This Is Why 99% of Cyclists Never Get Faster

If you’ve hit a cycling fitness plateau like I have how do you get get faster on the bike without buying expensive upgrades? I chatted with pro cycling coach Andy Turner to find out the answers surprised me

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Everyone loves riding fast, don’t they? One of the best feelings on a bike, but if you have been riding for a while, you probably hit a plateau. So, how do you actually level up your speed? To really understand why so many cyclist stop improving, myself included, and what to do about it, I sat down with pro cycling coach Andy Turner. He’s worked with riders from beginners to world tour pros. And in this video, Andy breaks down three key workouts that can genuinely help you get faster on the bike. So, let’s dive in. What can I do? What workouts can you recommend to help you get faster? So, I think a lot of especially with online training plans, they tend to focus on your zone 2 endurance, your sweet spot, and your threshold work. Those tend to be you’ve seen it referred to as like the bread and butter and the best bang for your buck training doing sweet spot of threshold intervals. But you adapt to training based on the stress that you expose yourself to and you need to adapt the stress that you expose it to to get training adaptations. Um so if you’re just doing endurance sweet spot and threshold, yeah, you’re probably increasing some of the power gradually on those. You’re changing the duration of them. you’re doing small changes, but overall you’re not giving your body as many new training stimulus as you could be to get a greater gain over a shorter period of time. So, there are sort of three workouts and one off bike workout kind of structure that I would recommend to a lot of people. Um, so if we start off V2 max efforts, they are horrible. They hurt. They make you feel tired and they are absolutely brilliant. Um, so you’ve got the components of boosting your aerobic ceiling because you often hear about threshold work and it’s in reality there’s another threshold, your V2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen that you can take up and use to generate power. Um, and a lot of professionals, they can work at a very high percentage of that V2 max. Okay? Whereas a lot of us tend to work at a lower percentage of it sustainably. But if you can say you’ve boosted up your threshold as high as you can go, it’s not going anywhere further. you’ve reached your peak aerobic performance. You can’t increase the amount of time that you can do this power or go any further up there. So, if you can then boost your aerobic ceiling, you open up the door to increase that threshold again. Okay? So, that’s a kind of workout where you’ve got two very quantifiable aerobic performance games. They’re just quite hard sessions that you kind of need to build up to be able to do those. Whereas sweet spot and threshold, I think it’s fair to say generally they’re a bit easier for beginners to do. So as you are reaching those plateaus, you want to find new workouts to do that are going to add a new training stimulus. The other one which is more like for road racing focus are glycolytic efforts. Okay? So that’s where you produce energy via breakdown of carbohydrate anorobically without oxygen through a process called glycolysis. And you do that through glycolytic enzymes, breaking down glycogen, generating ATP very quickly, but generating a lot of fatigue. They’re really good for road racers because the kind of efforts that you get, those big attacking efforts or say like a short sharp climb to the finish or even a point to attack to go into a breakaway, one to two minute efforts are what you need to be able to do there. Big efforts to drop everyone else. And you don’t improve that capacity without doing those sorts of efforts and doing them quite carbed up. So more glycogen availability increases the generation of more glycolytic enzymes as a training adaptation. So for those who are doing road racing or even short hill climbs, okay, that’s an effort that is sorely missed out on. So short, sharp efforts win races. Generally, if you want to win races, especially over in the UK where it’s not particularly hilly, glycolytic efforts absolutely essential. How those efforts compared to doing a V2? Are they very different in terms of the uh intensity? So, your V2 max, it’s a combination of the duration and the recovery because you want a really high peak heart rate. You can achieve V2 max during threshold efforts, but generally your V2 max workouts are 110 to 120% of threshold and you’re doing them for maybe 3 minutes on, 3 minutes off for five reps, or you start increasing that to four minutes on, four minutes off, 5 minutes on, 5 minutes off, you’re looking at having that high sustained heart rate and these above threshold efforts. uh whereas your glycolytic capacity is around 130 to 150% based on the effort duration because one minute versus 2 minute you can’t double the length of that and maintain the same power. Got it. Um and different riders different ratios um in terms of what they can sustain. And then the next workout point would be sprint work. Okay. And we’ve already mentioned with sprinting that is important for winning races. A lot of the time it comes down to a sprint unless you’re away solo. So being able to basically use your muscles in a way that they are moving quickly and generating maximum force is useful for elements with pedaling efficiency. Um generating peak force and improving that and recruiting more muscle fibers is really important for fatigue resistance. So when you’re doing long rides, your legs get fatigued, your muscles get fatigued. But if you have a greater capacity to recruit type two muscle fibers, your sprint fibers or the neurons are activating more as the motor unit activating more muscle fibers at once, you can generate more power and generally also helps with fatigue resistance. So sprint work’s interesting in that it can have quite a positive effect on not necessarily things like your FTP, but perhaps how tired you might be at the end of twoour rides. So if you townside sprint at the end of your group ride, it’s not just peak power. It’s also producing it after doing other workload. So then you’re getting into your durability side of things. But in terms of the sort of power percentage you do those at, they are maximum efforts. It’s the percentage will vary massively. Chris Room’s max sprint was maybe 200% of threshold. Chris always maybe knocking on 700%. So little bit difference. Big difference. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz you’ve got track sprinter versus road rider, GC rider in particular. So those it’s just maximal efforts. You’re not looking at percentage of FTP to maintain for them. It’s just a case of sprint as hard and as fast as you can. Yeah. And then the one outside of that, another reason for why people might be plateauing is strength and conditioning work off the bike. Yes. Which we don’t do enough of. I’m guilty of that. Cuz cyclists are traditionally very bad at doing strength work. We go into the gym and we think, “Right, let’s keep our heart rate as high as possible for as long as possible.” So, lots of reps, lots of exercises, no rest in between. Great. I’ve worked hard. I’ve burnt however many calories. It’s not doing anything more than if you were just doing that on the bike. you’re just making yourself tired. So, the big thing that people are looking at now incorporating with cycling is specifically strength and power training. So, you’re lifting big weights very slowly, but maintaining good form and posture and then doing maybe four to five reps, maybe six on certain ones. And then you rest in between. You rest and recover so that you can do them again without being tired at the end. You don’t want to be doing enough reps that you’re starting to lose your form and get tired out. And that really generates that the neuromuscular activation that we’ve mentioned with sprinting um where you have the motor unit recruiting more muscle fibers. When you do strength work in the gym, the biggest gains you always see in the first few weeks. There’s no increase in muscle mass. It’s just more motor units recruiting more muscle fibers. So more power produced and more power is useful for on the bike. Um and then you move into what you call your power phase which is you drop the weight but you increase the speed. So you still have a high amount of torque but you’re moving it much faster and you have to progress to that because if you do it incorrectly you can injure yourself. So that’s why building up to these are so important and that’s going to really help with sprint performance. um the short sharp accelerations and again also improving just overall muscle function. So yeah, strength work is it’s becoming a lot more common now. You’re seeing the world tours implementing it more. There’s more talk of strength work in cycling. It’s good that people are doing it in this low rep ratio. And the same with power work. you do that quite low number of reps, quite a lot of rest in between rather than treating your gym sessions like an aerobic session on the bike. Yeah. But those are probably the main workouts and areas to focus on if you’re feeling that you’re hitting a plateau in your training because you introduce a new training stimulus. It’s targeting areas specifically that improve cycling performance. And it’ll feel tough initially, but the body will adapt to those by getting stronger and better at completing them. Equally with those, if you keep doing them and you don’t do other components like your endurance riding and such, you will hit a plateau that way as well. Okay. The body’s quite clever. It adapts to the stress that it is exposed to. Yeah. So to really get the training gains and benefits, it’s adjusting the training stimulus and the training stress and varying it and giving your body something new to adapt to each time because you’re doing your V2 max efforts. It increases your aerobic performance. That’s going to then increase the capacity you can work at at your threshold. So then when you introduce threshold, you’re working at a higher level and you’re getting better training stimulus from that as well. So, it’s using it all in conjunction, applying it at the right times in the right phases will get you the most return for your training and over a long period of time as well, avoiding hitting those plateaus. I mean, there’s always a physiological limit, but we’re seeing in like with the world tour riders, they keep going a level beyond what we think they can do. Crazy, isn’t it? And Pagata is a prime example. When he changed coach, it was one of the things they said they changed was implementing more strength training. Yeah. And you see his seated acceleration is massive power generated at a high speed and it just leaves people for dust and his capacity produced to power at the end of rides when everyone else is fatigued and on their knees or at the end of stage races. That’s the big training game that’s coming there and riders are just leveling up all the time. And a better understanding of the different training stimulus that you can apply is part of that. and also the fueling aspect of things. But yeah, hopefully that answers gives some good ideas for workouts for people to do. I definitely Yeah. Yeah. Three good workouts which all sound horribly painful and some off the bike work which might get me a bit closer to Talia Pagach’s uh level. Hope probably not, but a little bit closer. Um yeah, let us know what you think of those workouts down below. I’ll put a link to Annie Crossite down below as well. And yeah, I’ll um I got some work to do. But thanks for sharing some uh some tips on how to get faster. You’re very welcome. Thank you much.