Most self-coached cyclists aren't failing because they're lazy. They're failing because they keep making the same five mistakes, and nobody's told them what those mistakes actually are. This episode of the Roadman Cycling podcast calls them out.
Key Takeaways
The biggest one is AI coaching. The problem isn't that AI is bad at generating training plans. It's that you don't know what you don't know. Anthony spoke to Dr. Sam Impey about this and the cramping example is the clearest illustration of it: you go to AI and say you're cramping because of low sodium, AI gives you a masterclass on electrolytes, and you go deeper and deeper into the wrong answer. The real reason you cramped is you went way above your lactate threshold. Any coach zooms out to that immediately. AI follows wherever you steer it.
The other four mistakes are just as fixable. Self-coached athletes consistently overestimate what they can get done in a week, leaving zero time for admin like food prep, kit setup, and data uploading, so the plan fails from day one. They misread freshness scores and push their TSB more negative than needed because there's nobody one step removed telling them to pull back. They worship FTP while ignoring event-specific demands — Matthew van der Poel doesn't have top 20-30 watts per kilogram in the world tour peloton and he won Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix. And they make training decisions based on a single morning HRV number instead of the full picture. Joe Friel's morning check-in questions are a better starting point than any wearable metric.
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