5 Ways to Build Fatigue Resistance and Conquer Any Bike Race

A couple of weeks ago I was doing research on that whole fatigue resistance topic, downloading anything onto my notebook related to fatigue resistance, durability, faster race finishing times and so on. I wanted to see what’s going on in that kind of field and if maybe fatigue resistance is a metric that is rather simple to work on or requires a fully stuffed lab with sports scientists all around you.

Most of the contents advertise themselves as “key” advice. They have fancy and complicated words. They promise to improve performance, train smarter, and after all become more fatigue resistant. And they all assure us that they’re based on the latest, greatest science.

I doodled around with some of them for a couple of days. Some were interesting and had profound messages. Many did not. Some gave decent advice. Most did not. I made notes and then moved on.

But what really blew my mind was some guru-like complexity advice that I think not even the contributor themself understood, similar to the movie “Prometheus.” I mean what is Prometheus all about? I think not even the authors had an idea what it’s actually about. Anyway, when you looked at comments of the post they were like:

“Deep down confused”
“WOW! One of the best episodes ever”
“(Can’t even insert comment because I don’t even know what it means in the first place.)”

Without fail, these comments immediately put me into a sour mood. How can something you don’t even understand actually delight you? And how the fuck can something be deemed the best episode ever if probably not even the contributor himself knows what the fuck he’s talking about? Is this what people actually sign up for? A complexity preaching guru that licks their brain balls with confusing fluff?

I went back to all the contents and was quickly annoyed with all the complex stuff around fatigue resistance trying to convince me of some vague calculations of some other guru that prove durability is all about translating the body into a physical and mathematical model with the holy grail of kilojoules.

I’m sorry but if this is what passes for “fatigue resistance” advice these days, then we’re just pouring kerosene on a goddamn dumpster fire. Because this doesn’t promote smart training. It promotes intellectual stimulation.

Developing Fatigue Resistance Doesn’t Mean Feeling Good All The Time

It’s no secret that cycling is a pretty tough sport. Even as an amateur. Long days in the saddle. Tough days on the turbo that squeeze lactate out of your legs like a milking machine. Incomprehensible weather you haven’t signed-up for. And what’s worse, you prepare for your A-race all year long and on the big day it ends all in a big crash right after the start.

Put another way, pain is inevitable in cycling. Yet, we are becoming less psychologically resilient as a culture. The word “suffering” used to be reserved for Tour de France riders full of abrasions in 40 plus degrees up a behemoth climb three weeks into the race hanging on for dear life to make the time cut. Now the word “suffering” gets thrown around like a football at Thanksgiving.

Everything’s suffering. Everyone’s suffering. Jack got dropped at the Sunday group-ride. He’s suffering. Call his clubmates. Give him bicarbonate. Get him Ketones. His confidence is suffering. His self-esteem is suffering. Hurry, sign him up for an app that tells him how beautiful his smile is!

Our aversion to pain and struggle has become so ingrained in everything we do that we obsessively try to find shortcuts, magic workouts, marginal gains and the next super supplement to help with the pain while comprising our ability to learn, grow, and function as healthy and stable humans.

“You don’t build fatigue resistance by feeling good all the time. You build fatigue resistance by getting better at feeling bad.”

This point strikes me as so obvious that I’m still regularly stunned when I come across articles that take someone who’s failing at the basics to receiving empty validation and then just sell them more empty validation. Jack’s problem isn’t that he’s sad about getting dropped or not using Bicarbonate. His problem is that he’s too busy feeling sorry for himself to fucking build that pain tolerance for once.

In our culture’s constant pursuit for optimum convenience, for constant positivity, and applause in everything we do, we’ve made ourselves fragile and weak. We catastrophize everything. We are offended by everything. When in fact, pain is the only constant in life. Even research has found that athletes have a higher pain tolerance than regularly active individuals. Or to put it in world-class middle-distance runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen’s words:

“There are no secrets. Just work.”
Jakob Ingebrigtsen

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How to Build Fatigue Resistance on The Road

Fatigue resistance doesn’t come from positive feelings. It comes from leveraging your negative feelings. From the ability to create positive adaptations to negative events.

In fact, if we just look at the definition of fatigue by the National Hurt, Lung, and Blood Institute it involves a lot of pain: “A loss in the capacity for developing force and/or velocity of a muscle, resulting from muscle activity under load and which is reversible by rest.”

How do you deal with that loss of power in your muscles?

Now while fatigue resistance was recently deemed the fourth endurance performance parameter next to VO2max, lactate threshold, and cycling efficiency, we can assume it’s quite a new thing when in fact it’s quite an old concept. Essentially, it’s the ability to prevent the fall of key endurance parameters such as FTP over time. When you are sufficiently fatigue resistant, you become unstoppable.

Yet, this appears to be a falsely understood concept, a wrong perspective. But fear not my intrepid pain seeker, for I shall walk you through a few of the best ways to do what Jakob Ingebrigtsen calls “Just work.”

1. Do Some Decent Training

Back in the 1950s a young, ambitious runner set out in grueling conditions to change the game in running. On his mind? An insane 100x400m interval workout. His purpose? The 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Humble, focused and determined he went to the Olympics and came back with triple gold.

His name was Emil Zátopek.

Zátopek became one of the most successful middle- and long-distance runners of the Czech Republic. But he was not the born prodigy you might suspect him to be. In contrast to his competitors his 800 and 1500 metre times were average at best. But he was a remarkable worker. He came from a humble background without wealth or privilege. His path to greatness was carved from sheer grit.

He believed that success came down to perseverance.

His approach was simple: outwork everyone. He embraced pain and used it as a fuel. To him, willpower was a muscle that is improved by repetition. He once famously said, “I know how to run slow. I want to learn how to run fast.” Fast running for him, came from running fast. While he didn’t invent interval training himself, he popularized it by taking it to impossible heights.

Zátopek’s tough mind told him that pain is a universal constant in running. Instead of fighting it, he used it to his advantage. He realized at a young age already that if you want to achieve something of importance, you have to put in the reps. There’s no way around mastering the basics.

The greatest skill in any endurance sport is doing the work. And for that reason, most people don’t need more time, better gear or fancier strategies. They just need to do the real work and master the basics.

So if you want to improve your fatigue resistance, you need to do some decent training first. You have to put in the hours consistently for weeks on end.

Sure, Emil Zátopek was an extreme example. But he was well aware of the complementary effects that hard workouts would also have on the mind. Due to tough winters in the Czech Republic, he often faced brutal conditions to run in. But again he saw it as an opportunity to build resilience. He said training in tough conditions made every race easier to bear. And you might’ve realized it yourself. The more tough sessions you’ve completed the better you cope with the pain, the more resilient you get. Every time you train your muscles, you also train your mind.

Strength training is such an example. Almost every study found improved cycling or endurance performance through strength training. One study even found improved 5 minute all-out power after 185 minutes of zone 2 riding just by adding a strength routine. On top of improved fatigue resistance from strength training, it will improve lactate threshold, sprint and anaerobic capacity etc.

Combine that with your on the bike work and from a lactate level standpoint you will notice lower lactate levels at the same or higher speeds as a result of training. On a standard lactate curve you will see a right shift that effectively raises your second lactate threshold or FTP.

On beige background a graph shows how the lactate curve in endurance athletes changes to the right due to proper training.

Yet, your hard time is pretty limited. Research across endurance sports has shown that two or on occasion three threshold or HIT sessions per week are optimal and more only induce symptoms of overreaching or overtraining. So with only two or sometimes three shots to fire per week, focus on the tough days and make them count.

As 11-times Olympic medalist Matt Biondi put it, “Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement.”

On those awful cold days on a track somewhere in the Czech Republic, Emil Zátopek showed-up repeatedly to get the work in that, ultimately, made him more fatigue resistant than his competition.

2. Focus on What You Can Control

Okay, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that you pretty much control nothing that goes on in your life. You can’t control what other people say or do or believe. You can’t control your genetics, the circumstances you were born into, or whether your mom hates you and your dad doesn’t care about your love for cycling.

You can’t control the weather, the year you were born or the people you grew up around. You can’t control almost anything that happens to you – oil on a descent, a car knocking you down from behind, race cancellations due to a global pandemic or growing bike prices due to rising tariffs.

You can’t control other people’s opinions about you or how they even see you.

You cannot fully control almost anything that goes on in this crazy ass world around you.

But here’s the good news. The one thing you do control is far more important than all the others.

You can control your thoughts. And with it you can control your mental attitude, you can control your training and you can control how you fuel your body.

Research on the coach-athlete relationship found that athletes tend to train harder than planned on easy days and easier than planned on hard days. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you are producing more fatigue and stress than intended on easy days. That fatigue will accumulate over the course of weeks. On the other hand, you are just riding yourself out of your own legs. Meaning, you are unable to produce the intended stress on hard sessions and the workout that was planned to make you faster, didn’t.

The reason behind, though, is purely mental. And it is optional.

I mean mountains of evidence tell us that be it pro cyclists, Ironman triathletes, or amateur runners, those athletes showing the highest proportion of low-intensity training, so those that take both their easy and hard rides seriously, end up with the highest fatigue resistance and the fastest finishing times. So if evidence is so crystal clear on the relevance of intensity distribution why do so many cyclists still neglect its importance? Plain and simple: It’s an ego, an identity-based issue.

Two graphs compare two different training intensity distributions with each other while the left side shows that most training should be very easy and the right addresses a high training time in the middle "junk mile" zone.

I’m sure your familiar with it, because in the age of social media people do it all the fucking time.

First off, there’s the guy desperate for self-validation. He has an easy ride on the plan but has to beat everyone in the group at the slightest incline or do sprints throughout the ride because he’s in a constant need of validating his power numbers and comparing it to others. Then there’s the social media guy. Easy rides simply are not Instagramable or shareable on Strava. They look as if you’re just cruising around without intent, without power. Yet, both riders have something in common. They both follow what feels good on the bike. But what feels good is many times not what’s the right thing to do.

Instead, it’s about getting better at feeling bad. If you want to gear your training toward building that durability you have to embrace the uncertainty, the pain, and the fear that holding back on easy rides will play out helpful in the future.

You cannot control how your body will adapt to certain training. But you can control how you think about your own training. You can control whether you embrace the pain that when attacks fly from the group up the KOM you let them ride or whether you will never recover from letting them go.

Because pain is inevitable and everywhere, but suffering is only in the mind.

3. Get Good at Pacing

“Be more conservative” is general advice on pacing. But while well-meant such advice can even be harmful for your performance depending on your particular event. As it turns out, there are different pacing strategies, where it shows that it can pay sometimes to go hard at the start.

Hell, pacing can have such a huge impact on your cycling performance that I wrote a whole article about it. And yet, so many people mess it up. Every race I do I see people going way too hard at the start and then paying for it later. I’m guilty of it myself. I’ve had first-hand experience of going too hard too early. I attacked at the start of a long road race, got caught, and exploded fabulously.

Pacing is one of those things that requires no gear, no effort and no investment but immediately improves your fatigue resistance. All you have to do is know when to hold back and when to dig in.

So while everyone is talking about more power, more kilojoules, more carbs, more ketones, more bicarbonate, building fatigue resistance is also a lot about less power, less grinding, and less noise.

Mark Cavendish riding a time trial for his team Sky at the time.

In fact, research has shown that most tactical bike races, where the group stays together for the most part and drafting and conserving energy is key, follows a parabolical or U-shaped pacing strategy. This involves starting hard, slowing down in the middle to conserve energy and then going all-in for that final hill or sprint finish.

But of course, almost no race is pancake flat without a single blow of wind. There’s strong headwinds, technically difficult sections or climbs you have to deal with.

To account for this you need variable pacing. Essentially, adjusting your pace over the course of the race to deal with any difficulty. For example, if you’re faced with repeated climbs you dig deep on the climbs and take it easy on the descents. They’ve done studies on simulated time trials, they’ve done studies on real-world time trials. In variable terrain with headwinds or hills, pacing harder through headwind and uphill sections and easing up on tailwinds and downhills is simply faster than keeping a constant pace.

But remember when talking about climbing the fastest way up is keeping a steady pace. We’ve seen time and time again in grand tours like the Tour de France that GC riders who were unable to keep the pace or surges of their competition and instead focus on their own pace limited losses and even caught riders along the climb.

A certain degree of self-control can be key in such scenarios.

However, almost any rider nowadays uses a heart rate monitor, a power meter or both. Over time you will learn what is a sustainable power or heart rate for a given climb.

4. Recover as If Your Life Depends on It

Let’s play a game. What if I told you there’s a free drug out there that’s not on WADA’s prohibited list that can:

Instantly make your sprint faster
Help you build muscle and recover quicker
Make you laser-focused on race day
Regulate your blood-sugar so you don’t bonk halfway up that climb
Burn fat like a steam train chugging up Stelvio

Would you take it? Of course you would! Who wouldn’t?

Now here’s the thing. You already have it. It’s called sleep. Yeah, I know. Boring, right? Not nearly as sexy as inhaling a bowl of bicarbonate along with a caffeine gel in your new 500$ aero suit that you think will turn you into Wout van Aert.

But here’s the truth nobody wants to hear. You can nail your training plan like a mastermind. You can eat all the carbs, hit every interval, and foam roll until your neighbours think you developed a fetish. But if you’re sleeping like crap, you are just riding with your brakes half-pulled. Every. Damn. Day.

Sleep is the ultimate performance enhancer. It’s free. It’s completely legal. And unlike half the supplements in your kitchen cupboard, it actually works.

The problem? It’s too simple. Too obvious. So we ignore it. We praise hustle, binge Netflix and doom-scroll Instagram reels until midnight. Then we wonder why our legs feel like concrete on the morning ride.

Same goes for your rest days and recovery rides. If your plan says rest and you head out hiking around your local pass for two hours, you’re just hurting the wound you intended to heal. If your plan says recovery ride and you end up hunting KOMS with the gang, you’re just bringing a knife to a gunfight.

The entire training process requires a certain amount of balance. If you train hard you need to recover hard as well.

To help you implement what I said about sleep and recovery, here’s the morning routine nobody tells you about from New York Times bestselling author Mark Manson:

Eat a reasonable dinner, no caffeine or alcohol.
Stop looking at screens around 9PM.
Get into bed by 10PM.
Relax, meditate, do some light reading.
Wake up early feeling fucking great and ready to go.

Want to improve your fatigue resistance? Start sleeping and recovering as if your life depends on it.

A man sleeping insanely comfortable and satisfied in his bed.

5. Care About What You Put in Your Body

It’s no secret that there’s a growing “health” crisis occurring right now. Rates of diabetes and Crohn’s disease are near record highs globally. Overweight and obesity rates are through the roof. Food intolerances have been climbing in the western world in the last decade. And what’s worse, more and more young people and children are becoming overweight and obese.

The recent trend of high-carb low-fibre in cycling and endurance sports is only elevating the issue.

According to health professionals in the UK, people are only eating half the amount of fibre of the recommended daily average that is 30-38 grams per day. Yet, there’s growing evidence of the importance a healthy gut microbiome has on whole body function.

Fibre is an essential component to increase the diversity of your good gut bacteria which supports your immunity against inflammatory disorders and allergies. According to science almost 70-80% of your immune cells reside in the gut. Basically, starve your good bacteria to death with too little fibre and you’re killing your immune system.

The growing supply and consumption of ultra-processed foods has made us incredibly weak and fragile. Our ability to digest all kinds of healthy, unprocessed foods worsens. We start to associate this lack of digestion with all kinds of made-up intolerances.

It’s a fact that every nation or culture that adopts a western diet high in ultra-processed foods, trans fats, and an abundance of calories is developing the mentioned inflammations and diseases. Of course endurance athletes that consume the highest amounts of sugar also show the greatest insulin sensitivity, yet it doesn’t mean they’re healthy.

Even if being lean as fuck you can absorb all the crap you find along a grocery visit.

The truth is that every normal functioning adult be it an athlete or an average Joe should be able to properly stomach all kinds of whole foods this world has in store for us. Sure, some will cause more digestive disruptions than others but you should fill your daily plates with whole grains, legumes, fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts and seeds.

All those components will provide you with sufficient fibre that is critical to your fatigue resistance.

A balanced diet is shown including all the foods from nuts and seeds to legumes to whole grain to vegetables to fruit to dairy to eggs to meat and fish. — A balanced diet should include all the variety.

Now, it’s not all black and white and there are exceptions when all you want is having sugar. Such an exception is before, during and after riding your bike. Numerous studies have found that consuming an adequate amount of carbs per hour of riding, and 60 grams per hour is such an adequate amount, prevents the fall in your FTP. So by something as simple as making sure you consume the right amount of carbohydrates before, during and after your ride you strengthen your body’s resistance to fatigue.

One last thing I want to mention is protein intake. Protein is a macronutrient critical for long-term adaptations. It’s present in lean meats, fish, eggs, dairy and its derivatives as well as in plant sources like nuts or legumes like peanuts or soy. Without sufficient protein, your muscles cannot properly repair and adapt. Without enough protein the gains you make won’t be the gains you could have. Everything depends on protein. Your immune system. Your muscles. Your sleep. Current literature findings suggest at least 1.6 grams of protein per kilo of body weight for endurance athletes. This is independent whether you’re male or female.

All your body asks for is balance. Balance in training. Balance in nutrition. Balance in recovery.

Because no matter how big of a badass you think you are, none of us can perform forever on a lack of sleep and a diet high in processed foods. The complex system that the human body is will sooner or later lose its balance. And what’s once lost is hard to regain.

The path to becoming more fatigue resistant in cycling is all about mastering the fundamentals and little about the details. After all, without the fundamentals, the details are useless.

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