Original episode & show notes | Raw transcript
Based on the Empirical Cycling Podcast featuring Kolie Moore and Rory
For any dedicated athlete, hitting a fitness plateau can be a frustrating experience. Despite consistent effort, the expected improvements in performance cease, leading to questions about training, recovery, and personal limits. In a detailed discussion on the Empirical Cycling Podcast, coaches Kolie Moore and Rory dissect the common, and often overlooked, reasons why athletes’ fitness stagnates.
This document serves as an in-depth educational guide to the concepts presented in their conversation. It is intended for an educated and intelligent student audience seeking to understand the multifaceted nature of athletic plateaus, moving beyond simplistic answers to explore the intricate balance between training, recovery, psychology, and lifestyle.
The hosts identified several key areas where athletes and coaches often make mistakes that lead to a plateau. These are not isolated issues but are frequently interconnected.
Consistency is a cornerstone of training, but the hosts present two sides to this coin: not being consistent enough, and being too consistent to the point of burnout.
Lack of Consistency (The “Rigid Plan” Problem):
Concept: An athlete fails to adhere to a training plan, not because of a lack of desire, but because the plan itself is flawed for their specific life context. A highly rigid, demanding structure may not suit an individual’s personality, work schedule, or motivational patterns.
Mechanism of Stagnation: The athlete feels like a failure for not sticking to the plan, which erodes motivation. This creates a cycle of missed workouts and guilt, preventing the accumulation of consistent training stress needed for adaptation.
Solution: Recognize that the plan serves the athlete, not the other way around. If you cannot stick to a plan, the issue may be the plan’s design. The focus should shift to finding a sustainable and enjoyable training structure. As Rory explains, for some athletes, the primary role of a coach is simply to provide accountability and a reason to get on the bike, ensuring the “good hormones” keep flowing.
Over-Consistency (The “More is Always Better” Fallacy):
Concept: This is the opposite problem, often seen in highly motivated athletes. The belief that if one hard workout is good, four must be better, leads to an unsustainable volume of high-intensity work.
Mechanism of Stagnation: The athlete rides too much and too hard, too often. This overwhelms the body’s capacity to recover and adapt. The initial gains quickly give way to deep, chronic fatigue, which masquerades as a plateau but is actually the beginning of overtraining. The body is no longer adapting; it’s just trying to survive.
Solution: Honesty about fatigue is paramount. A coach’s role (or a self-coached athlete’s primary task) is to balance motivation with recovery. Learn to recognize the signs of fatigue—both subjective (mood, soreness) and objective (inability to complete workouts, declining power). Build a training week around the minimum guaranteed time you have, adding easy volume if extra time becomes available, rather than trying to cram in more intensity than you can handle.
A common mistake that directly contributes to burnout is a misunderstanding of how workouts should feel and how they contribute to overall training load.
The Problem: Many athletes perform their “easy” or “endurance” rides at an intensity that is too high, accumulating significant fatigue without a corresponding adaptive benefit. They also attempt too many “hard” interval sessions per week.
Redefining Intensity:
“Easy” Work (Sub-Threshold): The hosts define anything up to and including Functional Threshold Power (FTP) as work that should feel manageable. Breathing should be under control, and the effort, while requiring concentration, should not feel overwhelming. An endurance ride should leave you feeling fresh, not “floored” or in need of a nap.
“Hard” Work (Supra-Threshold): These are workouts like VO2 max and anaerobic capacity intervals. They are purposefully hard and are meant to be the sessions where you expend your limited energy for high-level adaptation.
The Solution:
Cap Hard Days: Most athletes should limit themselves to a maximum of two hard interval sessions per week. This provides five other days for recovery and low-intensity volume.
Make Easy Days Truly Easy: Your endurance rides should be genuinely easy. A 20-30 watt reduction in power on these rides can dramatically improve recovery with no negative impact on aerobic adaptation. If you come back from a 90-minute endurance ride feeling tired, you went too hard.
Use the “Concentration Gradient”: The harder an interval is, the more intense your mental focus must be to maintain it. This can be a useful subjective guide to intensity.
How you structure your workouts and measure your fitness can create artificial plateaus.
The “Arbitrary Power Target” Trap:
Concept: An athlete decides before a workout to hit a specific power number (e.g., “I will do 5x5 minutes at 110% of FTP”).
Mechanism of Stagnation: This target may be too low for your current fitness, providing insufficient stimulus for adaptation (e.g., nose-breathing during a VO2 max interval). Conversely, if you are fatigued, the target may be unattainable, leading to a “failed” workout and a negative psychological spiral. It also provides poor feedback; you don’t learn how tired you truly are.
Solution: For high-intensity intervals like VO2 max, the goal should be a maximal effort for the prescribed duration, not a specific power target. The power you produce becomes the output and a diagnostic tool, not a prescriptive goal.
The “Miracle Interval” and Over-Specialization:
Concept: An athlete becomes fixated on a single type of interval or training philosophy (e.g., a specific high-intensity interval training protocol found in a research paper, or a purely polarized model).
Mechanism of Stagnation: The body adapts to a specific stimulus and then stops responding. Fitness is holistic; over-focusing on one area (e.g., anaerobic capacity) inevitably leads to the neglect of others (e.g., aerobic endurance or FTP duration).
Solution: Variety is a critical component of long-term progression. A well-rounded training plan should address multiple physiological systems over time.
Over-reliance on a Single Metric (The “FTP is Everything” Mindset):
Concept: Using only FTP as the sole indicator of fitness.
Mechanism of Stagnation: An athlete’s FTP might naturally plateau while other crucial aspects of their performance capability are improving. By focusing only on one number, they miss the broader picture of their development and may make poor training decisions.
Solution: Expand your definition of fitness. Track other markers of performance, such as:
Time to Exhaustion (TTE): How long can you hold your FTP?
Anaerobic Power: Your 30-second, 1-minute, and 5-second peak power.
Repeatability: How well can you repeat hard efforts?
Endurance: Can you complete long rides feeling fresher than before?
A training plan without a clear, logical progression is a roadmap to stagnation.
The Problem: An athlete repeatedly performs the same workout (e.g., “every Tuesday I do 2x20 minutes at FTP”) without understanding how to progress it.
Mechanism of Stagnation: Without progressive overload, there is no stimulus for further adaptation. The body becomes efficient at handling that specific load and sees no reason to improve further.
The Solution: Understand the Mechanism of Progression:
Every workout type has a primary lever for progression. You must know which one to pull.
For FTP/Sweet Spot (Duration-based): The primary goal is to extend the time in zone. Progress from 2x20 to 2x25, then 3x20. The goal is to accumulate more work over time.
For VO2 Max (Intensity-based): The primary goal is to increase the power output for a maximal effort. Doing more intervals (e.g., progressing from 5x5 to 8x5) often leads to excessive fatigue with diminishing returns (a poor stimulus-to-fatigue ratio).
For Anaerobic Capacity (Intensity-based): The goal is to increase peak power.
Establish a Feedback Loop: The progression within your workouts is the feedback. You don’t need to do a formal test every two weeks. If you can successfully add 5 minutes to your sweet spot intervals, you are getting fitter. Trust the process.
This is one of the most significant and common mistakes leading to a plateau.
The Problem: Athletes, particularly those who are highly motivated, fail to schedule deliberate, planned rest. They often only take time off when forced by illness, injury, or life events. A mid-season break is seen as a loss of fitness rather than a strategic necessity.
Mechanism of Stagnation: Chronic fatigue accumulates silently over months of training. Even with well-planned weeks, the load from a full season is immense. Without a dedicated period of deep recovery, an athlete enters the next training block already fatigued. Their body lacks the capacity to absorb new training stress, and their fitness will inevitably decline, regardless of how hard they train.
The Solution:
Schedule a Mid-Season Break: A deliberate break of 1-2 weeks (or more) is essential.
Reframe the “Fear of Lost Fitness”: You will lose fitness anyway if you burn out. A planned break allows you to shed fatigue, mentally reset, and return motivated and physically prepared to absorb training and reach a new, higher peak. One path leads to motivation and progress; the other leads to quitting the sport.
Training does not happen in a vacuum. Your mental state and life outside of cycling are powerful drivers of adaptation or stagnation.
Expectation Mismatch:
Concept: Setting arbitrary and unrealistic performance goals by a specific deadline (e.g., “I will gain 50 watts on my FTP in 3 months”).
Mechanism of Stagnation: This mindset creates immense pressure. When the unrealistic goal isn’t met, it leads to disappointment and can cause an athlete to abandon a perfectly effective training process. It encourages shortcuts and overreaching.
Solution: Focus on the process, not the outcome. The primary goal should be steady, incremental progress relative to your past self. As Rory puts it, “The ultimate goal is, I’m going to feel better than I do right now.”
Life Stress and Mental Health:
Concept: Stress—from work, family, finances, or mental health struggles—is a potent physiological force. The body does not differentiate between training stress and life stress; it all contributes to the total allostatic load.
Mechanism of Stagnation: High life stress compromises recovery and suppresses adaptation. The same workout that would produce a fitness gain in a low-stress individual can push a high-stress individual into a state of non-functional overreaching.
Solution: Be fluid and adaptive with your training plan. On a high-stress day, forcing a hard workout is counterproductive. The best course of action may be an easy ride, a day off, or simply eating ice cream. The bike should be a tool for managing stress, not another source of it.
The “Science” Trap: While scientific literature is valuable, it’s not a direct coaching manual. Research studies often use constrained methodologies (e.g., fixed-percentage power targets) that don’t reflect optimal real-world training and report on averages, which may not apply to an individual.
Training as We Age: The primary change with age is a reduced capacity for recovery. An older athlete may need more days between hard sessions. The solution is often smarter recovery and spacing of intensity, not necessarily a drastic reduction in volume.
Don’t Do What the Pros Do: Professional athletes are genetic outliers with a lifestyle entirely dedicated to training and recovery. Their training plans are not suitable templates for amateurs with jobs and families.
Basing Training on “Noob Gains”: The training methods that produce rapid gains at the beginning of an athlete’s journey (when almost anything works) will not be effective once a higher level of fitness is achieved. The training plan must evolve in complexity and specificity.
Hitting a fitness plateau is rarely the result of reaching a “genetic limit.” More often, it is a sign that one or more fundamental principles of training and recovery are being violated. The insights from the Empirical Cycling podcast reveal that the path forward is not always about training harder. Instead, progress is unlocked through a more holistic and intelligent approach that embraces:
Flexibility and Individualization: Your training plan must fit your life.
Honesty and Self-Awareness: You must learn to listen to your body and acknowledge fatigue and stress.
Strategic Recovery: Rest is not a lack of training; it is a vital part of it.
Broadening Your Definition of Fitness: Success is more than just one number.
By understanding these concepts, an athlete can transform a frustrating plateau into a valuable diagnostic tool, making the necessary adjustments to break through and reach new levels of performance.