The Five Self-Coached Cycling Mistakes That Keep You Stuck

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Self-coached athletes, listen up.
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You make a lot of the same mistakes year after year.
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And here's why.
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You are biased toward yourself and your strengths as an athlete.
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You get caught up in thinking more is always better.
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And there are powerful marketing trends that make it really confusing to know what's what out there in the real world of training, racing, and getting fit to go fast.
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I'm Adam Pulford, head coach of cycling at CTS.
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CTS is an endurance coaching company with over 70 coaches worldwide who help athletes like you get faster in their sport and achieve their goals, whether that's making the world's team selection or nailing your next century ride or just staying fit for the next adventure.
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We have coached literally tens of thousands of athletes in the 26 years of CTS's existence.
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And most athletes come to us from a self-coached background.
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They get stuck and they want help leveling up.
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So we have seen, heard, and helped tons of self-coached athletes get out of the rut of being stuck and back on the road to success.
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Today I want to focus on some of the most common mistakes I've seen over the years so that you can make sure you don't make them yourself again and again.
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First and foremost, most self-coached athletes do not test themselves regularly.
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Simply put, most athletes hate field testing.
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Why?
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Because it's hard.
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It's exhausting mentally and physically.
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It brings up anxiety and it just plain sucks.
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Well, that's what a lot of us tell ourselves, right?
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But it doesn't have to be like that, though.
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Yes, field testing is generally max efforts for specific durations to test energy systems and estimate things like FTP, VO2 max, and anaerobic capacity.
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I use a few different methods in my coaching practice throughout the year for each of my athletes when testing, and it's always very beneficial, in my opinion.
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If you're an athlete who thinks or says testing sucks, check yourself there.
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Check your self-talk because going hard hurts, but when you give your best, when you give your all, everything that you got, you should be proud of that.
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And when you see big numbers, when you see the results, when you see peak effort, or when you land on top of the podium from those efforts, I don't think that you're gonna say it sucks.
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No, because the pain hurts, but the process toward performance is super fun.
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So remember, make your internal self-talk at least neutral, if not positive, and this will help in your performance process too.
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Back to testing.
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Formal testing informs you of where your limits are, where your strengths and weaknesses may be, and it can validate or change your training zones so that you're more accurately working in the areas based on your current physiology.
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This is more than just updating the zones or keeping the model clean for those that may be using WKO5, Vecta, or intervals.
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So long as you have hard efforts of data for the short, medium, and long-term targets.
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Field test sessions are also valuable as training sessions for you to practice pacing for max efforts.
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20-minute TTs, sprints, or three to five minute at max are the durations that we coaches are usually targeting.
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And knowing how to pace these efforts for you, the athlete, is just as important as getting the data from the sessions themselves.
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Finally, back to the whole strengths and weaknesses thing.
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Most self-coached athletes gravitate toward training and testing mostly what they're good at.
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Because why do something you're bad at, right?
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It's not fun.
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Well, testing across all energy systems and spectrums of various lengths and durations help to identify where you need to improve.
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And you need to then observe the data for what it is, not just the self-fulfilling prophecy you wish it to be.
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Testing can do this, but analyzing the data with neutral, open mind is another challenge that self-coach athletes face.
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Overall takeaway on that is if you're not testing at least two times per year, you're leaving a lot on the table, in my opinion.
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So if you race regularly, you may not have to test as often.
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However, I still find value in testing athletes at least two times per year for my athletes, even if they are racing more often.
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My general philosophy here is you need to learn how to pace yourself at max when solo, as well as within competition, and certain testing protocols bring greater insights to the athletes' energy systems and development rather than the race effort alone.
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Also, you should know that there are other philosophies and systems out there that promote no need to test.
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But I think that this is really limiting for a number of reasons.
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First, you don't know where your limits are unless you go find them.
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You don't know if you're actually improving unless you measure it.
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And testing a few tons per year does both of those things.
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So I guess fundamentally, if you want to push your limits and see the results, why in the world would you not test yourself?
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It seems silly to me, but you can decide your own philosophy, I guess.
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Now, if you don't race as often, I'd probably test three or four times per year, or perhaps quarterly.
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What is testing?
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I guess we should talk about that.
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Boy, that's that is a bigger question though.
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I did a whole podcast comparing all types of field testing out there for cyclists, and you can check it out below.
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It's about 30 minutes in total, but compares some of the top testing protocols out there, including the methods that I use for my own athletes.
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For most of you listening here, that popular 20-minute test is what you're probably thinking about and dreading the most.
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Yes, this is good.
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And it does a fine job of testing limits and giving you a ballpark of where you're at to set your FTP training zones and get you pointed in the right direction.
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You just need to know that you take at least 95% of that peak 20-minute power and set that as your FTP.
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That's an estimate of your FTP.
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You put that into training peaks and use the CTS calculator to calculate your training zones.
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More specifically, if you did the 20-minute test as a fresh effort, meaning you warmed up and just sent it for 20 minutes max with no other five minutes beforehand, I would take more like 92 to 93% of your highest average power for that 20 minutes, because this will remove more of the anaerobic contribution and give you a more accurate representation of your current FTP.
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For someone who did a 20-minute max effort at 300 watts, let's say, this could be a matter of a 10 watt difference from 285 down to 275, which may sound drastic, but really, it actually matters.
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Especially when it comes to my second point of common mistakes in self-coach athletes, which is you set your FTP too high.
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Super common for a few reasons.
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First, many people think that setting a higher FTP is better because it pushes you more.
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It's not.
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Accurate FTP for accurate training ranges is best.
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Second, old FTP is still in there and you haven't tested in a while to update it, and your ego is attached to whatever that higher pass number was in the system.
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Super con.
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Third, you think 20-minute power is your FTP.
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It's not.
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Like I said, you have to calculate 95%.
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I would probably do 92 to 93% for those doing fresh efforts, but again, rewind, go back, listen.
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Fourth, you have no clue what your FTP is, so you just go with whatever high number.
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That usually sounds great.
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400 watts.
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Done.
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Wrong.
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Fifth, platforms like training peaks have automatic FTP calculation, and this is an option.
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So if you have that turned on, it will automatically set your FTP to 95% of your highest 20-minute power.
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And it does not automatically bring FTP down if you haven't ridden or tested in a while.
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So this could be artificially inflated for a while and you don't even know that that's occurring.
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So please hear me on this one.
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You are better off training at an FTP that is slightly lower than slightly higher.
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Why?
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Because if you're gonna get something wrong, err on the low end of things to minimize issues.
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Most problems with training happen with inadequate recovery from high intensity training.
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And if you are always doing higher intensity than your body can handle, you're going to mess yourself up more than you would have if you would have just listened to that YouTube coach guy and put your FTP five to ten watts lower than you think you should have.
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Which, of course, leads to my next point.
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Many self-coached athletes don't have enough recovery.
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In particular, sleep.
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Get the grade eight if you can.
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Eight hours of sleep per night or more is great for athletes.
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Now, athletes with children are probably laughing at me right now.
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And that's fine.
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But it doesn't change the fact that around eight hours per night is needed for most athletes.
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But people with kids, I know that you have constraints.
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I get it.
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I am not a parent, so I can't relate to this as much.
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But in my observations of the parents of the juniors that I coach, along with athletes who have kids themselves, I can say that those who do it well teach proper sleep habits just like any other good habit that a family would instill into a child.
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The good parents not only preach it, they practice it and they teach it to their kids.
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Everyone aims for a good sleep and lots of it, as one team, one family, and they are all better off for doing it.
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So get more sleep and you will become a better athlete.
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Sleep is not the only aspect of recovery that I'm referring to here for that self-coached athlete.
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Not getting enough recovery between a hard training session is another culprit.
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Honestly, the best advice I can give to the masses out there listening is two to three times per week of a hard targeted intensity during your base build and peak phases of training.
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For most people, this does a very good job of allowing enough time to recover from one training session to the next over a longer period of time, giving meaningful adaptation with fewer problems of fatigue getting in the way.
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This doesn't mean this is what I do for all of my athletes every single time.
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Definitely not.
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Everyone is different, and there are times where I'll do, say, five days in a row of super hard training, or two days with perhaps three to four hard training sessions in two to three days.
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But this requires a lot more targeted recovery and generally less going on in life.
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A lot of people love the sensation of high intensity training, and you can make a push on that for a while in doing it.
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It's just a matter of do you have enough recovery to adapt from all of it?
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That's where the art comes into the individual level, and that's where I would say that's where coaching is.
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So you can learn a lot more of how to do this and how to map out hard training sessions at some of our training camps.
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Our 2027 CTS camp calendar is now live.
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Check it out in the links below.
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And not only do we incorporate big miles and hard training days at the camp, but we teach you how to recover, we teach you how to train, how to pace, and we have live Q ⁇ A's with our actual coaches so you can learn from camp and then apply it to your own training.
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So pretty much all of our camps do sell out at some point.
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Check out the links below or head over to trainwrite.com and click on camps for more information.
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The last point on not enough recovery is this.
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Try not rushing into the next thing before giving your body some time to recover after a hard workout.
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I've talked about this on other videos, but this is the quick life hack.
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Take 20 to 30 minutes after your hard workout today to just chill.
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Sit and chill.
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Elevate your legs, lay down, relax, close your eyes, breathe, and let your mind and body unwind.
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This relaxation helps tremendously in the recovery process and helps to regulate your nervous system to get out of the fight and flight mode and into that rest and digest mode so that you can enter in that next meeting, phone call, air-in, podcast, or whatever adventure life brings you next, versus just rushing through the entire day and somehow you're just overly exhausted by the end of it.
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The fourth common mistake is lack of planning and adjusting to life.
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Most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year.
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Let's face it, so many of us want to crush it in the workout, crush it at the job, crush it at being a parent, and crush it at life.
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We can't.
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Not every day, at least, not unless we're living in some fantasy world.
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The reality is that we have constraints on our time, energy, and mental bandwidth.
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Today has so many things that pop up and draw our attention away from that bigger picture and it gets overlooked.
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Or we think that there's one magic workout or some magic block of training that's just going to do it all for us when really it's a lot of little things done right over time that leads to most athletes' success.
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Don't get caught up in the super deep details or problems of today.
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Create a plan, follow that plan.
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Then when something changes, change with it to stay on course for where you want your physiology to go.
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For self-coached athletes, this means you need to do a really good job of setting bigger annual plan goals, indicating the key races and training phases where you want to go along the way.
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This helps you design your week in your weekly workouts and cue you when you need to actually move on.
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Most people don't do this or don't know how to do this.
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They just pick a random workout from Trainer Road or what they read on Velo News, or that one workout that worked really well in the past because they don't plan well in the long run and hope for the quick fix today will be the answer.
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My final observation of the self-coached athlete making mistakes is over-reliance on new technology and equipment versus real proper training.
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Pretty classic here.
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You shop and stress about that new wheel set, arrow helmet, wearable device, or whatever the latest hyped thing from the feed that they're pushing for the week.
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The noise is loud out there right now, but the message is clear.
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Spend X amount of money on this X thing and get X amount faster.
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Right?
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Listen, I know this is gonna sound super salesy and I don't mean it like this.
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I just mean to frame it up a little bit more accurately, dollar for dollar.
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A really good new wheel set may cost up to$4,000, and it could save you three to eight watts over a 40k time trial distance.
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That's 1 to 2% at best for someone, say with a 300-watt FTP, assuming the rest of your position is arrow and optimized, and you're actually strong enough to hold that speed of the claimed wattage says it is, and let that one neuronate, by the way.
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A good coach will also cost you around$3,000 to$4,000 per year.
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And it could increase your FTP by 15 to 25 watts in 8 to 10 weeks, or roughly an increase of 3 to 8%, even for a moderately trained athlete.
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Not to mention improvements in durability, stamina, repeatability, fatigue ability, and much more, including knowledge.
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And we all know knowledge is power.
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So if you are looking to spend some money, think of how far that dollar can go, the impact on what you're putting in versus what you're getting out.
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I love a new fancy wheel set just as much as the next person.
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And they are faster than stock wheel sets.
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Please know that.
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But proper training, coaching, and knowledge of recovery will make you faster and it can last a lifetime.
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Buying all the ketones and green powder in the world won't make you faster.
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It'll just make you poor.
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All of that to say, if you're a self-coached athlete, I encourage you to spend at least the same amount of time planning your training, reviewing your files, and investigating improved training strategies as you do investigating a new bike purchase or supplement stuff.
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If you do, you'll get fast.
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If not faster, then what a whole brand new bike could give you.
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And who knows, maybe you can hold off on the new bike and invest in a coach this year and see how the gains can last more than a season or two.
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Up to you.
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So to wrap this thing up, I have to admit, this one sounded a little harsh.
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And I I kind of wanted to dial it back a bit, but when I kept coming back to the most common things our coaches and I see, the ones I covered today are some of the most classic and common ones out there.
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And I am a self-coached athlete, and I can benefit from hearing all this advice as well.
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So you're not the only one out there.
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In summary, no one really enjoys being tested and examined, but it helps to make us better.
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Everyone likes a big number to shoot for in their training, but more accurate numbers bring better results.
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Sleeping more hours per night and spacing your intensity days with full recovery between for most athletes out there is boring advice, but it's effective advice.
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And getting the new new is exciting and motivating for a minute.
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Doing proper training and actually being strong, fast, and fit is exciting and motivating, not only right now, but in the months and years to come.
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So I hope this message helps to dull some of the noise out there for some of the self-coached athletes.
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If so, hit that like button below and share it with your training partners.
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Or if you're like, yep, this makes sense, and I could use a little help myself on the coaching side of things, that's what we're here for.
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Go to trainrank.com to learn more.
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We do coaching for all endurance athlete types.
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We do camps, we do consults, and more.
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Until then, we'll see you back here for the next one soon.