The Hidden Psychology Behind Overtraining.

Often we start coaching riders when they're sick and tired of being sick and tired.

That is, they've tried everything but can't seem to escape their old habits of training hard, exhausting themselves, getting sick, then needing time off.

It's the classic boom and bust cycle seen so often in ambitious cyclists and busy professionals trying to improve their cycling performance.

Some cyclists go on like this for years.

Perpetual bursts of overtraining, followed by inevitable illness, followed by time off to recuperate.

They might have some brief moments of brilliance, but generally, this is standard operating practice.

And overtraining compounds the problem: it makes you more susceptible to illness in the first place, and when illness does hit, it hits harder and takes longer to recover from.

When we go through this with clients during data reviews, showing them clearly in visual form these extreme spikes and troughs in training load, they appear to have some sort of epiphany. A revelation. They explain how it's all so clear now, and feel confident they'll start making huge amounts of progress from this day forward, having clearly identified the problem...

Here's the fascinating thing:

They start their coaching journey with us, often after years of unstructured training and poor fatigue management, and after a couple of weeks, the call comes in:

"I'm not doing enough." "I'm losing fitness." "I can do more than this." "You need to push me harder."

In other words, they've identified the problem, they know how destructive their training habits have been, but they are unwilling to change.

They are unable to sit with the discomfort of doing less.

In a sense, they are addicted to exhaustion.

Why? Because exhaustion, albeit temporarily, suppresses feelings they find intolerable.

Usually, anxiety.

They are using training as a form of medication.

But here's the problem:

training as medication for anxiety always leads to overtraining, because training does not cure anxiety. It simply masks it for a while. The anxiety will endlessly persist until its cause is addressed and worked on.

So we arrive at a conundrum:

Do you want to 1. exhaust yourself constantly in a bid to out-train feelings you are unable to sit with, or do you want to 2. train for performance?

The two are different, and incompatible.

Option 1 is about training whenever you feel restless. Option 2 is about precision, calculation, structure, and long-term endurance performance.

And if you want to train for performance, you will have to break your old overtraining habits.

How do you know if you're actually doing that?

Here's the biggest giveaway: it should feel uncomfortable.

If it doesn't feel uncomfortable, you're simply doing what you've always done. Maybe you've tweaked a couple of sessions, maybe you're doing an hour less occasionally, but you're more or less in the same place.

However, when it feels uncomfortable, when rest days are full of restlessness, that's when you know you're making real progress.

And you'll see it translate into performance gains quickly.

You'll fly once fatigue finally lifts.

You'll start truly capitalising on your breakthrough workouts because you're rested.

You'll turn up to group rides feeling genuinely explosive, because you're not carrying around a load of underlying fatigue.

If you're brave enough to sit with the initial discomfort of doing things differently, you will absolutely reap the rewards.

And over time, like any new habit, it gets easier and easier.

Truly effective bespoke cycling coaching is often less about pushing riders harder, and more about helping them tolerate recovery.

So if this resonates, it's time to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.