By Alex Dowsett
There is no shortage of advice out there for cyclists wanting to improve. Most of it will tell you to train harder, buy faster kit, or suffer more. Some of it is even true. But after years as a professional, and now working with riders across all levels, the gains I see people leaving on the table tend to come down to the same handful of things. None of them require a new bike – but I wouldn’t possibly tell you that N+1 isn’t necessary.
1. Consistency beats heroism every time
The single biggest mistake I see is the weekend warrior approach: two weeks of smashing yourself, followed by a week on the sofa nursing tired legs or illness, then repeat. It feels productive in the moment, but the body does not adapt that way. Fitness is built through repeated, manageable stress over time, not occasional all-out efforts that leave you needing four days to recover.
To put it plainly, five sessions a week of 45 to 60 minutes at a solid but sustainable effort, call it an 8 out of 10, will do more for your fitness than one or two 90-minute full-gas days with three days off in between. The first approach builds the engine gradually. The second just damages it and waits for it to recover. A slightly easier week done consistently across six months will outperform a brutal block every time. The boring truth is that turning up, week after week, is the most powerful training tool available to you.
2. You are probably eating enough. But when?
Most cyclists are not under-fuelling in terms of total calories. Where things tend to go wrong is timing, and the failure to think far enough ahead.
A useful habit is to think three meals ahead of any training session. If you are riding tomorrow morning, what you eat tonight matters as much as what you eat at breakfast. The framework I use, and recommend, is to treat protein and fat as constants and fluctuate carbohydrates around what is coming, not what has already happened. At 75kg, I would be aiming for roughly 100 to 120 grams of protein and a similar amount of fat every day, regardless of what is on the schedule. Carbohydrates then go up or down depending on the demands of the upcoming session, not as an attempt to catch up after the fact. The body cannot retroactively fuel a ride you have already done.
On the bike itself, fuelling during longer efforts is important, but it is not an eating competition. There is a trend at the moment towards enormous carbohydrate intake mid-ride that works well for elite athletes doing six-hour days. For most riders, it is overkill and occasionally counterproductive. Eat to the effort, not to a number someone on the internet suggested.
3. Spend time actually in your aero position
This one surprises people. They buy a bike fit, they get the numbers dialled, and then they spend every ride sitting upright on the hoods because it is more comfortable. Which is fine, but if you want to go faster for the same effort, the aero position is where most of that time-saving lies.
The problem is that riding on the drops or in TT bars is uncomfortable until your body adapts to it. The only way to adapt is to actually spend time there. Start with short blocks, five or ten minutes at a time, and build from it, making it a habit. Your back, neck, and hip flexors will thank you eventually. It just takes a while.
4. Have a long-term plan. Then be ready to throw bits of it away
If you do not have a coach, you need at least a rough map of where you are going. Turning up to each ride without any structure is like driving somewhere new without a route and hoping for the best. But the other trap is following a rigid plan so religiously that you ignore what your body is telling you, or fail to adjust when life gets in the way, which happens to us all. The best plans are adaptive ones that respond to how you are actually progressing, rather than what a spreadsheet decided three months ago.
I should probably mention at this point that I co-founded a platform called Stride that does exactly this. Plans on Stride are either built by me personally and designed to adapt to you as you progress, or created through a carefully crafted AI that will work with you to adjust as your life and goals change. I am aware that recommending your own product in a tips article is not subtle. I am also aware that I am entirely biased. But it is genuinely useful, and you can try it at stride.is. I promise I considered not mentioning it briefly and then decided against it.
5. Protect the social ride
This one gets overlooked because it does not feel like training. But the long social ride, the one with a café stop in the middle and a slightly too-competitive sprint at the end, is doing more for your cycling than you probably credit it for. It gets the distance up without the psychological weight of a structured session, and it keeps morale high through the winter months when motivation is thin. Motivation and morale are important to look after.
The destination café stop is an underrated training tool. Picking a café that is 40 miles away and riding to it is a completely different mental proposition to setting out on an 80-mile loop that starts and ends at your front door. One feels like a mission with a reward. The other just feels long. The distance is the same. The willingness to actually do it is not. And café stops are one of cycling’s few genuinely perfect inventions.
If your training plan has squeezed out all the rides you actually enjoy, it is not a good training plan.