Steve Cummings is one of those riders it's easier to describe by what he didn't do than by what he won — though the palmarès is serious: an Olympic track medal, two Tour de France stage wins, a Vuelta stage, the Tour of Britain, a national title. The reason he stuck in the memory of every cycling fan who watched that era is that he never conformed. He was the peloton's last maverick, a rider who did things his own way in an era when the sport was being industrialised around him.
I was a giddy fan getting him on the podcast, because Cummings is exactly the kind of rider the modern, dialled-in, everything-measured peloton produces fewer and fewer of. And buried in his independence is the single most important lesson for anyone coaching themselves: the willingness to take what the experts say, test it on yourself, and tweak it until it fits you. Let me break down what the maverick teaches the self-coached rider.
The maverick versus the factory
You can't talk about Cummings without the Team Sky chapter, and it tells you everything. Sky was the most systematised team cycling had ever seen — formal, rigid, structured down to the last detail, a performance factory. And into that walked Cummings, an instinctive, independent operator. The result, by his own account, was a clash of cultures. The outlaw and the factory were never going to live happily together.
There's no villain in that story — Sky's system won a lot of bike races. But it's a perfect illustration of a truth the cycling internet forgets: one-size-fits-all doesn't fit everyone. A system optimised for the group can be wrong for the individual inside it. And here's what matters for you: as a self-coached rider, you don't have a factory imposing a system on you. You have the freedom Cummings had to spend his whole career chasing — the freedom to do what actually works for you. That freedom is your single biggest advantage, and most amateurs waste it by slavishly copying whatever programme is trending instead of building one around themselves.
Tweak the system to fit yourself
The clearest example Cummings gave was nutrition. He went through a phase of trying to get as lean and efficient as possible, experimenting with low-carb and fasted approaches, working with the nutritionist Barry Murray — a man, as it happens, who's helped out on the coaching side with us too. He talked about getting metabolically efficient, half-joking that the idea was the caveman diet, meat and berries, except the caveman didn't ride a bike, so he had to put a few carbs back in and tweak the system to fit himself.
That phrase — tweak the system to fit himself — is the whole philosophy of good self-coaching in five words. He didn't adopt a diet wholesale because a book or a podcast told him to. He took the idea, tested it on his own body, kept what worked, and adjusted the rest until it suited him. That's n=1 done properly: methods are starting points to experiment with, not commandments to obey.
But — and this matters enormously — he also understood the limits, and so should you.
Know when to revert
This is the part that separates a thoughtful experimenter from a fad-chaser. Cummings was clear that he scaled the fasting back around racing, because turning up to a race fasted was too much of a shock to the body. During a Tour, he'd have carbs. The experimentation lived in training and in the off-season; when the goal arrived, he reverted to what the goal demanded.
That discipline is the guardrail every self-coached rider needs. Experiment all you like in the base phase and the quiet weeks. But when your event is close, you fuel for the work — you don't roll up to your target sportive on a low-carb whim and find out at mile 60 that the experiment has cost you the day. I have to be honest here, because it's my job to be: extreme fasted and low-carb training is not something I'd hand to most amateurs as a blanket prescription. The evidence and the experience say most riders perform and feel better fuelling for the work they actually do — I've laid out the nuance in the fasted riding myth and fasted versus fuelled. What worked for one elite professional with expert support and a track pedigree is not a template for your Tuesday night. The transferable lesson isn't Cummings's diet. It's Cummings's method: test, individualise, and revert to proven fuelling when it counts.
The calculated maverick against the clock
The other thing that made Cummings different was how he raced. He came from the track — an Olympic team pursuit pedigree, which is a discipline of pure calculation against the clock, of holding an exact effort to the metre. That self-knowledge carried onto the road, where he built a reputation as one of the most calculated riders in the bunch: a man who seemed to know exactly when to commit, who timed his moves with a precision that looked like instinct but was really deep self-understanding.
That's the deepest lesson of all for the self-coached rider, and it's the opposite of chasing a template. Cummings won because he knew himself — his effort, his limits, his timing — better than a generic plan ever could. The self-coached rider's superpower is exactly this intimate self-knowledge: how your body responds, where your limits really are, what you can hold and for how long. A coach builds that knowledge for you. Coaching yourself, you have to build it deliberately — through honest feedback, through testing, through paying attention. Do it, and you get the maverick's edge: a read on yourself that no off-the-shelf plan can match. The time-trial fundamentals are a good place to start practising that calculated self-knowledge, because the clock never lies about whether you paced it right.
What the track taught him about pacing
It's worth lingering on where Cummings came from, because the track is the key to the maverick. He was an Olympic team pursuit rider — a discipline that is, at its core, the purest pacing exercise in cycling. Four riders, a set distance, and a single brutal question: can you hold the exact right effort, no more and no less, for the whole thing? Go too hard early and you blow and cost the team. Go too easy and you lose. The pursuit teaches a rider to know their effort to the watt and to the second.
Carry that onto the road and you get the Cummings the fans remember: a rider who seemed to know precisely when to commit, who timed his efforts with a precision that looked like luck but was really arithmetic. He understood his own engine well enough to spend it perfectly.
For the self-coached rider, this is the most practical lesson of all, and you don't need a velodrome to learn it. Pacing is self-knowledge made visible. The time trial — the race of truth — is where you build it, because the clock gives you instant, honest feedback on whether you judged your effort right. Go out too hard and the second half tells you. Hold it just right and you finish knowing exactly what you had. Practise pacing efforts, on a climb or a flat test, and you start to develop the same intimate read on your own limits that made Cummings so effective. The maverick wasn't guessing. He knew himself. That knowledge is the one thing a template can never give you, and it's entirely yours to build.
The honest version of "do it your own way"
It would be easy to turn Cummings into a slogan — be a maverick, ignore the rules, do your own thing. That's not the lesson, and it's not what he did. He didn't ignore the science; he engaged with it deeply, worked with experts, and experimented seriously. What made him a maverick was that he refused to let any system override his own read of what worked for him, and he had the self-knowledge to back that judgement up.
For the self-coached rider, that's the model. Not stubbornness. Not contrarianism. Thoughtful individualism — take the best ideas out there, test them honestly on yourself, keep what works, drop what doesn't, and always revert to what the goal demands when it matters. Do that, and you get the best of both worlds: the rigour of the science and the freedom of the maverick.
The peloton produces fewer Steve Cummingses every year, as the systems get tighter and the riders get more uniform. But the rider coaching themselves on six hours a week has the one thing the factory can't give: the freedom to build everything around the one athlete that matters. Use it the way Cummings did — thoughtfully, honestly, and entirely your own way.
Hear the full conversation with Steve Cummings on the Roadman podcast. If you coach yourself, read the five mistakes self-coached cyclists make, and bring your experiments to the community on Skool.