7 Reasons You’re Not Getting Faster At Cycling

Written by:

Chris Carmichael

CTS Premier Cycling Coach

Updated On

April 21, 2025

In recent weeks I’ve heard variations on the questions: “How do I get faster on the bike?” or “Why am I not getting faster at cycling?” When the question comes from more experienced athletes, it’s sometimes: “Why am I not getting faster anymore?” As the spring heats up, events ramp up, and you pile on the miles, you may notice performance stagnate. You’re training a lot, but you’re not making much progress. Or, you’re progressing, but not at the rate you were a few months ago. Here are some of the reasons this could be happening, and how to get faster.

Your progress likely stagnated, or let’s say ‘leveled off’ to be more positive, for a combination of reasons rather than one glaring problem. All of the factors below can contribute to a scenario that is just not conducive to producing positive training adaptations. Some are easy to fix while others are not. Either way, you must address the issues that are holding you back. Just realize it will take some time before the changes you make will yield meaningful and noticeable results. In other words, you didn’t get to where you are overnight, and you won’t jumpstart your progress overnight either. So please, be patient and be kind to yourself.

1. You Haven’t Changed Your Training Focus 

Most time-crunched cyclists reach a limit of how much workload they can achieve weekly, based on available training time. The next step to increasing workload, in let’s say 8 hours/week, is to add intense intervals. That works very well, but again, you’ll reach a limit. A lot of athletes look at their Chronic Training Load (CTL) level in TrainingPeaks as their current level of fitness. The issue with that is it leads an athlete to believe that the only way to improve performance is to keep that blue line ticking upward.

Solution: Get Faster by Changing Training Focus 

To wring more gains from the same capacity for training workload, you must change the focus of your training regularly. For experienced athletes, you’ll recognize this as periodization. And when periodization is done well, performance in individual workouts will start to decline as athletes reach the point of diminishing returns for a given type of training. That’s not a bad sign. It’s a good one! It means you’ve wrung the most training stress you can handle out of that phase of training. As a result, it’s time to move on to another (after a period of rest). Just remember, CTL will decline a bit due to those less-than-stellar workouts and the rest period. That’s OK and part of the process.

2. Your Training Zones Are Outdated 

Some athletes are good at following a training schedule, but not good about updating cycling power training zones as fitness changes. Both power and heart rate are useful; power as a direct measure of work being performed, and heart rate as context for the body’s response to the work. Rating of perceived exertion also provides additional context on the effort required for the work. Power zones shouldn’t be updated after one great or terrible ride (we generally disregard automatic FTP update requests from training softwares). Heart rate zones don’t get updated as frequently as power zones because improved fitness often means producing more power at similar heart rates.

Solution: Get Faster by Updating Your Training Intensity

Read more about when to change your training zones. If you’re using heart rate instead of power, your heart rate ranges will change early on in your training program. However, after several months they’ll stay relatively unchanged even as you continue to get stronger. If you use both power and heart rate, you’ll notice your power outputs at a given heart rate will continue to increase. For example, your Functional Threshold Power may increase from 250W to 275W over a three month period, but the heart rate associated with your FTP may not change at all, or may only change by 3-5 beats per minute. In TrainingPeaks, this is represented as “Efficiency Factor (EF)”, which is Normalized Power divided by Average Heart Rate.

3. You’re Not Eating Enough Food

Through the spring, some athletes increase their weekly training hours due to longer days and warmer temperatures. This increase in energy expenditure often happens at the same time they are actively trying to lose weight (or not upset that it’s coming off unintentionally). The problem is, chronic underfeeding isn’t sustainable for an athlete looking to improve performance.

Solution: Make Sure You’re Eating Enough Total Energy

When you are in a chronic energy deficit over a period of weeks and months, your body adapts to use energy to cover the bare necessities, which means it’s not making it available for the physiological adaptations you’re targeting with training. Take a look at your weekly energy expenditure and intake (not daily). If expenditure has gone up but intake hasn’t, and you’re not performing as well as you used to, consider bumping up your total energy intake. Listen to a Trainright Podcast with Wilfredo Benitez, MScN, M.Ed. on fueling tough training blocks.

4. You’re Not Consuming Enough Carbohydrate Daily or During Workouts 

If total energy intake is sufficient to support your weekly training workload, and your periodization plan is good, but you just don’t have the ‘umph’ for high-quality workouts, take a look at your carbohydrate intake. You have to look at both your total daily carbohydrate intake as well as your exercise-associated carbohydrate intake (immediately pre-, during-, post-workout). To achieve maximal performance during periods of higher training volumes, particularly with higher volume-of-intensity, you need more carbohydrate than you did during periods of more generalized, moderate-intensity training.

Solution: Focus on Carbohydrate When Training Volume/Intensity Is High

On a three-day rolling average, look to consume about 50-60% of calories from carbohydrate, 20-30% from fat, and 20-30% from protein. During workouts longer than 60 minutes, aim for 40-60 grams of carbohydrate per hour (up to 90 g/hr with mixed carbohydrate sources and during higher intensity/longer duration training). Another way to scale workout carbohydrate intake during rides is by hourly energy expenditure. If you’re training with a power meter, look for your hourly kilojoule production (or take total kJ for rides and divide by the hours). For aerobic endurance rides, aim to replenish 20-30% of that value in carbohydrate calories. In other words, if your Zone 2 or aeorbic endurance rides are at 600 kJ/hr, aim to consume 120-180 calories of carbohydrate (30-45 grams).

What about recent recommendations for ultra-high carbohydrate intakes, like the 100-120 grams/hour that pros are consuming during races? These intakes are scaled up based on their power outputs and total kilojoule workloads, which are much higher than average cyclists during 60- to 120-minute interval workouts, and certainly higher than average cyclists on aerobic endurance rides. For hard interval workouts, fast group rides, and races, aim to replenish 40-50% of your hourly kJ value with carbohydrate calories. Let’s say you race at 900 kJ/hr.  Replenishing 40-50% would mean 90 grams to approximately 115 grams of carbohydrate per hour. But it’s going to take time to work up to that amount. Our advice is to start with 60 grams/hour and if that works for you, go up to 75 g/hr for some longer or harder rides. If you feel good and don’t have stomach upset, try to go up to 90 g/hr but only for long and/or hard rides.

Here’s a more in-depth look at what to eat on rides of any length and what to eat before a workout or race.

If too little carbohydrate is holding you back, the good news is that the adjustment is quick and the difference is noticeable. You won’t necessarily see a huge fitness jump right away. Rather, you’ll notice you feel and perform a lot better during workouts (particularly later in endurance rides or at the end of hard interval sessions). It will still take a little while for those better workouts to yield meaningful physiological improvements.

5. You’re Not Eating Enough Daily Protein 

As coaches and endurance athletes, we tend to focus a great deal on carbohydrate intake. As you can tell from the previous section, it is important for performance. But the focus on carbohydrate to fuel workouts sometimes overshadows the importance of protein for recovery and for doing the work of physiological adaptation. It’s hard to point to a tell-tale sign you’re not consuming enough protein. However, you might feel like you’re not bouncing back from even an extra day of recovery.

Solution: Aim for between 1.5-2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day

Many athletes we work with think they’re consuming enough protein when they are nowhere close. First, use software like MyFitnessPal to record everything you eat over at least three days. Examine the macronutrient composition to see if you’re at least getting 1.5-1.8 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day (1.8-2.0 g/kg/d for athletes over 60). Hint: if you’re eating a lot of carbohydrate and being conservative with total calorie intake at the same time, it’s pretty easy to end up low on protein intake. You can read more about why athletes struggle to get enough protein, as well as myths about protein and recovery.

6. You’re Not Getting Enough Rest

You can have everything above dialed and still experience stalled progress if the balance between work and rest is off. The enthusiasm brought on by longer days and warmer temperatures leads some people to ride more and rest less. Unfortunately, you can’t sustain that very long before there’s a price to pay.

Solution: Focus on sleep and appropriate rest days between hard training sessions

If you ramped up the workout side of the equation without adjusting the rest side, flip the balance for two weeks and get more rest than stress. Then return to a more balanced approach so you can train hard, rest appropriately, and reap the rewards. Here are articles on optimizing sleep for endurance athletes, nutritional recommendations for improving sleep, and why you might have trouble sleeping after a hard workout.

In addition to getting enough and better sleep, it’s also important to look at the distribution of effort in your training plan. In most cases, hard interval days or fast group rides should be separated by at least a full day, if not two or three. Cyclists may ride easy aerobic endurance rides on back to back days, but you want to keep your hard days separated to increase training quality on those days. It’s also a good idea for most athletes to take at least one full day of rest (that means do nothing!) every 7-10 days. These are obviously general guidelines, however. In personalized training plans we sometimes utilize back-to-back interval days for some athletes and always adjust days off and recovery periods based on individual needs.

7. You’re Not Training Consistently Enough

Even if you nail everything above, your progress will stall if you do not train consistently. The physiological adaptations you’re striving for depend on repeated exposures to training stress, and the timing between exposures matters. Each ride or workout creates training stress, which signals or stimulates the body to adapt. If too much time passes before the next stimulus, those two rides or workouts can’t build upon each other.

Solution: Create a training schedule you can actually accomplish

Most athletes we encounter who struggle to train consistently are trying to follow a plan that’s unrealistic for their work and family commitments. It’s not that they’re lazy and skipping workouts, but rather that they’ve committed to a training plan that is incompatible with their training availability. You will make more progress consistently following a plan of four workouts per week than you’ll make failing to follow a plan that calls for six workouts per week.

FAQs to Get Faster At Cycling

1. How many hours should I ride? How long should I ride? More isn’t always better or necessary. We find athletes who can consistently train 6-8 hours per week, spread over 4-6 sessions per week, can get faster. If you have 8-12 hours of weekly training availability, that’s the sweet spot for amateur and masters racers. Emerging elite racers or people with major cycling goals (or who just have a lot of time) may need to train between 12-20 hours per week, with occasional weeks of even higher volume.
2. Do I need to do intervals to get faster on the bike? Yes. Although Zone 2 and easy aerobic riding makes up the majority of a cyclist’s training time (often 80% for amateurs and up to 90% for elites), you can only get so fast by going easy. To get faster you need to tap into all the ways your body can burn fuel and produce power. Interval training at higher intensities optimizes your ability to produce high power for longer durations and for repeated efforts.