block a defined physiological target. "Train hard" is not a target. "Build aerobic base at 80% sub-threshold volume" is. If you have no plan that extends more than a week forward, periodisation is the first thing to fix. Understanding how to get faster almost always starts here.
Mistake 5: Chasing FTP at the Expense of Base Fitness
FTP — functional threshold power — is a useful number. It is also the most over-optimised metric in amateur cycling. Riders test FTP every four weeks, structure every decision around it, and treat any decline as a crisis. Meanwhile the aerobic base that underpins FTP performance is quietly eroding.
The aerobic base is built at low intensity over months and years. It is the density of mitochondria in slow-twitch muscle fibres, the efficiency of fat oxidation, the stroke volume of the heart. These adaptations take a long time to develop and they are the foundation on which threshold and VO2 work sits. An athlete with a weak aerobic base can raise FTP in the short term through high-intensity training, but the gains plateau quickly, fatigue accumulates rapidly, and the power drops as soon as volume increases.
Prof. Seiler's research explains why. The high-end adaptations from VO2max work require an underlying aerobic capacity to express themselves. Without the base, the body cannot sustain the density of hard sessions needed to keep driving FTP upward. You hit a ceiling, and the ceiling is lower than it would be if the base were properly built first.
The signal that this is happening: FTP tests go well, but races at longer durations feel disproportionately hard. You can produce your best 20-minute power but fall apart after three hours. That is a base fitness deficit presenting itself at race duration.
Mistake 6: Comparing to Others Instead of Tracking Your Own Trend
Strava made it very easy to benchmark yourself against other riders. It also made it very easy to make training decisions based on those benchmarks rather than on your own physiological data. These are not the same thing, and confusing them is costly.
An athlete who gains 8 watts of FTP in twelve weeks has made genuine progress. If they spend those twelve weeks looking at a club-mate who gained 15 watts over the same period, the 8-watt gain feels like failure. That perception changes behaviour — usually toward adding more intensity, more volume, or both — and the additional load comes at the expense of the recovery that produced the original 8 watts.
Every experienced coach makes the same observation: improvement is not linear, it is not identical across athletes, and the rate of adaptation is heavily influenced by training age, genetics, life stress, sleep quality, and history of illness. A 45-year-old rider with fifteen years of base fitness responds to a training stimulus very differently to a 28-year-old in their third year of structured training. Comparing the outcomes is meaningless.
What matters is the personal trend line over time. Is power at a given heart rate improving? Is rate of perceived exertion decreasing at the same pace? Is recovery between hard sessions shortening? These are the right questions. They require data from your own training log, not your competitor's.
If the trend line is flat or declining after months of consistent training, that is a legitimate signal to assess what is happening. A coaching assessment is often the fastest way to identify whether the stall is structural, nutritional, or simply a sequencing problem.
Mistake 7: Never Deloading
A deload week is a planned reduction in training load — volume cut by 30-50%, intensity largely maintained — scheduled every third or fourth week. Its purpose is not rest in the passive sense. It is the week during which the adaptations from the previous block consolidate. The actual physiological gains from three weeks of training are realised during the deload, not during the hard weeks themselves.
Joe Friel has made this point consistently across decades of writing and coaching. The body does not adapt during stress. It adapts during recovery from stress. Three weeks of progressive overload followed by a week of reduced load is a complete training unit. Three weeks of progressive overload followed by another three weeks of progressive overload without recovery is a path toward accumulated fatigue, declining performance, and, eventually, injury or illness.
Most self-coached athletes skip deloads because performance drops temporarily in the first two or three days of reduced load. This feels like detraining. It is not. It is the nervous system finally releasing the tension it has been carrying. Power and freshness return by day four or five, and the following training block begins from a higher baseline than if the deload had been skipped.
The common variant of this mistake is the "accidental deload" — a week where training is reduced because of illness, work, or life circumstances, taken with guilt rather than intention. The same week taken as a planned deload produces the same physiological outcome but without the anxiety, and with the next block of training deliberately sequenced around it.
What the Coaches Would Change if They Could Train You for One Month
When podcast guests are asked what single intervention would most improve an amateur cyclist's performance over 30 days, the answers cluster around two things.
The first is intensity distribution. Almost every coach — Seiler in sports science, Lorang in professional cycling, Friel in long-form coaching — starts by pulling easy sessions back to genuinely easy. Not moderately easy. Genuinely easy. For many athletes, the improvement in hard-session quality that follows within two to three weeks is immediate and measurable. More power output in intervals, better recovery between intervals, and lower fatigue at the end of the week. The training load does not increase. The distribution shifts.
The second is fuelling. Coaches who work with amateur athletes report that underfuelling hard sessions is nearly universal. The fix — eating more carbohydrate in the two hours before and throughout hard sessions — produces visible improvements in training quality within days. It does not require expensive products. Rice, bananas, and standard sports drink at sufficient quantities achieve the same effect as premium nutrition if the quantities are right.
Beneath both of these is a structural point: most amateur athletes do not need more training. They need better training. The riders who respond best to coaching are not the ones who were doing too little. They are the ones who were doing a lot of the wrong things with a lot of genuine effort. Redirecting that effort is not a small change — it is the whole job.
If you recognise more than two of these mistakes in your current programme, the most efficient next step is a structured coaching assessment rather than trying to self-correct all of them simultaneously. The interactions between these errors matter as much as the individual errors themselves. Fixing fuelling without fixing intensity distribution produces different results than fixing both together. That is what coaching is for.