The data-driven corner of cycling has a quiet assumption underneath it: that if you could just build the perfect plan — the ideal periodisation, the optimal intensity distribution, every session scientifically justified — the results would follow. Stephen Barrett coaches at the very top of the sport, guiding Felix Gall at WorldTour level, and he came on the podcast to say something that detonates that assumption. The perfect plan is close to worthless if the rider doesn't believe in it.
It's a striking thing to hear from a man with every reason to defend the science. But Barrett's point isn't anti-science. It's that the science is only half the job, and the half everyone obsesses over is not the half that usually decides the outcome.
Belief is the active ingredient
Barrett put it about as bluntly as a coach can. "It's much more effective having a really bad training program, but the rider believes in it," he said. "It's going to be much more effective." And then the confession that gives it weight: "I've made so many mistakes in my coaching career where I've had the most scientifically validated, perfect, periodised training plan, but a rider thinks I'm an idiot because of how I act or how I present it. I've got no impact."
It’s the opposite of how most amateurs think about getting faster. We treat the plan as the thing — find the right one, execute it, improve. But a plan is just instructions on a page until a human commits to it, day after day, through bad weather and tired legs and weeks when the numbers don't move. That commitment runs on belief. A rider who fully buys into a slightly flawed plan will train consistently, trust the process when it's hard, and arrive at the start line confident. A rider who secretly doubts a perfect plan will skip sessions, second-guess the hard days, and undermine the whole thing. Adherence beats optimisation, and belief is what powers adherence.
This has a direct lesson for anyone choosing how to train. The "best" plan or coach isn't the one with the most impressive science — it's the one you'll actually believe in and follow. A program you trust and complete will beat a theoretically superior one you grudgingly half-do. It's a strong argument for why a coach can be worth it: not because they hold secret sessions, but because the relationship and the belief it builds are what make any plan work.
Ask better questions
The second idea is a habit of mind, and it's one of the most quietly useful things any rider can adopt. "I'm not so worried about the answers," Barrett said. "I want you to ask better questions, because a better question will lead to a better outcome."
Most amateurs ask narrow questions and get narrow answers. "How do I raise my FTP?" sends you down a single corridor — more threshold work, probably — that may have nothing to do with what's actually holding you back. A better question opens the whole field: "What’s actually limiting me in the races I care about?" Maybe it's not your FTP at all. Maybe it's that you arrive at the finale already cooked, or you can't follow a surge, or you fall apart in the fourth hour, or you fuel badly. Each of those is a different problem with a different solution, and you only find it by asking the right question first.
This is the difference between training busily and training well. The busy rider keeps answering the same small question — how do I do more? The thoughtful rider keeps interrogating the question itself, and ends up working on the thing that actually matters. It's also the antidote to several of the self-coached mistakes riders make: most of them start with a bad question.
The metric nobody trains: bunch efficiency
Then Barrett said something that reframes what "fitness" even means in a race. We all know the familiar numbers, he noted — "FTP, critical power, W prime, threshold, fractional utilisation, VO2 max." But a critical one that almost nobody talks about, he said, is bunch efficiency: how economically a rider sits and moves within the peloton.
Think about what that means. Two riders with identical FTPs can arrive at the bottom of the decisive climb in completely different states, because one spent the previous four hours fighting the wind, surging to hold position, and braking and accelerating out of every corner, while the other sat calm in the bunch, drafted intelligently, held their place without panic, and barely touched their reserves. On paper they're equal. In reality one has a full tank and the other is running on fumes. The energy saved in the bunch is invisible to a power meter's headline numbers but utterly decisive to the result.
For amateurs this is enormous, because bunch efficiency is trainable and most riders never work on it. It's positioning, anticipation, smooth cornering, drafting close, not braking when you don't need to, reading the road so you're never caught out of position. Develop it and you effectively raise your usable fitness without raising a single physiological number — you simply waste less of what you already have. The riders who seem to finish strong "without the watts to justify it" usually have this in spades. It's the racecraft layer that sits on top of the engine, and it rewards attention far more than another threshold block would.
How to put belief to work as an amateur
It's one thing to agree that belief matters and another to use it, so it's worth being concrete. The practical version of Barrett's point is about how you choose and then relate to a plan.
When you pick a training approach — a structured plan, an app, a coach — stop optimising for which one is theoretically best and start optimising for which one you'll actually commit to. Do you understand the logic behind it? Does it fit the life you really live, not the one you wish you had? Do you trust the person or system delivering it? A plan that scores nine out of ten on the science but two out of ten on those questions will lose to one that's the other way around, because you'll execute the second and quietly sabotage the first.
And once you've chosen, the belief has to be protected. The fastest way to destroy a plan is to keep second-guessing it mid-block — swapping sessions because a YouTube video made a different approach sound better, abandoning the easy weeks because they feel too easy, never staying with anything long enough to find out if it works. That churn is the enemy of belief, and belief is the enemy of churn. Pick something credible, commit to it for a real block, and judge it on results, not on the doubts that surface every time you're tired. Consistency, as ever, is the thing that separates riders who improve from riders who keep starting over — a theme that runs through the self-coached mistakes most amateurs make.
Training bunch efficiency
Because bunch efficiency is so underrated, it's worth saying how you'd actually improve it, since unlike your FTP it costs nothing but attention. Most of it is practised, not trained. In every group ride, work on holding a wheel without surging and braking, on anticipating the accordion effect through corners so you carry speed instead of sprinting out of every bend, on sitting in the draft rather than half-out in the wind, on moving up smoothly along the side of the bunch when it's calm rather than fighting for it when it's frantic. None of that shows up on a power file, which is exactly why it's neglected — but it's the difference between arriving at the finale fresh or fried. Treat the skill of wasting less energy as seriously as you treat the work of producing more, and you raise your effective fitness without a single extra interval.
What to take from a WorldTour coach
Barrett's lessons land in an unexpected place for a man at the sport's cutting edge. The science is real and he uses it, but he's clear that it's not where the biggest gains are for most riders. Find a plan and a coach you believe in — properly believe in, because belief is what makes any plan work. Train your questions, not just your legs — a better question finds the real limiter. And remember that a huge slice of race performance is bunch efficiency, the unglamorous skill of wasting less energy, which no power number will ever show you.
It's a humbling message for the data age: the perfect plan, perfectly ignored, does nothing. The flawed plan, fully believed, can take a rider to the WorldTour.
Hear Stephen Barrett's full set of coaching lessons on the Roadman podcast. For more on getting the most from coaching, read is a cycling coach worth it, and find a community that believes in the work on Skool.