Best Cycling Performance Boosters for a New Season

Written by:

Jim Rutberg

CTS Pro Endurance Coach

Updated On

January 6, 2026

There are no shortcuts to superior fitness, but there are ways to leverage the fundamentals to boost the effectiveness of training. If you have set ambitious goals for this year – and we hope that’s exactly what you’ve done – then it’s time to supercharge the ROI from your efforts! These cycling performance boosters are the keys to making big, meaningful improvements in performance, not just fitness.

Cycling Performance Booster: An Earlier Start

Giving yourself a longer training runway is one of the best ways to improve your race-day or event-specific performance. Time is a training superpower. It allows you to direct more focus to specific areas of your fitness and performance. One of the key takeaways from our four-part Youtube series on the time course of adaptation to training was that there’s a difference between what’s happening in the first half of a multi-week training block and what’s happening in the second half. The first half is often more about neuromuscular changes, creating novel fatigue, and learning how to handle the interval intensity. The second half is where the cumulative time-at-intensity becomes productive, but you have to figure out when to stop the training block based on diminishing returns.

A longer overall training runway gives you enough time to wring as much progress out of each training block as you can. If you have to shorten your training timeline, you’re missing out on the significant improvements that happen in the final weeks of effective training blocks.

More important, a long training runway time creates space for things to go wrong (and they will) and get back on track. Illnesses, injuries, and life’s ever-shifting priorities can disrupt training. More often than not, these unexpected breaks result in improved results because you experience extra physical rest and a mental reset.

“I don’t want to peak too early.” Don’t worry about that. It is much easier to back off or feather training to extend the timing before you reach a peak than to make up for lost time. Especially for Time-Crunched Cyclists who have unpredictable lifestyle demands (work trips, sick kids, that trip with your in-laws you forgot about, etc.), it’s better to err on the side of building peak fitness too early.

Cycling Performance Booster: More annual training hours

Adding training volume, mostly in the form of moderate aerobic endurance work, is a great strategy for boosting fitness and performance. Small changes in weekly hours add up to big improvements in annual training volume. Adding 30 minutes to two weekday rides and an hour to a weekend endurance ride can get you from 8 hours to 10 hours per week. Let’s say you’re able to do that for 48 weeks per year. That takes your annual hours from 384 to 480, a 25% increase for the year. Even if you’re able to do half of that increase, a 16% jump in training volume (mostly aerobic endurance hours) will make a meaningful difference in aerobic conditioning, durability, and the amount of higher intensity training you can support and adapt to. Just remember to pay attention to recovery time.

“How can I add training time to my already tight schedule?” Indoor cycling is one of the most convenient ways for cyclists to increase training availability because you can ride inside when it’s difficult or infeasible to ride outside. One to two hours per week on TrainingPeaks Virtual, Zwift, Rouvy, or your favorite indoor cycling app accomplishes the 16-33% increase in training volume mentioned above.

“I can’t add training hours at all.” Obviously, adding volume is not feasible for everyone. If you are time limited and using all the hours you have available, you may be able to rearrange your training time to concentrate training stimulus. For instance, reallocating weekly time to extend the duration of long aerobic rides or make more space for longer interval workouts can be beneficial.

Cycling Performance Booster: Improved sleep duration and quality

Before you buy the latest recovery gadget, invest in and protect your sleep. Research doesn’t conclusively say sleep hygiene strategies are universally beneficial, but if you’re going to splurge on something, get the nicer mattress (Cunha et al. 2023). Buy the blackout curtains to minimize light coming into the room. Get the nice sheets and luxurious pillows. Cool down the room. Leave your phone in another room before going to bet. And if you need an alarm clock, find one that’s not constantly lit. I use a battery-powered, analog travel alarm clock that emits no light.

“What if I know I have late nights coming up?” Anticipated sleep deprivation is a fact of modern life. You might have a big travel day coming up or an ultraendurance event that goes through the night. Recent sleep research supports the practice of “sleep extension” prior to anticipated period of sleep restriction (Cunha et al. 2023). Simply one hour of sleep to your normal duration for 7-10 days beforehand, preferably by waking up one hour later than normal. The result should be a reduction in sleep pressure (i.e., less desire to sleep during the activity, delay of exhaustion requiring sleep) during your trip or event.

Cycling Performance Booster: Optimized carbohydrate intake during exercise

One of the big topics of discussion among CTS Coaches is how to apply recent research regarding carbohydrate intakes during exercise (Podlogar et al. 2022). It has been well publicized that pro cyclists are increasing their carbohydrate intakes to 120-140 grams of CHO per hour during strenuous training sessions and competitions.

Rather than aim for a specific number of carbohydrate grams per hour during all rides, a more nuanced approach is to scale your carbohydrate intake based on the type of ride and/or your hourly energy expenditure.

• Zone 1-2/Endurance Ride/Easier Day: Aim to replenish 20-30% of your hourly energy expenditure as you ride. In other words, if you’re riding at 600 kilojoules per hour (roughly equal to 600 calories), aim for 120-200 calories per hour or 30-50 grams of carbohydrate. And for sessions under 75 minutes, you don’t need during-workout calories, just fluids and maybe electrolytes. Read more about nutrition for short workouts.
• Zone 3+/Interval Workouts/Fast Group Rides/Races/Hard Days: Aim to replenish about 50% of your hourly energy expenditure as you ride. During these workouts, your work rate may exceed 800-1000 kilojoules per hour. More importantly, the higher intensity means greater reliance on carbohydrate for rapidly-available energy, which means there’s greater need and benefit from consuming more carbohydrate per hour. For easy math, at 1000 kilojoules per hour, 40-50% replenishment means 400-500 calories from carbohydrate or up to 100-125 grams of carbohydrate per hour.

Cycling Performance Booster: Intensify Your Training Wisely

Well established sports science clearly shows that the optimal training intensity distribution for endurance sports performance favors a large volume of low- to moderate intensity with a relatively low volume of high-intensity work (Seiler et al. 2006, Tønnessen et al. 2016). The exact ratio of “easy” to “hard” varies by sport and athlete, but the often cited 80/20 ratio (i.e., 80% of training hours at Zone 2 or easier, with 20% of total training hours at higher intensities, often Zone 4 or above) works for general discussion. The 80% gets a lot of attention because it’s crucial for building the aerobic foundation that supports health, longevity, and durability. High volumes of Zone 2 training creates a strong, unbreakable sword… that’s dull as a butterknife.

To sharpen your sword and develop battle-ready fitness for high performance, you need to incorporate diversified intensity that addresses all zones. That means focused training blocks that target power at FTP, high-intensuty intervals that increase your performance ceiling by increasing your VO2 max, and anaerobic capacity intervals that increase Functional Reserve Capacity (FRC). These intervals may only occupy 20% or less of your total training time, but they are the difference between leading the group ride and getting dropped, making the breakaway or getting stuck in the gap, and winning the final sprint or missing the podium altogether.

If you want to perform by leveraging power at lactate threshold or efforts at or near VO_{2 max}, you must address these aspects of performance in training. You must train all zones to use all zones effectively. Diversifying your training also means cyclists should address general fitness, incorporate weight bearing activities, and engage in year-round strength training. This type of diversification makes you a more adaptable athlete and opens up more opportunities for activities outside the narrow scope of pedaling. There are sport-specific benefits from strength training, but just as important, strength training and weight bearing activities reduce “days of sport-specific training lost to injury”. In other words, by training off the bike you’ll miss fewer days intended to ride.

References

Cunha, Lúcio A et al. “The Impact of Sleep Interventions on Athletic Performance: A Systematic Review.” Sports medicine – open vol. 9,1 58. 18 Jul. 2023, doi:10.1186/s40798-023-00599-z

Podlogar, Tim et al. “Increased exogenous but unaltered endogenous carbohydrate oxidation with combined fructose-maltodextrin ingested at 120 g h^-1 versus 90 g h^-1 at different ratios.” European journal of applied physiology vol. 122,11 (2022): 2393-2401. doi:10.1007/s00421-022-05019-w

Seiler, K. S., & Kjerland, G. Ø. (2006). Quantifying training intensity distribution in elite endurance athletes: is there evidence for an “optimal” distribution?. Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports, 16(1), 49–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2004.00418.x

Sylta, O., Tønnessen, E., & Seiler, S. (2014). From heart-rate data to training quantification: a comparison of 3 methods of training-intensity analysis. International journal of sports physiology and performance, 9(1), 100–107. https://doi.org/10.1123/IJSPP.2013-0298

Tønnessen, E., Sylta, Ø., Haugen, T. A., Hem, E., Svendsen, I. S., & Seiler, S. (2014). The road to gold: training and peaking characteristics in the year prior to a gold medal endurance performance. PloS one, 9(7), e101796. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101796

Tønnessen, E., Rasdal, V., Svendsen, I. S., Haugen, T. A., Hem, E., & Sandbakk, Ø. (2016). Concurrent Development of Endurance Capacity and Explosiveness: Training Characteristics of World-Class Nordic-Combined Athletes. International journal of sports physiology and performance, 11(5), 643–651. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2015-0309