{"id":245497,"date":"2025-11-05T15:10:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T15:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/245497\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T15:10:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T15:10:23","slug":"these-are-the-7-training-mistakes-i-see-most-often-says-world-renowned-cycling-coach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/245497\/","title":{"rendered":"These are the 7 training mistakes I see most often, says world-renowned cycling coach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting in prime physical and mental shape to hit a fitness goal over a period of many months is no mean feat. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s like a game of snakes and ladders, where the temptation to skip early, vital stages of your training plan is often undone by a sudden injury, bout of fatigue or worse. Mistakes along the way are inevitable \u2013 and often end up getting repeated the next time round.<\/p>\n

\u201cInsanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results\u201d \u2013 an oft-cited quote attributed erroneously to Albert Einstein \u2013 might come to mind when we think of our fitness journey.<\/p>\n

Few people are as qualified as Joe Friel when it comes to finding out the most common mistakes made by athletes of all levels. <\/p>\n

Friel, 82, is an elite-level cycling and triathlon coach and has spent his whole career devoted to it. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s still going, as fit and sharp as ever. He co-founded TrainingPeaks.com in the late 1990s, a training software platform launched at the dawn of the internet that revolutionised how cyclists’ progress and performance is analysed.<\/p>\n

Out went pens and notebooks \u2013 and in came trackable data anywhere in the world. It introduced terms such as Normalised Power and TSS (Training Suffer Score) into the lexicon of cyclists globally.<\/p>\n

Friel has also authored 18 books on training (number 19 is on the way), with several devoted to older athletes beyond 50. As a very active octogenarian, he knows what he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n

We caught up with him on Zoom at his home in Arizona this summer, as he prepared to release that 18th book, High-Performance Cyclist. <\/p>\n

So, what are the training mistakes he\u2019s seen repeated over the years?<\/p>\n

Inconsistent training
\n\"MaleConsistency is key. Steve Sayers \/ Our Media<\/p>\n

This is, Friel says, by far and away the biggest mistake people make with their training \u2013 even when the simple fact of having a coach, and all the accountability that brings, should be a big motivator for doing the training in the first place.<\/p>\n

Life, however, conspires to get in the way. You’re doing too much, taking too many things on and, crucially, not getting enough sleep<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first talk to athletes about the idea of coaching them, they\u2019ll have this litany of reasons about why [they aren\u2019t training] and it comes down to the same thing,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019ve just got too much stuff in their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone is going to miss workouts. The professionals miss workouts. The question is how many do you miss? <\/p>\n

“If it\u2019s two or three a week, that\u2019s something you won\u2019t recover from. 90% consistent, you\u2019re going to go pretty well. At 70%, it\u2019s going to be a long haul.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of a season, when it\u2019s gone wrong, they\u2019ll look back to pinpoint the mistakes and they\u2019ll think \u2018maybe I didn\u2019t do enough hard workouts\u2019 \u2013 they seldom go back to how inconsistent they were.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always tell athletes that you could do the wrong workouts consistently and that would be better than doing the right workouts inconsistently.”<\/p>\n

Friel says for busy people targeting a fitness goal, who say they don\u2019t have enough time, they need to examine their lives and boil it down to the essentials \u2013 family, career and training \u2013 and put the rest on the back burner.<\/p>\n

What about friends, we suggest? You can see them in training, he bats back.<\/p>\n

Too little emphasis on base training
\n\"MeridaBuilding the base is crucial. Russell Burton \/ Our Media<\/p>\n

Building your base fitness, in the early stages of any training plan that focuses on endurance, is utterly essential to the success of the whole endeavour.<\/p>\n

This low-intensity period of training is the wide base of your pyramid of training that everything else is built on. <\/p>\n

It helps you to better absorb the later, harder work and improves specific areas of physiology, such as using fat as a fuel source. Yet Friel is shocked by how many people see it as a \u201cwaste of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey see the build period \u2013 the final 12 weeks of their plan \u2013 as the most important because it hurts the most. <\/p>\n

“So that must mean that it\u2019s the best for them \u2013 they do more of that and less of the stuff that doesn\u2019t hurt. That crucial base period gets bypassed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t do enough low intensity. The only time they\u2019re doing low intensity is when they\u2019re too tired to do another high intensity workout! <\/p>\n

People tend to think it’s of little value, but in this book, I list all the things that happen in the base period that do not happen with hard training. And it’s a long, long list of if possibilities!\u201d<\/p>\n

Training too hard, too often
\n\"\"Gamified indoor training can lead to cyclists training at too high an intensity for too long. <\/p>\n

Friel focuses on the concept of polarised training<\/a> (PT) \u2013 where you train at both ends of the intensity spectrum and skip the middle \u2013 to explain this popular mistake.<\/p>\n

In PT, he\u2019d get athletes to do five easy workouts and two hard each week during the base period (in the base, \u2018hard\u2019 workouts are long because of their length, not intensity). <\/p>\n

This then progresses to the specific phase, when two race-like sessions are the hard workout, with easier sessions for the rest of the week (including one day off).<\/p>\n

\u201cThis works very well for athletes,\u201d says Friel. \u201cUnfortunately, most don\u2019t want to do this. They want to do three, sometimes four or more hard workouts a week. <\/p>\n

“That doesn\u2019t get them any further along than doing two. They go into hard ones tired and consequently are rundown and set themselves up for overtraining syndrome. That can take months to get out of.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost people see it as something light, like \u2018I just did too much and I\u2019m tired\u2019. They think they just have fatigue. Overtraining is like having a major disease. It can be hard to get back to previous levels afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

It shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that, if training too hard, too often is a common issue, not resting enough can be filed in an equally important sub-category.<\/p>\n

Too much processed food in your diet
\n\"\"Processed food can be a damaging addition to your diet when eaten often. Getty Images<\/p>\n

Friel sees far too much junk food and too many poor-quality diets in athletes who are otherwise committed to other parts of their training. As the saying goes, put junk in and you\u2019ll get junk out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tell athletes, if I\u2019m going to be their coach, that there are only three things that make up 80% of their diet \u2013 vegetables, fruit and protein. <\/p>\n

“With the other 20, if you want to have some junk food, some candy, we can live with that, but 80% is the cut-off. If we\u2019re doing that, we\u2019re getting good calories.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is what the pros are doing. The junk food comes when they\u2019re on the bike [fuelling their ride]. Otherwise, they\u2019re eating high-quality food.”<\/p>\n

Using supplements as a crutch<\/p>\n

A lot of the problems described previously \u2013 inconsistent training, poor diet, feeling overly fatigued \u2013 make the idea of taking supplements to counter the negative effects appealing. That’s \u201cnonsense\u201d, according to Friel.<\/p>\n

\u201cFitness does not come out of a pill,\u201d he insists. \u201cWant to know the supplement that you should be taking? Exercise! <\/p>\n

“Pills are not going to do it for you. Athletes end up taking them to try and make up for the losses from their training, and the fact they\u2019re tired and rundown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Too little sleep
\n\"\"Poor sleep can limit your training gains. Joseph Branston<\/p>\n

Much of your good work in training can be undone by not getting enough quality sleep, says Friel.<\/p>\n

\u201cSleep is when fitness happens. It\u2019s when your body releases all the growth hormone, all the stuff that rebuilds muscle, bone \u2013 everything in your body. It\u2019s all happening during sleep.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re cutting back on sleep, you\u2019re not going to get the full benefit of yesterday\u2019s workout. You have 90-minute waves in sleep where all this good stuff is released, so if you\u2019re cutting your sleep short by a couple of hours a night to fit other things into your day, you\u2019re depriving your body of a whole cycle that your body needed to make the most of your session.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should wake up naturally. If an alarm wakes you, that\u2019s cortisol [the \u2018stress hormone\u2019] being released into your body.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not doing workouts at the right time<\/p>\n

No matter your endurance sport, just because you have a strong history in it that doesn\u2019t mean you should skip a specific block of training or take shortcuts.<\/p>\n

Professional cyclists treat every season on its own terms, building slowly through the winter and spring, then have a big summer of intensity in their goal events, followed by winding down with rest and recovery in the off-season.<\/p>\n

Of course, your form and ability ideally accumulate and build season after season, but each winter, this brick-by-brick process must start again if you are to avoid the worst effects of overtraining.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t start off by doing intervals, or sprints, or hill repeats. You start off by working on duration \u2013 building with long [slow] rides,\u201d says Friel.<\/p>\n

That leads into volume (upping the hours you do each week), then adding intensity on top of that. At the end of it all comes density, where intensity becomes more frequent.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took us a whole season to get there, months and months, but now they come into these tough sessions with a lot of fitness and they’re able to do it without feeling totally wasted,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

High-Performance Cyclist: The Complete Training Manual by Joe Friel is out now from Bloomsbury Sport (\u00a322 in the UK)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Getting in prime physical and mental shape to hit a fitness goal over a period of many months…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-245497","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}