Top 6 Pain Points Coaches Solve for Cyclists

By Jim Rutberg,
CTS Pro Coach,
co-author “The Time-Crunched Cyclist” and “Ride Inside”
 

People like you don’t have coaches, don’t need coaches. Don’t deserve coaches. That’s bullshit, and the people who have moved past these limiting beliefs are out here achieving their goals, living their best lives, living longer lives, and having more fun. Some are competitors, most are not. More importantly, there is no pre-requisite level of fitness, skill, experience, or ambition to benefit from personal coaching. All you need is a desire to learn and invest in your own development. But who really works with a cycling coach, why, and what do they get out of it?

Coaching vs. Training Plans and Apps

Coaching, training plans, apps, and content are all valuable resources, allowing athletes to access the levels of information and guidance they need at any stage of development. One-on-one coaching requires a high level of engagement and almost always combines training plans, apps like TrainingPeaks, Strava, and Zwift; and content from numerous sources. A coach makes the process personal by using their experience and education to focus an athlete’s attention and energy on aspects of training, nutrition, skills and tactics, and psychology that align with their goals.

Just as important in an era characterized by misinformation and pseudoscience, a coach is essential voice of reason and a domain expert who can help athletes make sense of the onslaught of data, gadgets, and influencer content. And finally, a coach a coach is a human being who can inspire athletes to reach further, empathize with an athlete’s challenges, provide meaningful emotional support and/or encouragement, and solve human problems with humanity.   

People who benefit from coaching 

Of course, as a coach representing a coaching company, my blanket statement would be that any and all people benefit from working with a professional coach. However, that’s not very helpful if you’re someone who already believes people like you don’t have, don’t need, or don’t deserve coaches. So, let’s look at this through a different lens. What are the pain points or problems that working with a professional coach will solve for you?

Pain Point: Limited Training Time

This is a big one, and the rationale behind the original “Time-Crunched Cyclist” methodology and books. Coaching athletes with limited training time is all about finding efficiencies and being adaptable. It’s not just that athletes with families and full-time careers have fewer hours available for training; those hours are also less predictable. Kids get sick, work trips interrupt your routine, meals get skipped, life gets in the way.

How a coach helps: Schedule adjustments are just part of the solution. The broader aspect is maintaining perspective and a long-term focus so the athlete stays on track. Time-limited athletes must make more out of less, learn to use their fitness wisely during events, and manage expectations and strategies to build confidence and experience joy from what they can do rather than lamenting what they don’t have time for.

Pain Point: Lack of Knowledge and Experience

These are the beginners or the experienced athletes branching out into new sports. The learning curve can be steep. In many cases, injury risk is highest when athletes are starting out in a new sport, a new discipline (road cyclist entering MTB), or even when they shift to longer or more strenuous events within the same discipline (70-mile gravel race to 200-mile gravel race). And it’s not just the risk of overuse or traumatic injuries. Changes in energy expenditure may necessitate changes in nutrition strategies and scheduling of recovery periods to minimize the risks for low energy availability or relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-s). 

How a coach helps: A coach can flatten or accelerate your learning curve and help you sidestep the mistakes and pitfalls you’re likely to encounter otherwise. Could you do your own research? Sure, but you know as well as I do that the internet will feed you as many contradictory opinions as you’re willing to read, watch, or listen to. A professional coach is not only an educated filter for factual information, but a person who can provide relevant guidance for you as an individual.

Pain Point: High-Stress Lifestyle

Maybe you have plenty of available training time, but you lead a fast-paced, high-pressure, high-stress lifestyle. You’re Type-A and proud of it, but your body is fried from charging too hard, resting too little, and failing to fuel your activity level properly. And maybe trying to do too much is negatively impacting your relationships and career, too. Your overall stress level – inclusive of exercise, relationships, and career – affects performance in all areas of your life. 

How a coach helps: Eliminating lifestyle stress isn’t realistic, but managing it and periodizing it (reducing training when work stress peaks, finding times of lower work or family stress to increase focus on training, etc.) protects your performance and peace of mind. Many times, particularly in the case of executives and people in positions of authority, a coach may be the only person in your life who will challenge you on your priorities or hold you accountable to your choices. 

Pain Point: Injured or Prone to Injuries

Movement is medicine, but sometimes all that movement results in injuries. When an athlete is injured or has a long history of recurring injuries, there are often more questions than definitive answers. Your body is not working or responding the way you’re used to and you can’t just go back to doing exactly what you did before you were injured. 

How a coach helps: First, there’s prevention. We can minimize injury risk by selecting various types of exercise, modifying work:recovery ratios, monitoring objective and subjective feedback, and collaborating with other professionals like physical therapists. Second, there’s guiding athletes through the return-to-training process, which is a psychological journey as much as it is a physical one. Crucially, though, what you’re experiencing for the first time, we’ve seen a thousand times, so we know the path.

Pain Point: Age-Related Changes

Baby Boomers and older Generation X are the first generations to exercise for the sake of fitness and competition in large numbers. Sports science is struggling to catch up and there is not that much evidence-based information available to guide training, recovery, and nutrition practices. Much of the mainstream guidance on “healthy aging” is based on research on elderly, sedentary populations. That’s not you. Aging athletes are not frail, can handle high training workloads if recovery is properly managed, and can maintain or build muscle with appropriate nutritional support. 

How a coach helps: CTS coaches likely work with the world’s largest cohort of 55+ endurance athletes, including champions in the 80+ and 90+ age groups. An athlete’s priorities often change, longevity and vitality increase in importance, generalized fitness may take precedence over sport-specific performance. Not only do we understand the physical challenges, but we have also learned to exploit the advantages time-rich athletes experience in retirement.

Pain Point: Performance Deficits

Finally, there’s the traditional pain point that people often turn to coaches for: competition. I’ve saved it for last, not because it is less important, but because it is the most obvious. The best athletes in the world have coaches. Olympians, World Champions, Grand Tour Champions… they don’t thank an app in post-race interviews and they’re not hugging avatars at the finish line. They use apps and advanced technologies, but they rely on people. That’s because winning isn’t just about data and performance can’t always be boiled down to formulas and algorithms. There’s inspiration and emotion and psychology and the intangible aspects of learning and relationships in there, too.

How a coach helps: Races are not won on physiology alone. If that were the case, we’d submit power files and declare Tour de France champions without the hassle of three weeks of racing. One of a coach’s main jobs is to help athletes learn to develop, access and apply their best and strongest efforts at the right times to yield the greatest results.