Most amateur cyclists train wrong. Not because they lack effort — they put in plenty of that — but because they misallocate it. They ride most of their hours at a pace that is too hard to produce deep aerobic adaptation and too easy to force meaningful high-end adaptation. The result is a lot of time on the bike with a frustratingly flat trajectory.
Dan Lorang has spent his career solving exactly this problem, though usually at a different scale. As head of performance at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe and the coach who guided Primož Roglič to Grand Tour victories, he thinks about training structure at a level most riders never encounter. On episode 2134 of the Roadman Cycling Podcast, he turned that lens on a different athlete: the time-crunched amateur with 8-10 hours a week and real ambitions.
What he described is not complicated. But it requires a kind of discipline that goes against most riders' instincts.
What Lorang builds first
Before Lorang writes a single session, he builds a picture of the athlete. That means understanding not just current fitness but life load: work stress, sleep quality, how many weeks until the target event, and what the rider's training history actually looks like versus what they think it looks like.
This diagnostic step matters more than most coaches acknowledge. Lorang's point is that a training plan is only as good as the athlete it's written for. A 45-year-old with a demanding job and two kids tolerates stress differently than a 28-year-old with flexible hours, even if their FTP numbers are identical. Generic plans ignore this. Individualised cycling coaching does not.
Once he has that picture, the first physical priority is always the aerobic base. Not intervals. Not threshold blocks. Base. Lorang is explicit that skipping this phase — or shortening it because it feels boring — is where most amateurs set themselves up to plateau.
The base phase for an amateur on 8-10 hours typically runs 8-12 weeks. Sessions are predominantly Zone 1 and Zone 2 work, kept genuinely easy. The physiological target is mitochondrial density, capillary development, and fat oxidation efficiency. These adaptations are slow, invisible week-to-week, and absolutely foundational. Every hard session later in the season sits on top of them.
Lorang also uses this phase to establish a rhythm. Consistency across 8-12 weeks teaches the body to absorb training load before that load increases. Riders who skip straight to intensity often find they get fit quickly and then stagnate or pick up injuries. The base phase is the insurance policy.
The intensity split for amateurs
Lorang's intensity distribution for amateurs is roughly 80% low intensity, 20% high intensity by volume. This is not a radical idea — Prof. Stephen Seiler's research at the University of Agder has documented that elite endurance athletes across multiple sports converge on a similar split, and his work has been central to how the endurance coaching community thinks about polarised training over the past decade.
What is striking is how far most amateur cyclists are from this split in practice. Lorang's observation is that amateurs typically land closer to 60% moderate intensity, 30% low, 10% high. That moderate-intensity chunk — what coaches call the "grey zone" or Zone 3 — is physiologically expensive without producing proportionate adaptation. It accumulates fatigue without the aerobic depth of genuine easy work or the neuromuscular and metabolic stimulus of genuine hard work.
Shifting that split means making easy days genuinely easy. For many riders, this requires slowing down by 10-20% compared to what feels comfortable. Heart rate caps in Zone 2 feel almost embarrassingly slow at first. That discomfort is informative — it tells you how much of your training has been creeping into territory that doesn't serve your goals.
The 20% hard work gets distributed with equal care. Lorang does not pile all the intensity into a single brutal session. He spreads it across the week in a way that allows quality to remain high. A fatigued athlete doing intervals is not producing the stimulus the session is designed for — they're just accumulating damage. Check your FTP zones before designing intensity blocks; without accurate zones, the whole distribution falls apart.
Weekly structure with 8-10 hours
On 8-10 hours, Lorang's typical week for an amateur in the build phase looks something like this: four to five rides, two of which have a specific intensity component, and the rest of which are genuinely easy. Total hard work within those intensity sessions might represent 60-90 minutes of the week. Everything else is aerobic development and recovery.
The structure is not complicated, but the sequencing matters. Hard sessions go on days when the rider is fresh. That often means Tuesday and Thursday for someone who works Monday to Friday. Long easy rides land on weekends when more time is available. The day before a hard session should be easy or rest. The day after should be easy. This is not negotiable — it is how adaptation happens.
Lorang is also direct about what 8-10 hours does and does not support. It does not support three hard sessions per week. At that volume, three intense workouts produce so much accumulated fatigue that the quality of each session degrades. Two well-executed hard sessions outperform three mediocre ones, and the data Lorang sees from his professional athletes — who obviously operate at vastly higher volumes — reinforces the same principle: quality of the stimulus matters more than quantity of the suffering.
One structural element Lorang emphasises for amateur schedules is the long ride. Even at 8-10 hours per week, getting one ride of 2.5-3.5 hours at low intensity produces aerobic adaptation that shorter rides cannot replicate. The duration itself is part of the stimulus. Riders who cap every ride at 90 minutes because of scheduling pressure are missing a meaningful piece of what makes endurance athletes fitter over time.
The biggest amateur mistake Lorang sees
Lorang has coached at the highest level in road cycling for years and has seen the same error repeat across thousands of athletes at every level. Amateurs train in the grey zone chronically. They do not do it on purpose — it emerges from a combination of competitive instinct, training with others, and the cultural belief that harder always means better.
The consequence is predictable. Riders who train predominantly at moderate intensity feel perpetually tired without feeling fast. They struggle to hit genuine high-intensity targets when they try, because they carry too much fatigue. Their easy rides drift upward in effort because they have not disciplined the habit of riding easy. Over a season, this produces stagnation or regression despite consistent training hours.
The correction Lorang prescribes is systematic and requires ego management. Slow the easy rides down. Use heart rate as the anchor, not power or perceived effort. Set a ceiling and stay under it, even when it means getting dropped on group rides or feeling like you're not doing enough. The metabolic changes happening at genuine Zone 2 intensity are not visible on a week-to-week basis, but they are what separate riders who keep improving in their 40s and 50s from those who plateau.
This is also where the link to every Lorang episode on the podcast becomes valuable — across multiple appearances, Lorang returns to this same correction. It is not a side note in his coaching philosophy. It is central to it.
When to add intensity
Lorang's rule on intensity is essentially: later than you think, and less than you think. Most amateur training plans add intensity in week three or four of a training block. Lorang pushes back on this. Eight to twelve weeks of genuine base work before meaningful intensity is his starting point for an amateur who has not trained systematically before, or who has spent years in the grey zone.
The physiological rationale is straightforward. High-intensity work produces its biggest gains when it is placed on top of a developed aerobic system. Without that foundation, intervals stress the body without the machinery in place to absorb and convert that stress into fitness. Lorang uses the analogy of building a house — you do not start with the roof.
When intensity does arrive, it enters progressively. Short threshold efforts — 10-15 minutes — before longer ones. VO2 max work after threshold capacity is established. The progression mirrors what his professional athletes do, just compressed into a shorter macro-cycle. Dan Bigham, head of engineering at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe since late 2024, has spoken publicly about the team's analytical approach to training load management, and Lorang's periodisation thinking sits alongside that same evidence-based framework.
Lorang also makes a point about intensity type selection. For amateurs with limited hours, threshold work and sweet-spot work produce more reliable gains than very high-intensity short intervals, because they build the aerobic capacity that matters most for events lasting more than 30 minutes. Pure VO2 max work has its place, but it is a later addition, not a foundation.
Recovery as a training tool
The final element of Lorang's amateur plan structure, and the one he says is most systematically neglected, is recovery. Not recovery weeks — though those matter too — but daily and weekly recovery management.
Lorang's position is unambiguous: adaptation happens during recovery, not during training. Training is the signal. Recovery is where the body responds to that signal. An athlete who trains consistently but recovers poorly is accumulating stress without cashing it in for fitness. Over weeks, this produces the overreached state that looks like poor form but is actually just insufficient recovery.
For amateurs, the primary recovery levers are sleep, nutrition timing, and easy-day discipline. Sleep is the most powerful and the most underused. Lorang references 7-9 hours as the target range for athletes in training, with quality mattering as much as duration. Nutrition around training — adequate carbohydrate before and during hard sessions, protein and carbohydrate within the recovery window after — supports the adaptation process directly. Asker Jeukendrup's research on carbohydrate oxidation and gut training informs how Lorang thinks about fuelling for training, particularly in longer sessions where 60-90g of carbohydrate per hour becomes relevant for maintaining quality.
Recovery weeks should appear every third or fourth week. Volume drops by 30-40%. Intensity drops too. These weeks feel like a step backward. They are not. Lorang points to recovery weeks as one of the highest-leverage interventions available to an amateur — the week where the preceding three weeks of training actually consolidate into measurable fitness.
If you want to take one concrete step from what Lorang describes, it is this: audit your last four weeks of training data and identify what percentage of your time was spent genuinely easy. If the answer is less than 70%, that is where to start. Not with more intervals. Not with a harder plan. With the discipline to slow down when the session calls for it, so that when it calls for hard, you can actually go there.