The Cycling Performance Handbook

Chapter 1: Why Most Approaches Fail — and What Actually Works

You have been riding for a while. Not a beginner, not someone who just bought a bike and a pair of padded shorts. You have the bike, the gear, the apps, and the willingness to suffer. You have probably followed a training plan you found online, or bought one from an app, and you gave it an honest shot. You pushed through the early sessions, you suffered through the interval workouts, and you saw some initial progress. Then things started to go sideways.

Maybe the progress stopped, and no matter how many interval sessions you did, your average power on your favorite climb stopped going up. Maybe you started feeling constantly tired, and your resting heart rate crept up, and you started skipping days. Maybe you found yourself staring at your trainer, your session already planned in your head, but you just could not summon the desire to clip in. The plan was there, the effort was there, but the result was not.

You are not alone. This is the most common experience among committed, self-directed cyclists. The sport is full of motivated people who spend hundreds of hours a year on the bike, and many of them are getting nowhere. They are not lazy. They are not untalented. They have been given bad information and, more importantly, an incomplete system.

The cycling training world is full of common wisdom that sounds sensible but gets you nowhere. You have