Coachinginterview

5 FIXABLE MISTAKES EVERY SELF COACHED CYCLIST MAKES

31:14·19 February 2026

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Self-coached cyclists don’t fail because they’re not tough — they fail because they keep making the same five fixable mistakes. In this episode, we’re calling them out (nicely), breaking down why they keep showing up for serious leisure riders, road racers, and gravel racers, and sharing the simple adjustments that make the biggest difference fast. We’ll also touch on a modern trap: letting HRV/readiness scores and wearable metrics steer your entire week — and how to think about trends without getting paralyzed by the numbers. Expect real-world race context, a few gentle call-outs, and practical takeaways you can use on your very next ride.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT7 SECTIONS

Folks, we're live. Thanks for tuning in

Folks, we're live. Thanks for tuning in. This is something new we tried last week or the week before for the first time that when we're doing our weekly show, we're gonna go live a little bit before it and give you kind of a look behind the scenes. So, the plan is today I have to leave for the dentist in 35 minutes. So, it will be shorter than that. But the plan is today to do myself and Sarah. Say hello Sarah. Hello everybody. To do uh writer support. It's about five fixable mistakes self-coached cyclists make. Yep. I have made quite a few of these. And then if we have time, I want to do a little bit for our school community. We're reopening the school community. Yes. Pretty soon. Well, actually, this is live. So, I wasn't planning on making this announcement till next week, but if you're on the live, you can now reapply to join the school community. Do we have a way for people to reapply? I will po post the link in the description of the live. That's probably the best way to do it. Sorry, I don't have the link there. You have it. Yeah, I think I can find it when you talk. Sorry, you did ask me to do that earlier and I totally forgot. So, apologies about that. I'm going to get in so much trouble when this is this isn't live. If you keep the show going there, I'll be able to find out the the URL. Yeah, keep the show going. No pressure at all. So, this is kind of interesting that we're doing the live because you're going to get to see all of the mistakes that we make as we're recording and me usually saying something stupid and then Wes having to cut it out. So, you'll everyone who's watching will be able to see these faux paws that I make constantly. And usually if I I know if I make a mistake because Anony's eyes get real wide and he doesn't blink and he stares at me for like longer than usual. So I know that I've, you know, need to row back or stop saying that. Okay, good job keeping the show going. Thank you. So I have the URL. So if you want to So we launched the community, not done yet, uh about four or five weeks ago. We put in an initial group of applicants and it's going super well. We've hired coaches. We're building out content in there. We've built out like had Phil Bort on physio from Inos and British Cycling. David Dunn who founds Hexus extract some podcasts with Stephen Sailor Vasilus Anastopoulos Dan Lang loads of cool stuff in there. So we're doing coaching, nutrition, recovery, strength and conditioning and community tribe. The kind of five pillars of performance on column for everyone. So I did find the URL. It's just romancecycling.com20262026. Sarah will put it in the description down below, but you can apply to join again now. It's $195 euro 100 sorry $195 US per month uh if you do get accepted in as an applicant. Uh I think we're going to keep applications open for a while. Yeah. So what the the pro the the way the process works it's really simple is you go on to that URL. You put fill out the application. It literally takes you 90 seconds. I review all the applicants and then I will email you back. I email absolutely everybody back whether they're successful or we think it's not a very good fit. So yeah, have a little look at that and looking forward to popping you some emails and learning more about you and the goals that you have over the next year. Okay, we get started with five uh fixable mistakes self coach cyclists make. So this is our rider support for this week. Final sip of coffee cold coffee. Okay, so I'm going to do the intro into this camera and then we will roll as always and if you make a mistake, it's live. H let me read it for us. Self coach cyclist not fail because they're not motivated. Self coach cyclists don't fail because they're not motivated. They fail because they keep making the same fixable five mistakes over and over again. Today we're calling out them mistakes. We're showing you how to fix them mistakes fast. And we're leaving you with simple changes that you can apply in your very next training session. Sarah, we're seeing mistakes, the same mistakes over and over again in true, you know, we get the questions on email coming in through socials and we've kind of identified a pattern of things that self- coach athletes are doing and we're here to call them out and hopefully give you some fixes. Some of them not really have any fixes. Like we'll dive into the first one maybe straight away which is AI coaching. This doesn't really have a fix only use AI coach. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people rely on AI more and more obviously in their day-to-day business, but like specifically for coaching and probably nutrition and stuff.

There's definitely pitfalls, isn't there

There's definitely pitfalls, isn't there? There's a few pitfalls. Okay. So, we we want to rally through some of the pitfalls of why we're seeing really bad outcomes for people with AI coaching. One of them I talked to Dr. Sam I impy on the podcast and it was the first time I'd heard this pitfall but I've observed it over and over again. It's as a cyclist we have an incomplete knowledge. You know those there's things we know there's things we don't know and then there's a third category of stuff we don't even know we don't know. It's the stuff that we don't even know we don't know that really hurts us in this context. So, an example is if somebody goes in and says, "I'm experiencing really bad cramps on long climbs in my sportifs. I need to fix this. I think it might be caused by low sodium levels." So, now AI is going to come back and tell you everything you need to know about sodium, magnesium, potassium, electrolyte, heat management, and you're going to go deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole each time you write back in this conversation. But the reality is you've just steered it in the wrong way. And AI is very bad at zooming out and seeing the whole picture. The reality is you weren't cramping because you mismanaged your electrolyte balance. You were cramping because you were way above the level or way above your limit. You're just you're flooding yourself with lactate. You've not adequately prepared for the intensity. You're riding that. That's the obvious answer that any coach would zoom out. Like if you started the conversation with me and you're like, "Oh, I'm cramping. I think I got my salts wrong." I'd be like, "Let's back this up a second. You're not cramping cuz you got your your salts wrong. You're cramping because you went way too hot into the first climb or you tried to go with the early break and you blew your lights and you couldn't clear like 17 uh lactate score from your legs. That's why you're cramp, not because of the salts." And people just do that over and over. Bad prompts follow the bad prompts with a bad conversation and then apply that bad information into their training. Yeah. Because AI, as you said, whatever way you steer it, it will almost back you up to kind of go down that rabbit hole and go deeper and deeper into that mistake that you're making. It is a it's a good tool to have, but it's for something that's as important as cycling. Like, we're all trying to get better at cycling. We have big goals. Maybe you're training 8 10 hours, maybe more per week. You're putting a lot of time into it. Other parts of your life are not, you know, getting looked at. family, friends, community because you're spending so much time with the bike. Why trust a being, you know, or we're calling it a being, a sentient being a sentient being with this thing that is so important to you and it's so important for you to improve. So, there's a few more uh problems with it that I'm seeing over and over again. So, I'll call that the cramping example. Another one is in our not done yet uh coaching community which we started in the new year which is going class by the way. We're loving it. We're taking applicants again. So we're going to throw that link down below. It's romancecycling.com2026 if you want to come and be part of our coaching community. There's a short application and then you can jump in. But one of the things that we're seeing in the community is most people don't sign up for coaching just because they need a training plan. And this is the problem. AI will spit you out a training plan. No problem. But it's what's on the far side of the training plan when an actual person builds your training plan. It's accountability. It's why like these stupid training apps like you download an app on your phone or you log into some software. I've never felt a pull to on a like, you know, I've had a busy day. It's 7 o'clock at night. I still haven't done my 90minute session. Never in my life. And I've signed up for all of these training platforms because we've had a few of them reaching out saying, "Would we endorse these training platforms?" And I' I've tried them quite extensively. I've never felt a pull to be like, "Oh, I I need to do this because I don't want to miss a session. My AI I'll be disappointed in my AI." Yeah. But man, I do not want to disappoint my coach. Like I just feel that judgment. I do not want to miss a session and have to explain to him how I'm lesser of a human than he thought I was. [gasps and laughter] It's so funny is that we have another coach in not done yet, Matthew. And I know Anthony coaches me, but I know that Matthew looks at my f my files [gasps] and I'm like trying to impress Matthew as much as I'm trying to, you know, impress onto Anthony that I've done a really good job at this session and that is very very motivating for me.

Another example is Dolingo. I think everybody in the entire world has…

Another example is Dolingo. I think everybody in the entire world has had a Dolingo account at some point or another. these prompts that I get from Duolingo like for the last two weeks that I haven't done one single lesson and just meeting them. It's not like okay I I owe that little bird you know 10 minutes of my time or it's guilting me into it. It's more a person that you need on the other side to give you those feels. And I also think on that person, it's when you're not I bang this drum all the time because community is so important, but when you're not 15 anymore or three, like my nephew had like 40 kids at his party and he's three years old. When you're not three, you don't have like a bunch of friends anymore. And you've got like your club mates, you maybe one or two friends that you're still carrying from childhood, a couple of work associates, whatever. But you don't have this gang that's just rooting for you. Everyone's so wrapped up in their own stuff. Like they just are so selfobsessed and not in a bad way, just people have limited time to care about other people. So when you have that coaching relationship, you h you're paying someone to be in your corner and care about your outcomes. Like I genuinely really care about the lads and coaching. like you know one of the boys on holidays at the moment and he's been under the weather and I'm just like I've been going through his bloods and I've been analyzing them with a friend of mine who's a doctor on a world tour team and I've been going through them and like I can't wait for him to get back to talk about the results of this like I genuinely care about his outcomes and I don't think you can get that with an AI coach. Well, like anytime anybody gets a PB or, you know, has a tiny little win in the community, like it it really pumps us up. Like we absolutely love it, those tiny little stories. So, yeah. The last one I'd like to throw in to this before you move on is hallucinations. AI is even at the highest levels, you know, what are beyond opus 4 or 4.5, I can't remember what the model is now in Claude and ChachiBT is up to 5.4. The hallucinations haven't got any better. They're still massive. Massive hallucinations. hallucination is. Do you remember I was working with uh Christian Vandervel and we're on the breakaway coaching app. We're trying to build an AI coaching app. You'd see then that like the AI would literally hallucinate like it would make something up. So somebody would ask a question and say, "Hey, how do I do an Apple Health integration?" Which was something we didn't have an Apple Health integration. And the AI be like, "Oh yeah, cool. No problem. Just click the menu on the top left corner and in the third dropdown, scroll across there. menu didn't exist in the top left corner. Third drop down didn't exist. So, I've seen AI hallucinations where people would feed in their training block and be like, "Hey, I feel like I'm on the brink of overtraining. Should I push on for another week or should I pull back?" And it'd be like, "No, push on for another week, but cook carbohydrates." Oh, wow. You know, like really dangerous information. And if you don't know, as he said, you don't know what you don't know. You have no way to validate it. Yeah. It's like, you know, I was working on trying to pull some data for a podcast script we're working on uh just before this and it's around it's something maybe I'll do a live on it tomorrow. It's around low torque high torque low cadence efforts. But I used AI to pull one of the studies that I'm referencing and it's like yeah high low high torque low cadence work seen better outcomes by a factor of 20. Oh wow. Than self- selective cadence. and init like intuitively it's like well that's obviously wrong but if you don't have that prior information you don't know that that's obviously wrong yeah okay I never heard of AI hallucinations but yeah it's a big thing like people hallucinate yeah it did happen a few times in Badlands [gasps] I kept seeing this like fake finish line but nope okay next thing that we see a lot of self-coached athletes come to us with kind of problems around overestimating their capabilities of what they can get done in a week and because I had an interesting section just before we're not done yet when I was gathering data on it just talking to people who are self coached and looking through their training plans and consistency Steven like nailed this into me and there's two or three podcast visits that we have because every time he keeps emphasizing every time he's on the podcast and he's probably actually due for a follow-up fourth appearance but consistency in sessions is what determines your long-term success.

How do you get consistency wrong

And how do you get consistency wrong? Well, there's a couple of ways. Too much intensity gets your consistency wrong. You train too hard and then you start missing sessions. But another way to undermine your consistency is just completely overestimating the volume you can get through in a week. When you look at your Google calendar of what you have to do for the week and you're like, "Okay, I have four hours available on a Saturday morning." and you put a 4hour ride in, I would say you're much better placed to stick in like a two and a half or a three-hour ride because when you put a four-hour ride in, you've left yourself zero minutes for admin. And by admin, I'm so big on admin and this word since I had like a US tier one operator on the podcast. Admin's everything that goes into premission, postmission. So, it's everything that goes into food prep, getting your kit ready, making sure your bike is in working order, uploading your data, playing around with training screens, charging, you know, quirks, power and shramm batteries, all this stuff. That's all admin. And you leave yourself zeroable zero errors for admin. The plan is built to fail. But it's even not even yeah of course the admin stuff but last night for instance I was doing uh over under session on the indoor trainer and I did it really late that then I at really late then that affected my sleep last night like which bleeds into my motivation today. So it has a million different spiderw webs of how it affects your day-to-day training and your training going forward. Yeah. And an interesting stat that it does affect, I've been using the ultra human ring, which is brilliant. It's like another layer of data because it has the homebased system and the ring when you eat late, what I've noticed, so you tag that you eat late. And what I've noticed on the report is now your time for your heart rate to drop. Heart rate drop score takes longer when you eat. And I actually got a warning to say stop eating so close to bed. It was taking like three hours for my heart rate to drop to, you know, baseline levels. So when you go into that late night session, eating late after it, you're totally right. It knocks it's a knock-on in terms of the obvious one, sleep debt. You just physically sleep less. Quantitative hours, but also the quality of the sleep is different as well. And that's people aren't always measuring that and that just drives burnout. And then what about okay so we see this I know you're saying overestimating volume and available time and I know when we're in let's say the training peaks app the thing that you'll see come up on the homepage immediately is your fatigue fitness and form scores. Yeah. Performance management chart. So this is essentially what we can use is it or how do we read these numbers or how does the self coach athletes use these numbers to make sure that they are getting their volume right that they're not pushing too hard that they're fresh. explain. It's I won't go to the whole performance management chart because I think that's like a different podcast on its own. But I think with the mistake that self- coached athletes use or make over and over again. It's misunderstanding the freshness score. So that's the difference between your CTL and your ATLs, your training stress balance. We call that the freshness score. But they constantly want to push a little bit more because they're super motivated. And it's actually an impossible thing to get out of because by definition you have a subjective understanding, not an objective understanding because you're not one person removed from this. If I was to objectively pay a coach, which I do even myself pay a coach for my training, my coach will look at that freshness score and be like, let's pull it back for a week. We don't need to draw like maybe you can get another week in, but maybe you can't. So why would we risk that? Let's just pull it back now. absorb the training, get the adaptation, which is what we're setting out to do. Like we're trying to get faster, get the adaptation by taking the easy week now, and then we can build again. Self- coached athletes always want to push that TSB slightly further negative, run the risk of burnout, and often they don't run the risk. They step way across the line. Yeah. Okay. The next one is this. We see it a lot as well, particularly in our community, where people are obsessed with the FTP numbers. they have this almost, you know, godlike worship for threshold numbers and knowing that their FTP has increased by 2% over the last three weeks or something and then they kind of ignore the the things that they need to actually be training for their events like the spec specific things that could say specificity. Yeah. That their race actually demands. I would say a great example of this is we're coming into classic season. who is likely to be the best classics rider again this year.

Matthew Vanderpal. Yeah, Matthew Vanderpole doesn't have the highest…

Matthew Vanderpal. Yeah, Matthew Vanderpole doesn't have the highest watts per kilogram. And that should be all you need to know about how misinformed this pitcher is. Matthew Vanderpole doesn't have top 10, top 20, maybe even top 30 or 40 watts per kilogram in the World Tour Pelaton. He won Milan San Ramo last year. He won Par Rubé last year. He was in the final of Flanders last year. It's like how is he doing this? Well, he's focusing on the demands of his event. So, you look at your event and maybe it's possible that it is a watts per kilogram event. Are you doing a a tap the tour that's going over to call the Gibby? That's going to be a watts per kilogram event. You're 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes at threshold riding this power to weight really matters for most of the events that most people are doing. Like I look at the Irish road racing scene aren't going to do you very much. opening race the season two minute climb next race three minute climb next race 30 second climb that you'll ride a bunch of times focusing on the efforts that actually move the needle for your results like shorter duration stuff and then the other thing that I see cropping up again and again is something called race craft that you're not going to get from somebody like an AI or it's going to be difficult for you to learn on your own without a coach who's that little bit more exper experience than you and again it's something that I'm fascinated with purely because I don't have any race craft but you know those little how you can dig into a race how you can coach can dig into like the parkour of a race and kind of kind of teach you give you tidbits about let's say the sprint example that we you and I were chatting about the other night like when to open your sprint up like what does the final 500 meters of the sprint this is actually really interesting I must do a full podcast on this cuz this is like something I'm really enjoying at the moment we have a Monday call inside our not done yet coach community. It's a group call and increasingly I'm starting to see that there's such a gap between people that cycle and people who have this deeper level knowledge. It's like when I was in France the expression lame metier was just banged into me and that's like the apprenticeship and the apprenticeship there's no destination with that. You're always the student because even when you're the professor if you're not also a student you're not worthy to tag a professor. So, you always need to be learning. And it's it's amazing to me that some people have just zero appetite for learning this. And it's not even zero appetite, but zero exposure to it. And then when you give them some exposure, like I didn't even know this world existed. Yeah. That's how I feel when we we talk about it. I'm like, God, there's so much that I don't know about this. Personally, I haven't done that much racing, but my brain's not even really functioning as in like trying to think tactically around what's happening or moves that are happening next because I'm usually in the red. But it is definitely something that I want to dig in more and taking the experience from your coach. Yeah, because is just invaluable. Well, like we were calling a lot of a course management the other night and course management is the idea of how do you take the parkour the terrain of a course and use it in a way that suits your capability. So for me I'm 79 80 kilograms. If I go and race say the Ross the Tour of Ireland this year, I know it's going to be very difficult for me on the second last stage to get over two cat one climbs back to back because my just row watts per kilogram, even if I'm doing five, five and a half watts per kilogram, it's probably not going to be enough to get over in the front group with guys, you know, at that level. So, how do I manage the course to be in the front group at the finish? That's the problem you're trying to solve for. So, it's okay. You could be super conservative, start the climb at the front, know that you're going to get dropped and try and come back on the descent in the cars. That's one way you could do it. You could try get out ahead of the race and on the climb in the early break and then get dropped deliberately out of the brake where you're just climbing at your own speed and hope the front of the bunch catches you. But that's managing the time gap then between the brake and the bunch. So there's loads of different ways you can, you know, you can do that, but that's collectively just course management. And there's so many different scenarios you can do that like Fred Wright was in the very front of Turf Flanders with Bugatta and Machu Vanderpole and you know the two best riders in the world and Fred Wright who you know I love Fred but with respect he's not the tour best rider in the world and he's there.

You've done that with course management and as well as that another…

You've done that with course management and as well as that another point that Matthew made um the other night we were just chatting about it um his uh someone he coaches is one of the world riders on the women's EF team and he was looking basically it got flagged that every time she came out of a corner she was at like 1,000 watts 1,200 watts now she has that power but what was determined then after was that essentially all these massive micro accelerations were draining her for later periods in the race. So that's something that they are going to work on. And again, that's going to be very difficult to pinpoint unless you have somebody who's looking at your file and kind of picking out these tiny little marginal gains that you can kind of take on board to make the entirety of the race successful. And that's kind of one of what I want to move on to next is these marginal gains. Now, not in the aspect of the 1% and the 1% and the 1%. I think as like cyclists who have a lot to learn, who are self- coached, the marginal gains that actually matter at this level are not the arrow socks or potentially. No, I think this would be like more appropriately tagged like massive gains, not marginal gains. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, because marginal gains are like you're saying, they're socks, aren't they? the you know slightly faster racing gloves or different base layer or something like that getting into the wind tunnel and getting your position dialed or you know should I have a beard or no beard kind of thing. No beard sir [gasps] noted but I but I think there are these as you said massive gains that recreational serious leisure riders and racers do completely ignore when they're just like drilling into these numbers and absolutely flailing themselves on the turbo trainer every week. Yeah. like some of them look we don't have to rattle through them but it's I think the the message here is when you're self coached you're so focused on your training that you know we keep talking about inside the not done yet community that if the goal is to go faster the framework to go faster is not just training there's five pillars the five pillars of performance that's what makes you go faster and the five pillars of performance are yes training training needs to be structured I'm a huge fan of reverse periodized training training needs to be structured But you also need nutrition to support this. You know, you need world class nutrition. And the nutrition needs to support your training. You need strength and conditioning that both supports your sessions. You know, there's no point in doing the wrong SNC session and taking a snap out of your sprint if you're in a strength sprint block. But there's huge sprint gains by having like Daniel Ston coaching, one of the road man lads who's in the not done yet community. Like Daniel's put on a massive amount. He's put a couple hundred watts onto his sprint this year and that's largely by being in the gym at the right times. So it's like you've they're your first three pillars. Then we have recovery as another pillar and we have this idea of community and tribe as a pillar. I think if you're missing any of those pillars, you're missing the idea like because the idea is to go faster and the framework to go faster is those five pillars. So if you're missing one of those, which we always see with self coach athletes, they focus on just training or maybe training plus one other, but very rarely in a joined up system. And that's why I think just there's suboptimal results for most self- coach athletes. And that's the literally the light bulb moment that went off in your head about those five pillars after speaking after doing 1,300 podcasts and talking to all those experts, a lot of podcasts that these are the five things that you do need to incorporate. Okay, the very last one I want to talk about and this is very buzzy at the moment. Everyone's obsessed with everyone has been, you know, wearing the wearables for a long time and people are getting, I think, even more entrenched in HRV numbers, readiness to train. There's all this information that's been thrown at us and yes, while it's kind of it can be quite useful, it can also be misused. I've Dr. Dan PL is coming back on the podcast. He's been on before. Dan PL is maybe the foremost expert in the world on heart rate variability. And I'm gonna do like a everything you need to know about heart rate variability podcast with him. I think that's going to be super valuable. But for me, the part that athletes miss when they use heart rate variability, self- coach athletes as opposed to coaches, coaches are getting really good at using this to guide training decisions. Self- coached athletes are too reactive. They look at too short a tail on heart rate variability and make a decision for should I train today, should I train hard today based off how they wake up and their metrics that morning when what they should actually be doing is listening to their body.

How do you feel today? That's a much better metric

How do you feel today? That's a much better metric. Heart rate variability is one data point. You have a bunch of different data points. Your training peaks data like you know where are you in that you talked about your TSB? Where is that? Where's your CTL? All that stuff. It's another data point. But these data points aren't equally weighted. The data point that matters most is listening to your body. How do you feel? And that's where the communication with your coach comes in. And I think on that, like just to rattle through these questions because I think they're some of the best questions ever written. And they're written by Joe Fel around listening to your body, waking up in the morning and starting to have a dialogue with your body. So it's like appetite. How is it high or low? What's your waking pulse rate? Is it higher than normal? What's your enthusiasm to train? Do you want to stay in bed? Your motivation to train. Your overall feeling. Do you feel fatigued or stressed? How's your mood? Are you usually grumpy, but now you're angry? Whatever it is, how's your sleep last night? Are you your lying versus standing heart rate? How's your health? Does something like not feel right? You know, sore throat, coming down with something, how's your muscles and joints? Heart rate variability, you can add that in there as well if you want. But like if you Google Joe Freel morning check-in questions, you'll get the list of questions. I think they're brilliant because it start you start to understand how to have a dialogue with yourself and not be just responsive to data. Yeah, I totally agree. Um I know there's new words that have been created around this kind of obsession with all of these metrics and sleep researchers have a term orthosomnia for when tracking data triggers anxiety and obsession with perfect scores. And it's the same vibe in training because you start chasing readiness numbers instead of executing the plan and you end up more stressed which ironically can make the metrics worse and like it definitely happens. I do find that the metrics for sleep are really helpful. I don't know how accurate they are but you know the errors that you've slept I mean they can't they're probably not so far off but I find that that's a really good one to focus on. Um I think as well that there's we're getting better at understanding these numbers like around HRV and I think damply that is going to be really really interesting kind of conversation that you have in them because HRV seems to be the buzz word at the moment but you have to be careful because HRV is literally like a snapshot like if you had one glass of wine last night your H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H H HRV is going to tank. Does that mean that you can't train today? No, absolutely not. of course you can train today. It was only one glass of wine. So it's like you do need to understand these numbers before you really, you know, hang kind of all of your decisions on them. But I like information. I also think that you're right that we do need to start to understand ourselves. And I think that's the difference between people who have been competing and training at a really high level, someone like yourself who is very in tune with themselves and okay, I don't feel great. Whereas myself coming from kind of a corporate background, never work, you know, never being in high performance athlete, I don't really understand myself yet. You know what I mean? So these numbers can be kind of helpful. But yeah, so I think maybe a bit of a balance of both. Okay, I think we'll wrap it up there, folks. That has been five fixable mistakes that self- coached athletes make. As I say, we have opened up our applications for the not done yet cycling coaching community. Again, it's romancecyclone.com/20262026 and the descript or sorry, the link to that is down below. Catch up soon. Are you laughing at me or laughing at Bree snoring? Both. Cuz I need to You were just like rolling, rolling, rolling. I'm like, "Shit, I need to go.

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SECRET TO ZONE 2 TRAINING - DOSE, FREQUENCY & DURATION

Zone 2: everyone’s talking about it, but how much do you really need? In this episode we dive into the great training debate — slow rides vs. speed work — and unpack what the science says about intensity balance, performance gains, and long-term fitness. We give you the dose, frequency and...

with Secret To Zone 2 Training

WHERE TO NEXT

COMPARISONSweet Spot vs Threshold vs Polarised: Which Cycling Training Method Actually Works?The cycling internet argues about this endlessly. The honest answer is that the right method depends on your weekly hours, your current limiter, and where you are in your season. Here's the decision tree.TOOLFTP Zone CalculatorEnter your FTP and get a complete 7-zone power table with wattage ranges and (optionally) heart-rate ranges per zone.ARTICLEHow to Climb Faster on the Bike: 5 Fixable Reasons You're Getting Dropped (And the Pacing Trick That Beat Pogacar)A 40-year-old amateur named Andrew Feather beat Pogacar up a climb in 2023 by sitting on a steady pace while Pogacar surged. The lesson isn't that the pro was off; it's that pacing wins climbs more often than power does.ARTICLECycling After 40: The Science of Getting Faster When Everyone Says You Should Slow DownSedentary people lose 10% of VO2max per decade. Masters athletes lose somewhere between 5% and 46%. The gap is training, not age — and the research on what actually works is clearer than the cycling internet pretends.

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