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CycleCoach, The Old Dairy, Randolphs Farm, Hurstpierpoint (2026)

12/01/2026

Most cyclists think they need an FTP training plan when what they actually need is to stop randomly hammering themselves into the ground. The difference between structured FTP improvement and throwing intervals at the wall determines whether you’ll increase FTP by meaningful watts or just accumulate fatigue.

If you’re training 6-10 hours per week and already understand what FTP represents, you’ve likely hit the point where generic advice stops working. Your aerobic base isn’t the limiting factor anymore. Neither is your willingness to suffer. What you need is precision.

WHO AN FTP TRAINING PLAN IS FOR (AND WHO IT’S NOT)

An FTP training plan works for cyclists who’ve moved beyond the beginner gains phase but haven’t yet optimized their approach to threshold development. You’ve tested your FTP multiple times. You know your current number sits somewhere reasonable for your training volume. You understand zone-based training exists.

What you might not realise is that FTP improvement for experienced riders follows different rules than the generic “just ride harder” advice that worked when you started.

This approach isn’t for cyclists still building basic aerobic fitness. If you’re doing fewer than 4-5 hours per week consistently, or if your FTP gains come easily from just riding more, you don’t need specialised threshold protocols yet.

It’s also not for riders chasing unrealistic improvements. The cyclist hoping to increase FTP by 50 watts in 8 weeks likely needs to adjust expectations rather than find a different training plan. Real FTP improvement for trained athletes happens in smaller, harder-earned increments.

WHAT ACTUALLY LIMITS FTP IN TRAINED CYCLISTS

Your FTP ceiling isn’t determined by how much pain you can tolerate during a 20-minute test. For cyclists with established aerobic bases, FTP improvements depend on specific physiological adaptations that require targeted stimulus.

To read the rest of our latest blog, click on the link in bio.

08/01/2026

Cyclists love power because it feels objective. Watts are clean, repeatable, and reassuringly numerical. If your FTP goes up, you expect to go faster. If your MAP is high, you assume you’re quick.

But anyone who has raced, ridden fast group rides, or spent time coaching knows this isn’t always true.

Two riders can have the same FTP and ride at very different speeds. A lighter rider with fewer watts can ride away from a heavier rider with more. Someone with an “average” power profile can be devastating in the real world, while another rider with impressive test numbers struggles to translate them into speed.

That gap between engine and outcome is exactly what PSTS is designed to describe.

WHAT PSTS IS ACTUALLY TRYING TO DO

PSTS stands for Performance Speed Translation Score.

It’s a composite score that combines:

power output (either MAP or FTP),

body mass,

and aerodynamic drag (CdA),

to give a single number that reflects how effectively your physiological engine can turn into real-world speed. It’s not a race predictor. It doesn’t tell you how long you’ll last, how tactically smart you are, or whether you’ll win. What it does do is answer a much more practical question:

Given this engine, in this body, in this position — how much speed potential is there?

That’s a question power alone cannot answer.

WHY WATTS (AND EVEN W/KG) FALL SHORT

Raw watts ignore body size. Watts per kilo improve that, but still ignore aerodynamics — which dominate speed once you’re above low climbing speeds.

Two riders both riding at 4.5 W/kg can have very different drag profiles. One sits compact and efficient. The other rides tall, wide, and exposed. On the road, they are not equal. PSTS exists to sit between physiology and physics. It doesn’t replace FTP or MAP — it contextualises them.

To read the rest of the most recent blog post, click on the link in bio.

05/01/2026

Why Training Harder Isn’t the Answer (Especially After 40)

For most of your cycling life, the solution to getting fitter was simple: train harder. Ride more. Push deeper. Stack another hard session into the week and trust that effort would be rewarded.

After 40, that logic quietly stops working.

Not because you’ve suddenly become fragile, or because intensity is “bad”, but because performance is no longer limited by how much stress you can apply. It’s limited by how well you absorb it. And that requires a different skill entirely.

The skill most masters cyclists never consciously train is knowing when not to push.

THE TRAP: DOING MORE OF WHAT USED TO WORK

Most riders I speak to over 40 aren’t undertraining. They’re doing 8–12 hours a week, hitting sweet spot, riding hard group rides, racing online, adding VO₂max sessions, and often lifting weights on top. On paper, it looks like commitment. In reality, it’s often just accumulated fatigue dressed up as discipline.

The problem is that the body you had at 28 could tolerate frequent, overlapping stressors. You could train hard, recover “well enough”, and still adapt. That same approach at 45 or 55 doesn’t fail immediately — it fails slowly.

You don’t suddenly blow up. You plateau.

FTP stops moving. Endurance feels fragile. Hard sessions feel harder than they should. Motivation dips. And the instinctive response is to push again, because that’s what has always worked.

This is where most masters riders dig themselves into a hole.

WHY EFFORT STOPS BEING THE LIMITER

After 40, your biggest limiter is rarely willingness to work. It’s recovery capacity.

That doesn’t mean you recover “badly”. It means recovery has become a finite resource that must be managed deliberately. When intensity, volume, strength training, life stress, and poor fuelling all draw from the same pool, the issue isn’t whether you’re training hard enough — it’s whether anything is being fully absorbed.

To read the rest of the latest blog, click on the link in bio.

29/12/2025

The Right Way to Start Training in January (If You’re Over 40)

January is where a lot of masters cyclists quietly sabotage their season.

Not because they’re lazy. Not because they lack motivation. But because they restart training in a way that feels productive and looks disciplined, yet sets them up for fatigue, stagnation, or injury before spring has even arrived.

If you’re over 40, the first week or two of January is not about gaining fitness. It’s about re-establishing training tolerance so the work you do later actually sticks.

Get this right, and the next three months flow smoothly. Get it wrong, and you spend February wondering why nothing is moving.

Here’s what “starting properly” actually looks like.

FIRST: ACCEPT WHERE YOU REALLY ARE

By late December, most riders are carrying some combination of residual fatigue, disrupted routine, poor sleep, richer food, alcohol, and mental overload. Some people rode through Christmas. Others barely touched the bike. Both groups tend to make the same mistake in January: they assume fitness status and readiness are the same thing.

They’re not.

You might still have plenty of fitness on board, but that doesn’t mean your body is ready to absorb structured training immediately. Readiness is about how well you tolerate load right now, not what you could do six weeks ago.

January training needs to respect that distinction.

WEEK ONE IS ABOUT RE-ESTABLISHING RHYTHM, NOT BUILDING FITNESS

The purpose of the first week of January is simple: get back into regular training without creating unnecessary stress.

That usually means three to five rides across the week, depending on your schedule. The focus is frequency rather than volume. A consistent pattern matters more than long rides or big numbers.

For most masters riders, sessions in this week should feel manageable. You should finish rides feeling like you could have done more, not like you’ve ticked something heroic off the list.

To read the rest of the blog, click on the link in bio.

22/12/2025

Over the last few months I’ve been reminded, again and again, why I enjoy coaching so much — not just the numbers improving or the results on paper, but the conversations, the honesty, and the trust people place in us with their training and goals.

Whether you’ve been following along quietly, reading the blog posts, using the calculators, asking questions, or actively training with us, thank you. It really does matter.

This time of year doesn’t need to be about doing more. A bit of riding if you enjoy it. A bit of rest if you need it. Time with people who matter. Training will still be there in January.

From all of us at CycleCoach, have a genuinely good Christmas and a strong start to the New Year — on and off the bike.

Merry Christmas,

Ric

Claire
Neil
Glenn
Richie

CycleCoach

18/12/2025

The 5 Signs You’re Under-recovering (not Under-training)

Most masters cyclists don’t fail to improve because they aren’t training hard enough. They fail because they don’t recover well enough.

This is one of the hardest things to accept, especially if you’re disciplined, motivated, and consistent. You’re doing the sessions. You’re ticking off the plan. You’re not skipping rides. So when fitness stalls, the natural response is to push harder.

For riders over 40, that instinct is usually wrong.

Under-recovery is the silent limiter of performance in masters athletes. It doesn’t announce itself with dramatic fatigue or obvious illness. It creeps in quietly, disguising itself as “lack of form”, “getting older”, or “needing a new training block”.

Here are the five most reliable signs I see that a rider is under-recovering rather than under-training — and what to do about it.

1. YOUR EASY RIDES KEEP DRIFTING HARDER

One of the earliest warning signs is that endurance rides stop feeling easy. Power numbers that used to sit comfortably in Zone 2 now feel laboured. Heart rate creeps up for the same watts. You find yourself nudging the intensity just to feel like you’re “doing something”.

This isn’t because your aerobic fitness has suddenly disappeared. It’s because fatigue has raised the cost of producing power. The system is stressed, so even low intensities feel expensive. When this happens, riders often make things worse by riding harder on endurance days. That just digs the hole deeper.

What to do: Pull intensity down deliberately for a week. Keep the duration, lower the watts. Easy needs to feel easy again before anything else will improve.

2. YOU CAN COMPLETE INTERVALS, BUT NOTHING PROGRESSES

Another classic sign is stagnation inside the sessions themselves. You’re finishing your VO₂max or threshold workouts, but power isn’t increasing, intervals don’t feel sharper, and there’s no sense of momentum.

To read the rest of the blog article, click on the link in our bio.

15/12/2025

THE 5 SIGNS YOUR WINTER TRAINING ISN’T WORKING (AND WHAT TO FIX BEFORE JANUARY)
By Coach Ric Stern

Every December I see the same pattern: riders are training, riding regularly, even doing long weekend rides — yet nothing is improving. Their FTP is flat, they’re tired more often than they should be, and they don’t feel any stronger on the bike.

Winter is when fitness is built. But only if the training you’re doing is actually productive. If you’re heading into January without clear progress, there are usually five reasons why.

1. YOUR ZONE 2 ISN’T REALLY ZONE 2

Most cyclists think they’re doing Zone 2, but their power file shows something very different. Instead of a clean endurance profile, the ride is full of spikes, surges, long sections drifting into Zone 3, and a Normalised Power that’s too high to be considered true low-intensity work. The result? You never accumulate enough actual endurance volume to move the aerobic needle.

Fix: Zone 2 is only Zone 2 when the majority of the ride is at your endurance level and your NP lands roughly in the correct range. Surges are fine on hills, but they should be brief. The ride should feel almost boring — but you finish knowing you trained, not drifted.

2. YOUR DURABILITY FALLS APART TOO EARLY

Most riders can produce good power in the first 60–90 minutes of a ride. Where the real cracks show is after 1,500–2,000 kJ of work. For some riders (and this is extremely common over 40), performance falls off a cliff once the workload gets high. Even moderate tempo becomes difficult, and anything near threshold feels impossible. This isn’t a character flaw — it’s a physiological limiter. And it’s trainable.

Fix: Start identifying where your durability drops. That’s your training opportunity. For some, it’s 1,500 kJ. For others, 2,500 kJ. The absolute number doesn’t matter — what matters is lifting it over time.

For the other 3 signs, and details on CycleCoach’s training options, check out our latest blog article, via the link in bio.

09/12/2025

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ testimonial for Coach Ric from

“My experience with coach Ric was excellent. He took me from a 5:58 finish at Dakota Five O in 2024 to a 4:45 finish and a podium in 2025. He puts out the plan early so you have time to plan your week. At 52 years old it’s been fun reaching new heights in bike racing.”

Ric responded: “Thanks so much Todd — that was an absolute pleasure to work towards together. Going from 5:58 to 4:45 and onto the podium in a year is some jump, especially at 52. Brilliant consistency from you — well deserved result 👊”

If you want to progress your performance to new levels, check out our coaching options (link in bio).

Whatever your age, if you want to improve your fitness and get faster on your bike, we can help. Our new CycleCoach Collective at $75 per month (for early adopters; link in bio) provides structured and flexible plans via . If you have under 6 hours a week to train, or more than 6 hours, our plans will fit your schedule.

08/12/2025

“I’m working hard… so why isn’t my FTP moving?”

It’s rarely because of age, talent, or genetics. It’s almost always because the training being done—while well-intentioned—isn’t creating the specific physiological stress required to raise threshold. FTP is a stubborn metric. It responds brilliantly to the right combination of stimulus, timing, fuelling and recovery, and it refuses to budge when even one of those pieces is missing.

If your FTP has been stuck for months, let’s look at the reasons why, and more importantly, what to do about it.

YOU SPEND TOO MUCH TIME IN THE “MIDDLE”

This is the most common reason for stagnation. A lot of riders fall unintentionally into what I call the “always kind of hard” trap. Endurance rides start drifting upwards. Zwift rides have you sitting just under threshold far more often than you realise. Sweetspot slowly becomes threshold. Hard days are not hard enough, and easy days aren’t easy at all.

The trouble is that this moderate intensity feels productive, yet it rarely produces the adaptations necessary to move FTP. Mitochondria don’t get enough stimulus to grow. Aerobic enzymes don’t up-regulate in the way they should. VO₂max sits unchanged. And because you’re never truly riding easy, you don’t recover well enough to hit quality intensity when it matters.

FTP never moves because nothing is stressing the system in a way that forces it to.

A pyramidal distribution solves this. The majority of your riding should be genuinely easy. Then a small but consistent dose of MIET (moderately intensive endurance training) or tempo, and an even smaller amount of high-intensity work. When that structure is in place, threshold almost always rises as a side-effect of good training—not from smashing endless “FTP intervals.”

To read the rest of our most recent blog article, click on the link in bio.

05/12/2025

Why Every Masters Cyclist Should Test Durability (Not Just FTP)

Most cyclists put far too much weight on a single number: FTP. It is a useful benchmark, but it only tells you how strong you are when you are relatively fresh. It tells you nothing about how strong you are after you have already done a significant amount of work.

For riders over 40, that distinction really matters. Gran fondos, gravel events, hilly sportives and long club runs are not decided in the first hour. They are decided after several hours of riding, when everyone is tired and the ability to keep producing power under fatigue becomes the real limiter.

That quality has a name: durability.

Durability is your ability to maintain a high percentage of your best power after you have accumulated a large amount of work, usually expressed in kilojoules (kJ). It is a very different thing from FTP, and in many masters riders it is the true weak point.

WHAT DURABILITY ACTUALLY IS

Durability is simply the relationship between what you can do when you are fresh and what you can do when you are already tired.

If you ride a 20-minute best effort at the start of a session and then repeat the same test after several hours of riding, the drop in average power between those two efforts is a measure of your durability. A small drop means you are good at holding performance when fatigued. A large drop means you are not.

This is not an abstract lab concept. It is exactly what happens in real rides and races. The rider who can still produce close to their “fresh” power after a long day is the rider who climbs best at the end, who rides away from the group, or who simply doesn’t implode in the last hour.

To read the rest of the most recent blog article, click on the link@in bio.

01/12/2025

How to Actually Ride Zone 2: A Masters Cyclist’s Guide to Doing It Properly

Zone 2 is the most misunderstood training intensity in cycling. Everyone talks about it, most riders think they’re doing it, and almost nobody is truly in the right zone. For masters cyclists — where recovery, durability, and aerobic efficiency matter more than ever, getting Zone 2 right is one of the biggest performance multipliers you have.

But the internet has made Zone 2 confusing. You’ll see contradictory rules:
“Stay strictly below LT1.”
“Never let power spike.”
“Average power must sit in Z2.”
“NP must not exceed Z2.”
“Ride as easy as possible.”
“Ride steady tempo.”

None of these statements are fully wrong, but none alone describes what a good Zone 2 ride actually looks like in the real world.

So let’s clear it up — properly — and give you rules that are physiologically sound, practical to execute, and appropriate for riders over 40.

FIRST: WHAT ZONE 2 IS ACTUALLY FOR

Zone 2 isn’t magic. It’s the one intensity where you can build serious aerobic fitness without accumulating the kind of fatigue that derails recovery for riders over 40.

For masters cyclists, that matters because:

You can accumulate meaningful volume without burning out.

You improve fat oxidation and mitochondrial density — the “engine” work that keeps you strong on long rides.

You build durability: the ability to produce the same power late in a ride as early.

It supports, rather than competes with, the quality of your harder training sessions.

Zone 2 is where most of your aerobic adaptations happen. But only if you get the intensity right.

SO WHAT COUNTS AS ZONE 2? (THE REAL ANSWER)

Zone 2, in my training levels, is 50–65% of MAP. Not sure what 50–65% of MAP is for you?
Use the MAP/FTP Calculator (link via blog/website)

That’s a wide range, deliberately so, because physiology doesn’t operate in neat boxes. But here’s the real-world rule that actually matters:

A RIDE COUNTS AS ZONE 2 IF THE MAJORITY OF YOUR TIME IS SPENT BETWEEN 50–65% OF MAP, AND YOUR OVERALL STRESS (NP) STAYS INSIDE THE SAME RANGE.

That’s it.

To read the rest of the latest blog, click on the link in bio.

28/11/2025

VO₂max Training for Cyclists Over 40: What Still Works (and What Doesn’t.

Most cyclists over 40 have been told, at some point, that their VO₂max is destined to decline no matter what they do. It’s partly true — if you stop training it. But I’ve coached riders into their 50s and 60s who maintain, and occasionally increase, their aerobic capacity simply because they continue to stimulate it correctly.

The limitation isn’t age. It’s programming.

VO₂max is not just a “racer’s metric”. It underpins almost everything you care about: your sustained power, how strong you feel on climbs, how well you cope with surges, and how quickly you recover between efforts. Even if you never pin on a number again, raising or maintaining VO₂max keeps you riding at a level that feels enjoyable rather than laboured. Importantly, VO₂max is one of the strongest health predictors we have — higher values consistently correlate with better ageing and lower all-cause mortality.

So, yes — you can improve it. But only if you train it in a way that suits a masters athlete’s physiology and recovery profile. Let’s walk through what actually works.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENS TO VO₂MAX AFTER 40

Ageing does cause several predictable changes:

- your maximal heart rate drifts downward, slowly

- you lose some muscle mass unless you strength train

- stroke volume can decline if you drop training volume

- you become less tolerant of repeated high-intensity sessions without recovery

But the adaptations that matter most for endurance performance — mitochondrial density, capillary networks, lactate transport, and aerobic enzyme activity — remain highly trainable well into your 50s and beyond.

The biggest drop in VO₂max with age isn’t biological. It’s behavioural. People simply stop training the qualities that support it.

When those qualities are trained — consistently, progressively, and appropriately the decline mostly stops or slows dramatically. In some cases, it reverses. As an example I’m holding mid-60s mL·kg⁻¹·min⁻¹ for decades.

For much more info, read the rest of the blog post via the link in bio.

CycleCoach

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