Not Reaching Your Cycling Goals? Here’s What to Do
You ride as often as you can, but lately some of your metrics, and the way you feel on the bike aren’t improving the way you hoped. Whether you’re a competitive-level cyclist, a weekend warrior who lives to grind gravel, or you just started riding, the joy of cycling can sometimes diminish when we don’t see improvements.
So what improvements should you pay attention to on the bike when you’re not getting the results you want? Maybe you’ve become too focused on a singular metric and that obsession is leeching your experience. Understanding metrics is helpful, obsessing over them isn’t.
Goals give us a sense of direction, but at the same time, we can become disappointed in ourselves if we feel like they are out of reach. That disappointment makes the goals seem further away, but there are ways to move from disappointment to success. Here’s how.
How to Manage Expectations When You’re Not Getting Results You Want
There are a few types of goals that pertain to riding, and it’s important to be clear on which one matters most to you and why. For example, you can work on your technical skills, which is considered a process-oriented goal. You can focus on improving your sprint power, a metrics-based goal. Or you may try to win your local weekly race every single week—an outcome-oriented goal. Going for all three? You’re likely asking your body and your brain to do too much.
Of course, we aren’t discouraging you from aiming high. Instead, we brought in some coaches, top pros, psychologists, and mental performance consultants to offer ideas on how to change your approach and maybe your point of view to help you get the results you want from your rides.
1. Face Your Feelings
Athletes love to set goals, both big and small. “I’m going to start riding faster intervals!” or “I’m going to train for a century!” Sometimes those goals are well-planned and timed right, but other times, they set us up for disappointment, because we don’t seem to grow them. In other words, we plateau.
“Take a few moments to accept that this plateau is happening,” says Pat Spencer, licensed therapist at Getting Your Mind in Gear and gravel racer, tells Bicycling. “Accepting does not mean rolling over and doing nothing about it. It means taking a step back and reevaluating the situation without beating yourself up. In that space you have created, you can look at why you are not meeting these milestones. Do you have access to the needed skills, tools, opportunities, or support? You may need to adjust the results you’re looking for or push back your timeline.”
It's normal to grieve or feel sadness when you’re not getting the results you want. If you feel stuck in the grieving process, it may be helpful to seek professional help.
2. Understand That Plateaus Are New Beginnings
The first thing you might want to do is replace negative words about where you are with a positive phrase. In other words, remind yourself that you have come a long way from where you started and now you are at a new level of ability in your training.
“Stagnation happens to every single human being in the world,” Rebecca Rusch, a world champion endurance mountain biker better known as the Queen of Pain, tells Bicycling “We don’t just linearly improve all the time. A normal training season involves your progress going up and down. It’s a saw blade, not a straight line. There will be lots of little peaks and valleys that happen during training. For example, doing an FTP workout won’t immediately raise your FTP. It takes time for the body to adapt, and the higher your level, the harder it is to make gains.”
3. Get Clear on Your Non-Metric Goals
“Your ultimate goal is probably not to be a cyclist with an FTP of 300,” world champion mountain biker Sonya Looney, who is also currently pursuing a master’s degree in applied positive psychology. “But a lot of athletes make their self-worth contingent upon getting certain results or hitting certain numbers. We start to think, ‘If I don’t get whatever power number/if I don’t get whatever race results/if I don’t ride that feature on the trail, then I’m not good enough.’”
To get out of this mindset, Looney recommends getting clear on your “why.” Why did you start riding in the first place? Was it fun, fitness, friendship? Get clear on what riding your bike means to you—it’s not about the numbers. That simple reminder and shift back to your initial reason for riding can help you reset your relationship with the bike.
4. Redefine Yourself
Once you’ve landed on your why, take the time to come up with a few “I am” statements around why you train, says Looney. This helps you dissociate from those numbers you’re overly attached to. “Ultimately, I’m not training just to improve my FTP,” she says. “I’m training because I’m the type of person who values my health. I’m training because I’m the type of person who values working hard. Look for the values you hold around why you train.”
5. Take a Break
If you’re stuck in a plateau and can’t remember the last time you took a break from the bike, Rusch says that her first recommendation is to take a few days off to rest. “A plateau can be your body’s way of telling you that you need to rest,” she says. “You might be surprised how quickly your results improve when you make time for rest.”
6. Check Your Fueling
On an extremely practical level, your plateau could be related to your fueling on and off the bike. Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) often presents early as plateaued or diminishing results, say the experts.
“When athletes are beginning to get frustrated or plateau in race results or training numbers, I check on their fueling first,” cycling coach Peter Glassford tells Bicycling. “It’s important to make sure that you’re fueling the work that you’re doing. If your goal is to be faster, stronger, and/or go longer, then you may need to increase your fueling. It’s worth experimenting with increasing your on-bike fueling, maybe adding a preworkout snack, for a couple of weeks to see if that helps.”
7. Look at the Bigger Picture of Your Mindset
This is a common trap in the fitness, weight loss, and diet culture: It’s easy to get addicted to progress. But there is a point where you simply cannot make more gains (or lose more weight, increase your sprint, etc). You will eventually hit the limit of what your body is capable of at this point in your life—no matter what the motivational poster in the training room says.
“Growth is never going to be a continuous upward trajectory, and it is going to plateau at some point,” says Looney. “You may have to shift your strategy away from focusing on growth.” That could look like focusing on improving a different area of your riding, trying a new sport (or a different type of cycling) or even simply focusing on enjoying each ride rather than hitting a certain number.
“There’s going to be a limit at some point for all of us. So we do need to think about managing our expectations and being realistic about what’s actually possible,” says Looney. “Growth can’t always be the goal: If this plateau is our new normal, what are other things we can focus on instead? Can the goal become staying at that level?” If you manage to keep your FTP the same from age 55 to 70, you’re actually doing amazing!
8. Phone a Friend or Ask a Coach
Sometimes, perspective from someone else will help you bust through a rut. “Asking around for other drills, new workouts to try, or tips that will kickstart your progress can be really helpful, even just in terms of getting motivated again,” former WorldTour racer and coach Ted King tells Bicycling. “You also may want to have a conversation with your coach—or a new coach—to just address the fact that you’re hitting a wall, and want to break through it.”
9. Do a Life Audit
Off the bike, how is life going? We tend to compartmentalize our lives, with work in one column, family in another, and sport in another. But the body views all stress the same, so if work is particularly hectic and stressful, that could impact your ability to improve your sprint power.
“Most people don’t think about what manageable expectations are for them in their current time of life,” says Looney. “They’re just aiming to be perfect in every part of life, to hit these certain numbers—but if you’ve been in a busy season at work and you have sick kids at home and you just got over a cold yourself, your FTP probably isn’t going to be great, and that’s okay.”
10. Go a Few Days Without Measuring Anything
You may also need a mental break from measurements. If every ride has you staring at the power numbers on your screen, it’s time to hide your cycling computer (or at least turn off the data display!) during your next few rides.
“After a bad crash a couple years ago, I had to take a really long break from the bike, and when I came back, it was obvious that my numbers were much lower than they’d been before,” says Rusch. “It was really challenging to ride, because I was embarrassed about the level I was at. I had to take myself away from the measurements. So I actually took a break from focused bike training and paying attention to the numbers as I built back up my fitness. When I finally went back to a race, I made sure I wasn’t looking at my lap times or power during the race, I just focused on enjoying the ride.”
11. Check Your Comparisons
Are you comparing your numbers to those of full-time pros? Are you enjoying the ride less because you’re worried about your numbers? Stop the comparisons. “You want to improve your FTP? Why?” asks former pro Eros Poli, who retired from the WorldTour after serving as Mario Cipollini’s leadout man for years.
Now, Poli works as a tour guide with inGamba, and he’s never loved the bike more. “You’re trying to work a full-time job, and then trying to do what the pros are doing,” he says. “I tell people to focus on having fun—it’s good to challenge yourself, yes, but only if it’s fun as well.”
12. Trust the Process
Plateaus in your power (or skill or confidence) happen, but if you focus on the process rather than the results you’re hoping for, you will likely find that before you know it, you’re through the plateau and back to making progress. “Trust in the process,” says King. “Cycling is such a cumulative sport. Try to zoom out and look at the bigger picture, whether that’s a season or a decade. This plateau is just a small part of a much longer journey.”
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