11 Essential Skills For The Self-Coached Cyclist
Self-coached athletes can be well placed to know what training activities are best suited for them on any given day provided they have a certain set of abilities and can avoid making common mistakes that many of those who coach themselves are particularly prone to!
Let’s take a look at what these key abilities are and how a self-coached cyclist can exploit some of the advantages they have.
1: Objectivity
One of the main reasons athletes hire coaches is to add a level of ‘objectivity’ to their training.
This can help them to avoid making harmful decisions which they wouldn’t necessarily advise someone else to do under the same circumstances, since the coach can provide a unbiased perspective on the situation.
In a self-coached scenario, it’s imperative then to have the ability to be objective with yourself and be able to take assess your decision making without being clouded by your ego and be self-aware in terms of your limited perspective, lack of experience etc. This means being able to consistently put your head before (or at least alongside) your heart when there are strong indications in the data and the wider environment suggesting your default approach may not be ideal.
As an example, you might notice that your HRV has been dropping for several days and you have a tickle in your throat…
There’s arguably a clear approach to be taken here, e.g. back off from any hard training and focus on giving your body a low stress environment so that it can get on top of what may well be the early onset of illness, even if that conflicts with what you want to do or had planned to do that day (which might be a punchy 3 hour ride with friends, for example).
2: Subjectivity
At the risk of undermining the point above, you also have a great advantage as a self-coached athlete insomuch as there isn’t a disconnect between the feelings and sensations you’re experiencing and what a coach knows/doesn’t know about how you’re feeling due to good or bad communication.
Therefore, you can use this subjectivity and the opportunity for less misunderstanding to your advantage.
Perhaps the key metric when it comes to subjectivity is RPE or ‘rating of perceived exertion’, which you can use in combination with other values like heart rate and power output to adapt your training, both on the fly and into the future. Of course, you’ll need to “calibrate” your RPE so that you can reliably judge what a 5/10, a 7/10 or a 9/10 is for you and it can take a while to pull yourself away from being a slave to external measures like power output!
Some days, the data will tell you one thing and your internal sensations another - if you can effectively use both, you can make smarter and more informed decisions by combining the objectivity discussed above with your own subjectivity for a powerful combination.
3: Strategic
Being strategic in the training planning process is vital for the self-coached athlete not relying on the helping hand of an expert coach.
Knowing how to approach creating a logical roadmap towards your goals, understanding how and when to check your progress and being adaptable as you make your way through a plan is a great skill for the self-coached athlete.
This involves constantly trying to learn and implement frameworks and approaches from sources like the business world (where effective planning strategies have been honed due to the vested interest of large financial gain).
Examples that we use in our coaching are:
SMART goal setting
Gantt charts for programming the year ahead
the use of SWOT analysis to determine your own athletic strengths, weaknesses/limiters, opportunities (e.g. areas of your fitness and performance potential that are low-hanging fruit to improve) and threats (where have you gone wrong in the past, what lifestyle factors have hindered or could hinder your progress) etc.
Whilst having a well thought out plan all the way up to the key dates in your calendar like races/events is very useful for knowing what the more immediate training decisions should be, it’s also important to understand that just like driving a car in the dark, you only really need a general sense of your destination and you can navigate using just the immediate information in front of your most of the time (e.g. what’s lit up by your car’s lights as you drive).
In this sense, try not to get overwhelmed by trying to figure out every last detail multiple months in advance, as these will almost undoubtably change nearer the time.
4: Patience
Without the presence of a reassuring coach and potentially in the absence of a fully constructed training plan, it’s crucial to have the patience necessary to put in the necessary grunt work to support the more stimulating specific training to come.
This is especially true when it comes to laying a foundation of aerobic endurance in the “base” period.
The nature of most of the training performed at this phase in the year/season means that rapid progress and large jumps in fitness aren’t necessarily noticeable, and thus you need to have a patient commitment to the process rather than looking to gain motivation from seeing key training values increasing week on week.
In James Clear’s popular book “Atomic Habits”, he makes reference to how heating an ice cube in a room in tiny increments appears to do nothing initially, before a critical level is reached and suddenly state change happens rapidly!
Whilst those initial increases didn’t seem to be affecting anything, each is in fact wholly necessary to eventually cause the ice cube to rapidly melt. All of these increases in temperature beforehand were building the necessary foundation of energy, pressure and potential for the melting to happen. Base training is very much the same idea.
5: Efficiency
The best-performing self-coached cyclists are those who are in some way adept at making the most of limited training time and energy, and there are numerous ways you can go about boosting your training efficiency…
Practical examples can be having particular go-to locations for different types of workouts. This can help, for example, with not going out for a structured ride and finding the terrain unsuitable and wasting time completing an ineffective session.
Another example is using a library of go-to workouts you can constantly draw from when planning your training, as opposed to reinventing the wheel every time you come to program a week of training and having to build similar workouts from scratch.
Our Complete Workout Library product is designed just for this purpose and you check that out if you’re at all interested:
The self-coached athlete would also be wise to work on their time management skills to balance demands of life such as family, career etc too.
Some good methods for this are time-blocking, where you organise your day into key portions using a calendar, which helps make training something that’s intentional and prioritised, rather than just squeezed into the day (or not) randomly.
Here’s a good post to learn more about time-blocking.
6: Discipline
Having the ability to stick to a plan when it’s clear that the planned session is the correct and appropriate course of action to take (i.e. fatigue state is low, weather conditions are safe etc) is vital for the self-coached athlete.
Whilst having a good supply of motivation is important, enthusiasm for training isn’t a finite resource or guaranteed to be there each day for many different reasons.
In such situations, it’s key to have the discipline to be able to train in the absence of motivation.
A helpful idea to keep in mind here is that rather than relying on motivation to stimulate action, see this process as a cycle, where action creates motivation, which fuels further action, and so on.
We also like to encourage athletes to apply the “5-minute rule” for this, which means committing to at least riding 5 minutes and not initially worrying about completing a session as a whole.
The reason for this is simple - just about everyone can muster the energy to ride for 5 minutes in pretty much any situation!
Given that getting started with an action is often the hardest part (think Newton’s law of inertia here), the 5-minute rule aims to get over this initial hurdle and build momentum quickly, where the likelihood is that once into the task, you’ll almost always stick with it for longer.
There are little nudges you can put in place to help with this too, including laying out your riding clothes and getting the bike ready the day before to reduce the friction associated with getting started with a workout.
7: Adaptability
As the point above outlines, the ability to stick to a plan will serve the self-coached athlete extremely well most of the time, but that doesn’t negate the idea that sometimes you need to be adaptable and willing to modify the program if doing so is the right call.
Not every day will present ideal conditions and circumstances for training and this often means taking a flexible approach and having variations/alternatives for key sessions can be really helpful.
For example, this could mean having 2x variations of a workout for that day and ideally having an indoor setup that you can fall back on if the immediate environment isn’t conducive to the originally planned session.
8: Analytical
The ability to make good sense of your day-to-day training data, interpret results from testing and decode your race performances will give any self-coached athlete a competitive advantage.
There are lots of tools out there to help with this, and self-coached cyclists are encouraged to learn about what metrics they should be tracking for their particular cycling discipline and at different phases of the season, since these can change from the early base period up to your competition periods.
As important as looking at daily workouts is spotting trends in your data over time to help determine if your training approach is resulting in the desired outcomes or not.
Part of being a good analytical self-coached athlete is knowing what data to look at and which to ignore. Cycling is a sport where enormous amounts of data can be generated from every ride and trying to examine everything can quickly become overwhelming and result in analysis paralysis.
Instead, spend time learning what metrics are the most important for your physiology and the demands of what you’re training for and prioritise these. A post that might be able to help here is one we put together on the physiological demands of different cycling disciplines.
Our Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide is another great resource for understanding your training data better, covering how to identify key thresholds, what certain metrics can tell you and strategies for improving the execution of your workouts.
Programs we use to manage the training of both amateur and professional athletes include TrainingPeaks, WKO5, Intervals.icu and Exphyslab.com, among others.
9: Rationality
Similar to the ability to be objective, the self-coached cyclist aspiring to improve needs to act rationally most of the time, and this carries into all kinds of areas, including planning, during mid-training racing and post-event too:
If we firstly take planning as an example, being rational here could mean progressing training load sensibly from week to week and learning from your training history and increases in load you’ve previously managed to inform the plan.
Another example during your actual workouts could be knowing when to call time on a workout because the effective training dose has been completed and carrying on, even if the plan arbitrarily says so, would cause excess fatigue and may risk injury or illness.
Whilst racing, an example of being irrational (i.e. what you DON’T want to do) would be trying to hold the wheel with another rider or group when RPE is too high and values like power output and HR are clearly above your current ability level to sustain. Exercising rationality here would see you focusing on producing your best performance and not trying to fool yourself that you can beat a much fitter competitor.
If you’re prone to these irrational decisions, then using mantras and self-addressed messages can be helpful.
Examples we have seen athletes have good results from are those like “stick to your perfect pace”, “trust yourself”, which can be attached to the bike in visible places like the stem or handlebars.
Even putting power numbers as guidance in similar places can be really helpful to keep you in check and prevent you from letting the adrenaline-fuelled nature of an event lead you to irrational decisions.
10: ’Healthy irrationality’
As much as point 9 remains true, there are undoubtably times where you need to have a little bit of faith that you can achieve something like a race result or a new performance breakthrough (“faith” meaning belief in the absence of evidence).
Whilst acting rationally in the vast majority of cases will help with continuous progress, in critical moments where there’s little to lose, throwing out otherwise rational decision-making can sometimes pay off! An example might be seen at the end of an important race; you might have a good amount of evidence that you don’t have the ability to win the bunch sprint, but it’s important to still try on the off-chance you perform much better than you expected and/or get lucky.
Another instance where healthy irrationality might prove useful is in setting “stretch” goals…
Such goals sit atop your main performance and outcome goals and act a bit like a bonus, providing extra motivation and can be a way to help you more easily achieve your more primary goals (at the risk of being trite, something along the lines of a “shoot for the stars, land on the moon” situation could happen.
11: Mental strength
Finally, it’s clear that being mentally strong is a help to just about anyone, particularly so for athletes and even more so for those who manage their own training and performance.
Well-established sports psychology tools and frameworks can help you recognise and control your emotions, avoid being an obstacle to your own progress and ultimately allow you to gain and practice all of the points listed previously in this article.
The self-coached athlete will need mental strength in situations like pushing hard in their key workouts and managing their nerves before high priority races, but will also call upon this strength to exercise confidence and restraint when recovery and time away from the bike is needed.
Good skills to garner under the mental strength umbrella include visualisation, self-talk as well as the goal-setting frameworks like SMART and the Process, Performance and Outcome method, which we’ve written about here.
There are plenty of great resources out there for self-coached athletes to work on building their mental strength, including the posts and books by Josephine Perry of Performance in Mind.
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