Cycling training is about getting small advantages over your opponent. Being just one percent better than him means that you will be the favourite and he will be the underdog. If you have a one percent higher anaerobic threshold than your opponent, you will very likely beat him time after time in events where a high anaerobic threshold is essential.

More training is needed to make progress
When you have trained seriously for a couple of years, you will experience that more training is needed before you get significant improvements. At this time that many riders get the feeling of a training vacuum. They train more than they have ever done before, but their form does not change at all. This is a critical moment in every serious riders´ career. The common outcome is that the rider sooner or later realizes that he is not making further progress with the current program. He takes the consequences and start making things different. This could be quitting, switching coach, switching club, different training methods, more training, less training, new bike, new wheels, eating nutritional supplements or getting so desperate that he takes drugs. But often he does not realize that the problem is a training vacuum, because he has optimized his cycling performance through proper training, eating and resting. Instead he victimizes his coach, club or material because his performance has reached a plateau.

Strength training is a controversial topic when we discuss optimizing of training programs for cyclists. There is no definitive answer to whether cyclists should include weight lifting in their winter training plans. There have been made several studies which have not yet proved that cyclists can benefit from strength training.

One of the biggest problems for these scientific studies is that they are done at untrained people and the study group is usually small. That makes it rather difficult to prove a significant difference between endurance training only versus endurance training combined with weight lifting.