If you think back to when you started cycling as a clueless, over-motivated athlete, life was pretty simple. A bike magazine told you needed a basic first road bike, so you got yourself a basic first road bike. Your ride-bud told you to get clean, white kicks, so you got yourself clean, white kicks. Your local club told you, you need a bib and a jersey, so you got yourself a bib and a jersey.
Life back then was algorithmic. Do X get Y. It’s the simplest form of getting along in a new domain.
In the beginning most decisions passed this way. You went to the local group ride and tried to soak up all the bro science thrown at you. The cool riders told you what was cool and what was lame and you followed accordingly. That dude who got 4th in the unofficial Wednesday evening crit-race told you that you need to get your ass out of the saddle until blood drops out of your eyeballs if you wanted to land a podium at the unofficial Wednesday evening crit-race.
And so it goes: Do X; make or expect Y to happen. Everything is sort of predictable. Everything is understood. Whenever you do something, you know what result to expect.
But suddenly you want more. More power. More speed. More knowledge. So you stumble across the world of complexity. Full-on aero bikes that cost 10.000$ and more. Skinsuits so thin and sticky, impossible to put on yourself. Online Gurus throwing random studies with ridiculous workout formats and complex theories at you, you feel like you discovered a new sport.
Once entered it’s tough to get out. If you’re trying to leave it behind it’s pulling you back in with charm and persuasion. Even though we know that in most cases, and cycling in particular, a handful of simple variables drives the majority of outcomes. If you’ve covered the few things that matter, you’re all set. A lot of what gets added after that is unnecessary filler that is either intellectually seductive, wastes your time, or is designed to confuse or impress you.
The question then is: Why? Why is complexity so appealing when simplicity will do? The sore truth is complexity sells better. However, there are a few more reasons:
- Complexity gives you a sense of control while simplicity makes you feel like an idiot – the more variables you take into account, the more you think you get out of it. On the other hand, the less you use, the more ignorant you look.
- Things you don’t understand make those special who you think that do – Gurus are those who understand things you or I don’t. It leaves an impression of thinking about that topic in ways you or I can’t. That’s a whole different level of admiration.
- The depth of complexity is confused with effort – Doing a deep dive on a certain topic, for example zone 2 training, seems like that person has spent way more thinking about that topic than you have. A justification rather than a benefit.
So as you can see trying too hard can backfire. Or in other words, there are no points awarded for difficulty. Now, what I want to show you instead is what I think is the single most important factor of success in cycling. Drum roll; it’s that lame, old, grumpy asshole: consistency. But before you delete my website from your favorites list, let me show you how diverse consistency impacts your cycling performance.
1. Consistency Means Putting in The Reps
Similar to our tendency to overvalue complexity, we have a tendency to undervalue strategies we have already discovered. We underutilize old solutions – even if they are best practices – because they seem like something we have already considered.
Here’s the problem: “Everybody already knows that” is very different from “Everybody already does that.” Just because a training method is known doesn’t mean it’s utilized.
And even more critical, just because a training method is implemented occasionally, doesn’t mean it’s implemented consistently. For example, most cyclists know that holding back on their easy rides will keep them fresh for their hard days but very few do so week after week.
Therefore, we assume that a new training approach is needed to make real progress, but that isn’t always the case.
We simply waste resources and ideas at our fingertips because they don’t seem new and exciting.
There are many examples of strategies that will improve our cycling performance but the most obvious one is never missing workouts. How many training sessions did you miss past or this season already?
Of course, this is a boring answer. Mastering the fundamentals isn’t sexy but it’s the single most important factor of success in cycling and elsewhere. Consistency is so powerful it can yield results immediately. So start putting in the reps by focusing on less not more.
2. Consistency Means Holding Back
Be it the easy endurance ride that turns into a tempo hunt with the lads or the bro who’s always half-wheeling you by pushing harder though you agreed to take it easy. Or the threshold session, where intensity control is key but you throw it out of the window at the first set and push above your FTP because it looks nicer on Strava.
In all those examples you had a prescribed power range that you calmly ignored.
The problem is, however, that when you push harder than you should have, you greatly influence your performance and all other upcoming training sessions. You change the training stress. You change the fatigue response. And ultimately, you change the training stimulus.
As a result, sooner or later future key sessions will suffer in quality and you will end up asking yourself why you’re stagnating despite working so hard.
So the question to ask is can you sustain the emotional pain to hold back? Accepting the fact that constantly having to validate your power numbers is merely a need you need to live with? I think that consistently holding back, be it easy rides or key sessions, will have a tremendous effect on your race performance.
So instead of seeking more power, get good at holding back.
3. Consistency Means Being Able to Trust and Resist
No matter what you decide to do in life it all requires a huge amount of trust and belief in that decision. A training plan is no different.
If you create your training plan toward your goal event you build it around the weekly volume you can dedicate, and the key sessions that will let you arrive at your goal in the best possible shape ever. So it’s your training plan that requires you to trust and believe in it. Otherwise you are easily distracted by all the noises in the modern cycling society.
For example, you see your competition is training way more than you on Strava and with the trust in your plan being low you do more. Or maybe bros ask you for a 6 hour ride even though your plan suggests an easy 2.5 hour ride. If you don’t trust and believe that your training plan will make you faster in the long run you won’t feel committed enough to stick to it.
Apparently, there is no secret sauce to success at anything. And especially heat training, altitude training, or blood lactate testing won’t cut it if you avoid mastering the basics. So create a plan that you trust and believe in, show up at every session, hold back when training sessions require it, stay focussed, play the long game and you will put yourself in the best possible position to become a better cyclist.
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