 What are some of the biggest mistakes that new cyclists make? This video is going to tell you some key things that you need to know about training and nutrition that most beginners get wrong. Shoot, even seasoned riders get these wrong on a regular basis. We'll be talking about how much fitness you can expect to gain as a new rider, how to plan your workouts properly to maximize your fitness, how to fuel yourself properly on the bike, and the very first upgrade that you need to make to your bike if you want to improve. Welcome back to another video. My name is Dylan and for weekly science based coaching videos just like this one, be sure to subscribe. As I said, the training mistakes that I'll be talking about today are most common amongst beginners, but I also see more experienced riders making them all the time. What? Before I get into the training mistakes, I want to address a question that I get quite frequently from new riders, which is how much fitness can I expect to gain in a month, the next couple months, a year, or the next couple years? It's not hard to see why this is a popular question. People want to know that they're going to be rewarded for the hard work that they're doing and they want a timeline of when it'll happen. The reality, though, is that this is a difficult question to answer even as an experienced cycling coach. This study on the responses of aerobic power and capacity to training took 24 untrained subjects and put them all on the same 20 week cycling training program. What they found was that responses range dramatically between subjects from just 5% all the way up to an 88% increase in maximal aerobic power and a 16 to 97% increase in maximal aerobic capacity. And these results are confirmed in multiple studies. This review on individual differences in responses to physical activity found that changes in VO2 max after training range from almost no gain to a 100% increase in large groups of sedentary individuals. Response to training is a bell curve. An unfortunate few will see little to no gain after training and then a fortunate few will see huge fitness gains after training. These would be your pros. However, the majority of us fall somewhere closer to the middle. The good news is that as somebody who's relatively new to riding and training, you'll gain fitness much faster than a seasoned rider. When you first start training, you can expect to see massive jumps in fitness but the fitter you get, the harder and harder it becomes to get more fit. Don't let a lack of form when you first start riding discourage you because if you stick with it for even a couple months, you're going to see the biggest fitness gains you'll ever see over the course of your cycling career. Let's get into the first mistake that new cyclists make and that's doing every ride as hard as you can. Sorry, man, you already lost me. I have a reputation to uphold. My 23 Strava followers are going to flip out if they don't see that I average at least 20 miles per hour on every ride. This is extremely common amongst eager beginner cyclists. And yes, it's fun to challenge yourself and push your body and believe me, there will be plenty of time for that but it shouldn't be every time you hop on your bike. Research has shown that when it comes to high intensity, more isn't necessarily better. Like in this study that showed there were no differences in performance between doing VO2max intervals once a week and doing them three times a week over a four week period. This is because going hard every time you ride can easily lead to overtraining and even though it may not feel like it, you're still gaining fitness when you ride easy. This review on intensity versus volume training stated that a short term period of high intensity interval training can elicit improvements, but also that important adaptations appear to occur with low intensity continuous training that are not observed with mixed or high intensity training and that both high intensity and low intensity training are important components of the training program. Part of the reason for this may have to do with how riding hard affects your autonomic nervous system. This study on autonomic recovery after exercise found that exercise before the first ventilatory threshold causes minimal disturbance in ANS balance. Further, the first ventilatory threshold may demarcate a binary threshold for ANS slash HRV recovery in highly trained athletes because further delays in HRV recovery with even higher intensities were not observed. High intensity exercise stresses your body and constantly putting your body under a high amount of stress day after day can easily overwhelm the system and lead to burnout or overtraining. You may not even notice it right away, but after weeks or months of training like this, you may start to feel stale on the bike and feel like you can't push hard anymore. Doing easy rides allows for adaptive benefits without turning on the stress response. Setting up your training week so that you're balancing hard workouts with easier paced endurance rides will have a huge impact on your progression. Here's a rough template of what it should look like. For example, let's say you ride four days a week, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Generally, I would shoot for two of these days to be high intensity. This is the amount often cited in the literature as being optimal for high intensity or threshold intensity. Again, additional increases in high intensity frequency do not induce further improvements and tend to induce symptoms of overreaching and overtraining. A question I get a lot is does a hard group ride or a race count as a high intensity day? And the answer is absolutely. It doesn't matter that you rode with other people or you did a race. If the intensity is high, then that counts as a high intensity day. Going back to our example week, let's say you do a hard hour and a half group ride every Saturday. That's one of your intensity days and the other one should be during a time of the week when you're well rested so that it can be high quality and you can get the most out of it. In this example, Tuesday would work great for this which would mean that Thursday would be a shorter endurance ride and Sunday might be a longer endurance ride. These endurance rides should be done at a pace that you could hold all day. That's why it's called endurance zone. Endurance rides don't necessarily have to be long rides though. If you do have a power meter and know your FTP then 55 to 75% of your FTP is a good number to shoot for for these rides. You're going to want to avoid going harder than that. This was just an example week and obviously you can arrange it differently to fit your schedule and your goals. Also, I didn't talk about what a high intensity workout should look like but if you want information on that I have plenty of videos about it that I've linked down in the description. Our next big mistake is not fueling yourself properly on the bike. This one can be confusing and it's easy to get lost in a sea of claims from sports drink and energy bar companies but it doesn't have to be complicated. This is something that a lot of beginners screw up but even more experienced cyclists struggle with this. For example, my dad one time went on a long road ride and bonked and stopped at a gas station and got a hot dog and milk to help get him home. Yeah, that's right. My dad thought that a gas station hot dog and milk was good ride food. Now let me tell you something, son. Back in 73, I used to ride my steel swing to school and back into an uphill headwind both ways with nothing but leftover chicken liver from the night before my belly and you didn't hear me complaining. My dad watches all these videos and he'll probably be giving me a call shortly. Taking in the proper fuel while riding is extremely important to performance especially if you plan on riding for long periods of time. Most cyclists find this out the first time they bonk or run out of glycogen and can barely ride in a straight line much less ride at a fast pace. As a cyclist, the primary fuel source that you should be concerned about is carbohydrates. Individual studies on carbohydrate feeding and performance have been done usually coming to the conclusion that carbs improve performance. And in fact, if we take a step back and look at the result of many studies which was done in this 2011 meta analysis that looked at 88 randomized crossover studies on carbohydrate consumption and endurance performance, the conclusion is that carbohydrates show a large benefit to performance. Protein and fat simply don't provide energy fast enough while you're riding, making carbohydrates the fuel source that's going to keep you going on the bike. And unlike your diet off the bike while riding, simpler carbohydrates meaning easy to digest and lower in fiber are better. Now, the exact amount of calories that you need while riding and the amount that your gut can handle is different for everyone. This study on marathon fueling techniques stated that regardless of what research demonstrates or how complex a formula may be, each athlete must be treated as unique. An endless list of factors all affect fueling needs. Unfortunately, no clean universal formula exists to calculate such precise expenditure. That being said, there's some basic guidelines that you can use as a starting point. Most people can only handle 60 grams of carbs per hour. This of course depends on the source and on the person. What does 60 grams of carbohydrates look like? That might be the equivalent of two to three gels depending on the brand. If you're finding that 60 grams of carbohydrates isn't enough, there's a way to boost your body's absorption of carbs by combining carbohydrates from different sources such as multidextrin and fructose. This review article on carbohydrate intake during exercise performance found that one gram per minute or 60 grams per hour is the limit of how much fast carbs can be absorbed even when large amounts of carbohydrates are ingested. However, combining different carbohydrate sources such as glucose and fructose have been shown to increase carbohydrate oxidation rates by 20 to 50% because fructose can utilize a different transport pathway. This review confirmed these findings stating that a two to one multidextrin to fructose ratio appears to be optimal and benefits endurance performance. Using the right ratio of multidextrin to fructose can potentially bump your absorption rate up to around 90 grams per hour. But you'll need to practice consuming this amount to get your gut used to it. And don't worry. You don't need to measure out ratios of ingredients and then mix them in the right proportions. The easiest thing to do would be to find a drink mix that has a two to one multidextrin to fructose ratio and then use that as your primary fuel source so you don't have to think about it. Now two to four gels worth of carbohydrates per hour may sound like a lot. And for a shorter endurance ride, it is. You don't need to consume quite that much for rides like that. Just a banana in the back pocket will probably do. But if you plan on doing a century or bumping up the mileage of your long rides, this becomes important to ensure that you have even energy levels throughout the ride and don't bonk. To close things out, I want to talk about the importance of a power meter and how it can help you with our last biggest beginner mistake which is improper pacing. After you've got your bike and your riding gear at the point that you start thinking about making upgrades a power meter should be priority number one. This is because buying more aero wheels or a lighter fork or better breaks will make your bike marginally faster but buying a power meter and using it correctly will make you as a person significantly faster. Many people would probably say that if you're just starting out don't worry about a power meter yet and I would probably agree with that. However, if you do plan to progress as a cyclist at some point you're going to want to invest in a power meter and I'm constantly surprised when I talk to people who say they've only been riding for a couple of months and they already have a power meter, know what their FTP is and are dead set on improving it. One of the things that a power meter helps you with just so happens to be another extremely common beginner mistake and that is pacing. New cyclists are notorious for going out too hard whether that be an FTP test, intervals, a group ride, a race, etc. This is because people in general are just naturally poor pacers. Let's take a look at what this looks like on a long climb for example. The fastest way to the top is to pace evenly throughout the climb meaning that you're holding the same power at the beginning of the climb that you are at the end. It's not hard to spot a novice rider or a rider who doesn't use a power meter on a climb because at the bottom they'll be putting out 350 watts and by the top they'll be struggling to maintain 150. This pacing strategy is likely slowing you down. This study on the impact of starting strategy on performance had cyclists perform 20 kilometer time trials where the first four minutes were performed either at their self-selected pace, 15% above their self-selected pace or 15% below their self-selected pace. The results showed that the 15% below condition averaged a higher power over the course of the test even though they started lower than either the self-paced or 15% above condition. They concluded that it appears that cyclists may not have self-selected an optimal start strategy and that cyclists need to be aware that a hard effort during the start phase of a 20 kilometer time trial does not optimize performance. Riding too hard and then fading is called positive pacing and in most cycling events or situations is considered a less effective strategy. This is where a power meter comes in. While heart rate lags and perceived exertion can be wildly inaccurate as we've already seen, a power meter tells you how much power you're doing instantaneously. This allows you to pace intervals, climbs, group rides and races. Let's go back to our climbing example. If you know that the climb will last roughly 20 minutes and you know that your max 20 minute power is around 200 watts, then don't do the first two minutes of the climb at 300 watts. The fastest way to the top is to hold 200 for the entire climb. If you're doing a longer event that'll last for hours and you keep looking down and seeing power numbers that you know you can only hold for an hour or less, then back it down and catch the next group. A power meter can be a game changer for doing intervals. Your goal for most interval sessions should be to hold the same interval power over the course of the whole workout. For example, if you're doing a four by 10 minute workout at 200 watts, then try to do every interval at 200 watts instead of doing the first one at 220 and then barely being able to hold 180 by the last one. Having a power meter allows you to do this more easily and offers a better point of comparison. Trying to judge pace off of speed is problematic because of things like wind, temperature, riding surface, elevation gain, et cetera. As a cycling coach, I don't even look at things like average speed and distance. What's vastly more important from a training perspective is power and duration. Yeah man, a power meter sounds nice, but I usually just measure my performance based off of how many riders I pass and drop on the bike path. Racers doing recovery days, tourists on beach cruisers, grandmas on hybrids, four year olds with dinosaur helmets. They all count. A drop is a drop. Thanks for watching. I hope you guys found this information helpful. If you did, be sure to give the video a like, share it with your cycling friends, and subscribe. I'll see you in the next one.