Most amateur cyclists assume the gap between them and the World Tour is suffering. More intervals. More watts. More days when the legs are properly cooked.
It is not.
The gap is restraint. World Tour pros spend the majority of their training week riding at a pace that would embarrass a club run. The reason that pace works for them and the reason your version of "easy" is not the same thing comes down to a single overlooked layer of the training puzzle — your zones might be wrong, and the intensity you think is easy is doing the opposite of what you want.
Dr Christian Schrot, performance coach at Team Jayco, came on the Roadman Cycling Podcast to explain exactly why. The conversation reframed how I think about zone calibration, training load, and the trap most time-crunched amateurs fall into without realising it.
Listen to the full episode on the Roadman Cycling Podcast →
The Mixed Metabolism Zone — The Trap Most Amateurs Live In
Schrot has a phrase for the place most working cyclists train. He calls it the mixed metabolism zone. Below threshold. Above fat max. A grey middle that feels like training and produces almost nothing after the first few months.
His read on how amateurs end up there is brutal. Very often the time frame is very limited. It feels just awkward going super easy when you have limited time. So most of them have the tendency to train too hard.
That is the pattern visible in the lab data of riders who plateau after their first or second year of structured work. The cardiovascular system gets stimulated up to a point, then stops adapting. Threshold gets depressed because the anaerobic system is constantly switched on. Fat oxidation is undertrained because nothing is ever truly easy.
You can be putting in the hours, doing the intervals, following the plan — and quietly cooking yourself in a zone that does almost no useful work.
Why Your FTP Number Might Be Lying To You
Here is the part that genuinely changed how I think about training prescription.
The standard 20-minute FTP test, useful as it is for benchmarking, has a structural flaw when you derive zones from it. It gives you a power number. It tells you nothing about how your individual metabolism actually behaves at different intensities.
Two riders with identical FTPs can have completely different fat oxidation profiles. One might be a fat-burning machine, riding hours at 75% of FTP fuelled almost entirely by fat. The other switches to carbohydrate metabolism much earlier, dropping them into the mixed zone at an intensity their derived zone 2 says is fine. Same FTP. Different zones. Same plan applied to both produces opposite results.
The only way to know which rider you are is to measure it with a metabolic lab test using spirometry — the gases coming in and out as you ramp up. That is what Schrot prescribes for his Team Jayco riders. It is also what happened to me last year when I went into John Wakefield's lab in Girona for the Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe testing setup.
The week before, I had ridden 401 watts for 20 minutes. Not a bad number for an amateur. Using the old Andy Coggan FTP framework, my zone 2 sat at around 230 watts. That is what I had been training to. What I had been telling other riders to train to.
John spat out the lab data at the end of the test. My actual zone 2 — the intensity that would let me ride for hours, build endurance, develop fat oxidation — was 170 watts. Sixty watts lower than I had been riding it.
His exact line has stuck with me. You have a huge hole right here. I had got good at 20-minute tests. I had got good at racing my mates over 10-minute climbs. Aerobically I was falling apart after two hours and had no idea, because the FTP test did not see it.
That is the gap Schrot is describing. Not a small calibration issue. A blind spot in how amateurs derive zones from external data without ever seeing the internal physiology underneath.
Kilojoules, Not Just Stress Balance
The other shift Schrot has made is in how he tracks training load.
Most of us have been raised on the TrainingPeaks model — chronic training load, acute training load, training stress balance. TSS as the dominant currency. It works. The whole modern coaching ecosystem runs on it, and TrainingPeaks is still the right tool for most amateurs trying to keep their week visible to a coach.
What Schrot layers on top of that is granularity. Power data lets you break the kilojoules of mechanical energy in a ride down by zone. Some of those kilojoules come from fat, some from carbohydrate, and the split tells you whether the work actually landed where you wanted it to.
This is where the mixed metabolism zone becomes visible. A four-hour ride with 2,800 kilojoules of work looks like a productive endurance day on paper. Break it down and 70% of those kilojoules might be sitting in the mixed band. That is not an endurance ride. That is four hours of digging a hole the body cannot climb back out of.
The shift is from how stressed am I to where exactly did the work land. The second question is the more useful one.
The Time-Crunched Intensity Trap
Schrot pushes back hard on the message that has dominated time-crunched amateur coaching for the last decade — if you are short on hours, do more intensity.
His position is the opposite. Working cyclists who pull harder on the intensity lever because they cannot pull on duration or frequency build a fast-adapting system that hits a ceiling and then collapses. Initial gains. Quick stagnation. Then the same plateau that drove them to chase intensity in the first place.
His prescription for the time-crunched amateur is the polarised structure he uses with his pros, scaled to the hours available. Most of the week truly easy. One or two sessions a week of genuine high intensity. The 80/20 distribution should be read as a seasonal target, not a literal weekly accountancy — 15 to 28% at the higher end is still a polarised week.
The amateur who rides three 90-minute sessions of "kind of hard" a week — sweet spot, threshold, group rides at three-quarter gas — is doing exactly the kind of training that drops you into the mixed zone five days out of seven. The fix is rarely more intensity. The fix is splitting those sessions into truly easy days and one genuine VO2max effort.
Same conversation Vasilis Anastopoulos brought to the podcast when we talked through zone 2 at Astana. Same conversation Professor Stephen Seiler has been having for thirty years. Different vocabularies. Same underlying answer.
Knowing When To Quit A Hard Session
The other useful pivot Schrot offered is on how hard a hard session actually needs to be.
The default amateur instinct on a VO2max day is to push every interval to the redline. The cat 2 brain says you have not earned the session unless the last rep was a perfect 10 out of 10 and you are crawling off the bike.
Schrot's data tells a different story. Most VO2max sessions release the adaptations you are training for at an RPE of 7 to 8 out of 10. Going beyond that is mostly additive fatigue, not additional stimulus. The session that finishes at an honest 7 will produce roughly the same adaptation as the session that finishes at a wrecked 9, with a fraction of the recovery cost — which means you can repeat it sooner. And frequency across a season is what actually moves you forward.
I see this in the riders I coach. A 10-out-of-10 training block almost always becomes a 2-out-of-10 training block within a fortnight. An 8-out-of-10 block can be replicated for months. The rider who learns to leave a little in the tank is the one still progressing six months later, while the all-out merchant is sitting on the couch with a chest infection.
A useful rule — benchmark each session type against its own normal RPE. If your standard 2x20 threshold day usually sits at a 7 and today it is a 9 by the second interval, that is your cue to cut it short. The frequency you protect by quitting today is worth more than the kilojoules you would force out by continuing.
One more layer Schrot pushed — most rides should target one primary stimulus, not a mixed bag. Throwing sprints, sweet spot and a few VO2 efforts into the same long ride feels productive and dilutes all of it. The kitchen-sink session only earns its place once a block as a deliberate race simulation.
What You Can Do Without Walking Into A Lab
You probably do not have a metabolic cart in your spare room. The honest practical version of Schrot's argument for the working amateur is a four-step reset.
Step one — assume your zones are wrong. If you set them off a 20-minute FTP test, treat them as approximate. Your derived zone 2 is probably 10 to 20% too high. Drop the upper end by 10% for four weeks and see how the long rides feel.
Step two — apply a hard ceiling on easy days. Heart rate cap, talk test, or both. If you cannot hold a full conversation, you are out of the zone. Ease off without ego when a strong group goes up the road.
Step three — track kilojoules per zone, not just TSS. TrainingPeaks already gives you most of this. Look at where the work landed, not just how much there was. If most of your weekly kilojoules sit in the mixed band, that is the diagnosis.
Step four — when you go hard, target one stimulus and stop at a 7 to 8. Frequency over a season beats intensity over a fortnight, every time.
If you have access to a sports lab — John Wakefield runs the Science to Sport setup in Girona, there are good labs in Manchester, London, Dublin and across mainland Europe — a single metabolic test once or twice a year can save you from training off zones that are quietly miscalibrated. It is one of the highest-leverage spends a serious amateur can make. More valuable than a new wheelset for most riders.
The Roadman Take
Easy has to actually be easy. Hard has to actually be hard. And both have to be defined against your real metabolism rather than a number you derived from an hour of pain on a training road.
That is the same drum that gets hit on this podcast over and over again. Anastopoulos at Astana. Schrot at Jayco. Wakefield at Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe. Seiler in the lab. Different vocabularies. Same underlying answer.
The amateur version is fixable. Not easy. Fixable. The mental work of riding genuinely slow when your group ride is going up the road is harder than any interval session. The honesty of accepting your FTP test does not know your fat max is harder than buying another power meter.
If you want help auditing your week against this, that is exactly what we work on inside Roadman coaching. For a specific question about your own zones, ask the Roadman AI coach — it has been trained on every episode I have recorded with the coaches who actually do this work.
You are not done yet.
Key Takeaways
- The mixed metabolism zone — below threshold, above fat max — is where most amateur progress dies. It feels productive and produces little.
- A 20-minute FTP test gives you a power number, not a metabolic profile. Two riders with the same FTP can have completely different zones.
- Anthony's lab test with John Wakefield dropped his zone 2 from 230 watts to 170 watts. The "easy" rides were not easy.
- Kilojoules per zone is a sharper load lens than a single TSS figure. TrainingPeaks already gives you most of the inputs.
- Time-crunched amateurs who add intensity to compensate for missing volume usually make the plateau worse, not better.
- VO2max sessions trigger most of their adaptation by RPE 7 to 8 out of 10. Anything beyond that is mostly fatigue.
- Frequency over a season beats peak intensity in a fortnight. The 8-out-of-10 block can be repeated for months. The 10-out-of-10 block usually breaks.
- One stimulus per session. Mixing threshold and VO2max in the same ride dilutes both.
- For the broader picture of how this fits with the polarised model, see our 80/20 grey zone reset and the polarised training cycling guide.
- For the framing pros bring to it from the practitioner side, what pros say about amateur training is the natural next read.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the mixed metabolism zone in cycling training?
The mixed metabolism zone is the intensity band Dr Christian Schrot of Team Jayco identifies as the most common reason amateur cyclists stall. It sits below lactate threshold but above fat max — too hard to recover from properly, not hard enough to drive a meaningful aerobic adaptation. Most time-crunched amateurs train there by default because it feels productive. The fix is stricter zone discipline, with truly easy days under fat max and genuinely hard sessions above threshold, rather than the moderate middle most riders default to.
Is a metabolic lab test better than an FTP test for setting cycling zones?
Yes, according to Schrot. A 20-minute FTP test gives you a power number but tells you nothing about how your individual metabolism actually behaves at different intensities. A lab test using spirometry measures fat and carbohydrate oxidation rates directly, which is the only way to see exactly where your fat max sits. Two riders with the same FTP can have completely different fat oxidation profiles, so the same derived zones can be productive for one and counterproductive for the other.
How do you monitor cycling training load without using TSS?
Schrot tracks kilojoules and energy expenditure by zone rather than relying on a single TSS figure. The benefit is granularity — you can see how much actual work is being done at each intensity, which makes the mixed metabolism zone visible. TrainingPeaks still gives you a single training stress balance number, but the modern approach also breaks load down into kilojoules in zone 1, zone 2, and above threshold.
How do you know when to quit a VO2max interval session?
Schrot's position is that most VO2max sessions trigger the adaptations you want by an RPE of 7 to 8 out of 10. Beyond that, you mostly add fatigue without adding stimulus. Benchmark each session type against its normal RPE — if your standard threshold session is suddenly a 9 by the second interval, you are stacking fatigue rather than building adaptation. Cutting the session short on those days protects the frequency that drives long-term progress.
Should time-crunched cyclists do more high-intensity training?
Schrot's answer is the opposite of the standard internet line. Working cyclists with limited hours typically default to more intensity because they cannot add volume — and that decision often makes the plateau worse. The better model for the time-crunched athlete is the same polarised structure pros use, scaled to the hours available — most of the week genuinely easy, one or two genuinely hard sessions, and the discipline to stay out of the mixed metabolism zone in between.