You have a training plan for your legs. You have a fuelling strategy, a recovery routine, maybe a strength programme and a power meter logging every watt. Now answer honestly: what's your training plan for your mind? For almost every amateur cyclist, the answer is nothing. We treat the most powerful performance system we own as if it's fixed — and Dr Michael Gervais thinks that's the single biggest reason people fall short of what they're capable of.
Gervais has spent his career inside elite sport and performance as a high-performance psychologist, and he came on the podcast with a claim that reframes how to think about getting better. The thing holding you back, more than your VO2 max or your weekly hours, is probably internal. And it's trainable — you've just never trained it.
The number-one constrictor
Gervais described the focus of years of his work in a single sentence. "I spent the last two years adjacent to your question," he said, "researching what is the number-one constrictor of the potential of people — what gets in the way more than just about anything else."
The answer he keeps arriving at isn't physical. It's the mind: the thoughts, the fears, the running internal commentary that narrows what a person will attempt and how long they'll stay with discomfort. For a cyclist this should land hard, because we spend enormous energy on the measurable, physical levers and almost none on the one that quietly caps all of them. You can have the engine and still be governed, on the climb that matters, by a voice telling you it's too much. Until you can work with that voice, the engine doesn't fully get used.
Grinding versus being in the game
The most pointed thing Gervais said draws a line between two kinds of dedicated person, and most committed amateurs will recognise themselves in the wrong one. "If you're not doing something in your life to invest in awareness training," he said, "you're not really in the game. You're a grinder, you're getting after it, but you're not really in the game of the potential that you have dormant lying within you."
That distinction — the grinder versus the rider who is in the game — is worth sitting with. The grinder works hard, shows up, suffers willingly. None of that is wrong, and it's more than most people manage. But Gervais's point is that effort without awareness has a ceiling. You can train relentlessly and still leave a huge amount of your potential untouched, because you've never developed the capacity to notice and shape what's happening inside you while you do it. Grinding is necessary. On its own, it's not enough.
What awareness actually is
So what is this skill that almost nobody trains? Awareness, in Gervais's sense, is the ability to notice your own thoughts and internal states rather than being unconsciously driven by them. It's the gap between having a thought — "I can't hold this, I'm going to get dropped" — and being that thought. The rider with no awareness training simply obeys it. The rider who's trained the skill notices it, recognises it as a passing piece of mental weather rather than a fact, and chooses how to respond.
That's not mysticism, and it's not positive thinking. It's a trainable capacity, built the way any skill is built — through deliberate, repeated practice, the mental equivalent of the intervals you already do for your legs. The riders who have it don't suffer less on the climb; they relate to the suffering differently, which is what lets them stay in the effort when the untrained mind would have quietly backed off. It's the foundation under every concrete mental tool for long climbs, and it's why goal-setting that actually works starts in the head, not the training log.
Starting awareness training on the bike
The obvious objection is practical: fine, the mind is trainable — how do you actually train it? You don't need a meditation retreat. You need reps, and the bike is an ideal place to get them, because it serves up a steady supply of discomfort and unhelpful thoughts to practise on.
Start small and low-stakes. On an easy ride, pick a few minutes to simply notice what your mind is doing — the planning, the replaying, the commentary — without trying to stop it. That noticing is the skill. Then take it somewhere harder. In the back half of an interval, when the voice starts negotiating — "ease off, it's fine, you've done enough" — the practice is to catch the thought, name it for what it is (a sensation asking for relief, not an instruction you must obey), and decide, deliberately, whether to act on it. Most of the time you'll find you can stay. The gap between hearing the thought and obeying it is where the trained rider lives.
Where it shows up in racing
This is not abstract self-help; it's the difference between riders on a given day. In a race or a hard group ride, the untrained mind reacts — to a surge, to a gap opening, to the first bite of real pain — and the reaction is often panic dressed up as a decision. The rider with awareness has a beat of separation. They notice the spike of fear when the move goes, recognise it, and choose a response rather than being swept into a poorly-timed effort that empties them before the finish.
It also governs how you handle the long arc of training, where the negative-thought patterns Gervais studies do their quietest damage. The rider who reads one flat session as proof they're "losing it," or one missed week as the end of their progress, is being run by their thoughts. The rider with awareness sees the thought, holds it against the longer trend, and keeps showing up. Over a season, that difference compounds into a different athlete — which is exactly why Gervais argues the internal work isn't a luxury bolted onto the physical training. It's the part that decides how much of the physical training actually counts.
The dedication trap
There's a particular reason this matters for the most committed riders, and it's slightly cruel. The harder you work physically, the easier it is to assume the mental side is covered — that grit and dedication are the same as mental skill. They're not. Plenty of riders with enormous discipline are, in Gervais's framing, world-class grinders who have never spent ten minutes training awareness, and they hit a ceiling they can't explain because all their effort is pointed at the systems they already train. The work ethic that got them this far is the very thing that hides the missing piece: when something isn't working, their instinct is to grind harder, which is the one response the problem doesn't answer. Recognising that the next gain might be mental rather than physical is itself an act of the awareness Gervais is describing.
The takeaway
Gervais's challenge to the dedicated amateur is uncomfortable in the best way. You've proven you'll do the hard physical work — the grinding is not your problem. The gap is the system you've never trained at all. Start treating the mind as a trainable part of performance, not a fixed personality trait. Practise noticing your thoughts instead of being run by them. Build the awareness deliberately, in low-stakes moments, so it's there in the high-stakes ones. The fitness you've been chasing may be less limited by your legs than by the one performance system you've left completely untouched — and unlike your genetics, that one's entirely in your hands.
Hear Dr Michael Gervais on the mind, awareness and beating negative thoughts on the Roadman podcast. For the practical mental tools that build on it, read the mental tools the pros use on long climbs, and train the inner game alongside riders who take it seriously on Skool.