What Is a Fitness Plateau?

No matter where you are in your cycling career, a lot of athletes find a time where they’ve hit a plateau and feel like they can’t find a way to improve their cycling performance. Many times, the plateau happens at a weak spot in their cycling arsenal. This occurs because most cyclists know that they have to train their weaknesses in order to get better, but don’t quite know the right way to go about it. As they train these weaknesses over and over, they eventually hit a wall that cannot be overcome. Instead of taking a step back, they keep hammering after this weakness, which can often lead to disappointment and frustration.

Sometimes the athlete has lost motivation to go after the weak spot where they can no longer make a serious gain and feel like that have plateaued. Sometimes it’s their mind that is holding them back and they psych themselves out. It’s the fear of the pain that the wattage will create that paralyzes them. Don’t believe it? Put them in a race scenario that has that same or similar duration, and if the segment is at the right time of the race (someone else attacks and they are hanging on for dear life) and they no longer are anticipating and thinking about the pain, they JUST RIDE HARD, and we see a lifetime Personal Best come out of it.

They see the data afterwards, and they think, “I CAN beat that personal best I had before!” While it is very hard to recreate race-paced efforts on your own, simply seeing that you can improve will often lead to even more improvement.

Don’t psych yourself out. Be calm before the most intense intervals.

All that mental talk aside, there are also physiological things than can be hampering your performance which are what we’d like to look at in this post.

What To Do When You Plateau

How do you break a bike plateau? Should you rest or train harder? Oftentimes a plateau occurs because a rider is not training hard enough, or they are training too hard. These are both on polar opposite ends of the spectrum, so it’s key to figure out what the issue might be.

If you are not training hard enough, you will plateau simply because you are not causing enough “damage” to your body from training for it to adapt and come back stronger. With training, we need to overload ourselves with things we have not done before and challenge the body. The other aspect of this is training variation. You might be training hard but have been stuck doing the same thing repeatedly and need to switch it up.

How do you know if you are not training hard enough?

You’ve been doing the same thing in training for a long time and rarely mix it up
You’ve been missing workouts and slacking a bit :)
You never really feel like you are getting out of your comfort zone in training

If you are training too hard, this is usually because an athlete is not giving themselves enough time to rest and adapt. You might be getting in some good challenging workouts, but you are not providing your body with the time that it needs to repair that damage so you can come back stronger.

How do you know if you are training too hard?

You often feel tired during training, and this is what prevents you from giving your best in workouts
You wake up feeling unmotivated
Your resting heart rate is unusually high. Sometimes you have disrupted sleep because you can’t get your heart rate down, or it is thumping when you wake up
When training, you can’t seem to get your heart rate as high as you should be able to, especially during intervals

If this sounds like you, take a rest. Seriously. Your body will thank you. If it’s only been a week or two of low energy, perhaps 5-7 days off the bike or riding very short and easy could be enough to give you a reset. Unfortunately, many riders have trained this way for months or even years and must take extended time off from training to get back to full function. Don’t let that happen, even WorldTour pros make this mistake.

With training, we need to find the optimal load that will give us enough stimulus to get stronger, but also enough time to repair and improve. This can take some time to figure out if you are new to cycling training. It can be tempting for athletes to do too much, too soon and get burnt out. This is where an accountable partner or cycling coach can help keep you on track.

How To Get Over a Plateau

If you aren’t overtrained, then it’s likely you need to either provide a greater training load or change up your training regimen to give your body something new to adapt to. So just how do you get over a performance plateau?

See Also: Master’s Cycling Training

Hitting a VO2Max Plateau

For VO2Max Plateaus, spend more time hitting that 85-90% VO2Max power or 90% HR Max. If you’re newer to cycling and find training the really strenuous loads very difficult to handle, take a look at some very short, but highly repeatable, 20 second tabata intervals. 6 x 20s at full gas, resting just 10 seconds in between. Rest 5 minutes between and do it two more times. These will really hurt, but they will mentally prepare you for the intensity that longer VO2Max sessions demand.

If you’ve been throttling VO2Max efforts in hopes of increasing your 5-minute power and have worked up to 5 x 5m, lower the duration to 3.5 minutes, and only do 4 of them on your hard day. Your body will still get a high stress stimulus but will be able to recover more between efforts; this change increases the wattage but decreases the duration. You'll be able to achieve greater power outputs with shorter intervals and then eventually lengthen them to 5 x 5 and be setting PRs in no time.

You could also decrease the intensity but increase the duration to bank more time close to VO2Max. Both will help you break out of stagnation from a lack of variety in the training stimulus.

Pushing out your VO2Max ceiling is a great thing to do anyways, as it will allow you to have more room to grow your FTP. Have you plateaued at FTP? Keep reading.

Use our library of VO2Max workouts with our VO2max training pack.

FTP Training Plateau

If you’ve been working on building your FTP and can’t seem to get past ‘x’ Watts, look at the entire picture of threshold efforts. Doing long FTP intervals like 3 x 15 minutes is not actually the best way to increase your FTP. These long intervals will train your fatigue resistance at your current FTP but will not increase it. To increase FTP, you need to train above your FTP with supra-threshold efforts, VO2Max, and over-unders.

BONUS: Use the Power Duration Curve

Take a look at your Power Duration Curve and see if there is anything lacking on the edges of where you are plateauing. If you’ve plateaued at FTP, is your VO2Max really weak? You might need to do some top-end work to give your FTP room to grow. Or, maybe your aerobic base isn’t as efficient as it could be, and this is why you might be struggling with FTP efforts.

Many times, we see the latter. Athletes who go in guns blazing with the hard intervals without many base miles and have a lack of aerobic base to improve their FTP. Those that put in the work and develop their base fitness begin to see huge gains.

Warning: this endurance growth cannot be fast tracked. There are very few shortcuts in cycling, and developing your aerobic base takes time and consistency.

So, what do you need to work on? Glad you asked! We provide a Free Power File analysis where we will delve into your training data, look at your rider history and provide you with training recommendations

Related Post: Understanding Power Meter Data

This rider could work the edges of their 5 minute and 1 hour power if they were plateauing at these durations

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How to Overcome a Cycling Plateau