Most riders who come to coaching are not undertrained. They are mis-trained. They have been riding hard for years, accumulating hours and fatigue in roughly equal measure, and the power numbers have stopped moving. The problem is not effort — it is structure.
The four riders profiled here represent a cross-section of NDY members: a sportive rider stuck at a plateau, a category racer aiming for elite status, a rider carrying excess weight that was slowing him down, and a masters athlete working nights. Different goals, different constraints. The training changes that drove their results were not identical, but they share a logic. That logic is worth understanding before you look at the numbers.
What changed for a sportive rider stuck at 205w FTP
Damien Maloney came to coaching with a 205w FTP and five years of riding behind him. He was training six days a week, completing back-to-back hard rides on weekends, and had not seen meaningful FTP movement in 18 months. His TSS was high. His recovery was poor. His intensity distribution, when mapped across a week, showed almost every session sitting in the moderate-hard zone that Prof. Stephen Seiler's research identifies as the most physiologically expensive and least productive place to train. Seiler's work at the University of Agder consistently shows that elite endurance athletes perform roughly 80% of training at low intensity and 20% at high intensity — Damien was spending most of his time in between.
The first structural change was reducing weekend ride intensity. Two long rides became one long easy ride and one ride with embedded quality work. The second change was adding a genuine recovery day — full stop, no 45-minute "active recovery" that was actually a moderate effort. Within eight weeks, Damien reported feeling fresher going into quality sessions. Within four months, his FTP had moved to 238w.
Over two full seasons, Damien's FTP reached 295w. That is a 90w gain — 44% improvement on his starting number. He did not ride more hours. In year one, he rode fewer. The change was in how those hours were distributed across intensity zones, and in treating recovery as a training input rather than an afterthought.
If you want to understand whether the same structural problems exist in your own training, the free coaching assessment is the right starting point. It maps your current load against what the evidence suggests is productive.
From Cat 3 to Cat 1 in one season
Daniel Stone was a solid Cat 3 racer when he started working with NDY. His fitness was real — he could hang in most Cat 3 fields and occasionally contest a sprint — but he was losing races at the moments that decided them: accelerations, short steep climbs, the final ten minutes of a criterium. His aerobic base was adequate. His ability to repeatedly produce high power after sustained effort was not.
The diagnostic here was straightforward. Daniel's training had almost no work in the VO2max range and above. He was riding his intervals at "hard" rather than "very hard", which meant he was developing his threshold but not the top-end capacity that wins races. The training change was to introduce structured VO2max work — sessions that were shorter and more intense than he was used to — alongside a deliberate reduction in the moderate-intensity riding that was filling his week.
Daniel also had a pacing problem in racing. He was burning matches in the first third of races that he needed in the last third. Race analysis over a full spring season revealed a consistent pattern: peak efforts in the first 20 minutes, progressive fade, missing moves in the final 15. That pattern was addressed through race-specific simulations in training and explicit tactics conversation during weekly check-ins.
He upgraded to Cat 1 before the season ended. That is not a common trajectory — Cat 3 to Cat 1 in one season represents two category jumps and requires both sustained improvement and smart racing. Daniel achieved both. You can read more about how coaching works and what the week-to-week process looks like.
16kg lost without calorie counting
Chris O'Connor's primary goal when he started coaching was performance, not weight loss. But he was carrying 16kg above his racing weight and he knew it was a limiting factor — on climbs in particular, the physics are not negotiable. Every kilogram costs approximately 6–8 watts per kilogram of body weight on a 6–8% gradient, which means Chris was effectively riding with a full bidon of water taped to the frame that never emptied.
The approach NDY used was not a calorie deficit protocol. It was a nutrition restructuring built around fuelling training correctly and improving food quality in the hours outside training. Chris had been chronically under-fuelling during rides — taking in less than 30g of carbohydrate per hour on efforts that required 60–80g — and compensating with large, low-quality meals afterwards. That pattern drives both poor training adaptation and excess fat storage.
The fix was to increase carbohydrate intake during rides, which sounds counter-intuitive when the goal is fat loss. Asker Jeukendrup's research on multiple transportable carbohydrates is relevant here: properly fuelled training drives better adaptation and reduces the post-ride hunger response that undermines body composition. Fuelling the work correctly meant Chris arrived home from rides less depleted and made better food choices in the evening.
Tim Spector's research on the microbiome reinforced a second change: improving food variety and quality rather than tracking calories. Over 22 months, Chris lost 16kg. His FTP rose by 31w in the same period. The weight loss and the performance gain were not in tension — they came from the same structural fix.
FTP gains at age 52 on a shift-work schedule
Brian Morrissey is 52, works rotating shifts at a manufacturing facility, and gets on the bike when the schedule allows rather than when it is optimal. His sleep is fragmented. His recovery windows are unpredictable. He had largely accepted that significant performance improvement was not realistic at his age, on his schedule.
The first thing coaching did for Brian was challenge that assumption with specificity rather than encouragement. Joe Friel, whose work on masters cyclists is extensively documented in The Cyclist's Training Bible and in his conversation on the Roadman Cycling Podcast, is clear that VO2max and neuromuscular power decline with age, but that training response does not disappear — it requires longer recovery between hard sessions and more careful periodisation. A 52-year-old on the right programme can still move the numbers.
Brian's programme was built around his shift pattern rather than against it. Hard sessions were placed on days following rest days, not on days following night shifts. Easy sessions served double duty as both aerobic maintenance and active recovery. The total training load in hours was lower than what he had been attempting before coaching — he had been trying to match training plans designed for riders with predictable schedules and regular sleep, and failing to recover from them.
Over one full season, Brian's FTP improved by 15%. On a watts-per-kilogram basis, the gain was larger because his body composition also improved modestly. At 52, with shift work as a permanent constraint, that result required precise load management. If you are weighing whether the investment makes sense for your situation, the is a cycling coach worth it article addresses the question directly with numbers rather than assertions.
The common thread across every result
Four riders, four different situations, four different goals. But the mechanism driving results in each case was the same: identifying the specific structural problem in existing training and fixing that problem with precision.
Damien was training at the wrong intensities. Daniel lacked top-end work. Chris was under-fuelling training. Brian was trying to recover on a schedule that did not allow recovery. None of these problems required training harder. All of them required training differently.
This is a consistent finding across high-performance endurance coaching. Dan Lorang, who coaches Jan Frodeno and Anne Haug and heads performance at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, has discussed at length on this podcast how elite athletes often need less volume and more precise targeting of specific systems rather than more hours. The principle applies at amateur level too. Harder is not better. More specific is better.
The corollary is that results from coaching are not primarily about access to secret sessions or exotic training methods. They are about fixing errors that are difficult to see clearly when you are inside your own programme. An external perspective with the right analytical tools identifies those errors faster than most riders can on their own.
What coaching actually changed vs what stayed the same
It is worth being clear about what coaching did not change for these four riders, because the marketing version of coaching implies transformation of every variable simultaneously. That is not what happened.
All four riders kept riding the bikes they already owned. None of them moved to a new training location or acquired new equipment beyond what they already used for power measurement. Their life constraints — work schedules, family commitments, available riding time — remained the same or became more demanding, not less. Coaching worked within those constraints rather than requiring their removal.
What changed was the quality of the decisions made with available time. Which days got hard sessions. Which sessions were genuinely easy. What was consumed during rides and how food was structured around training. How sleep and recovery were prioritised when windows existed. These are not glamorous interventions. They are the unglamorous ones that move the numbers.
The Not Done Yet programme costs $195 per month. It is 1:1 across five pillars: training, nutrition, strength, recovery, and accountability. There is no template plan that gets modified with your name on it. Each programme is built from scratch around the rider's data, schedule, and specific goal — which is the only way the precision that produced these results is achievable.
If you are a rider with real goals and a schedule that makes generic programmes unworkable, the right next step is to apply for coaching and go through the intake process. That process identifies the specific structural problems in your current training before any programme is built. The diagnosis comes first.