The self-coached athlete would also be wise to work on their time management skills to balance demands of life such as family, career etc too.
Some good methods for this are time-blocking, where you organise your day into key portions using a calendar, which helps make training something that’s intentional and prioritised, rather than just squeezed into the day (or not) randomly.
Here’s a good post to learn more about time-blocking.
6: Discipline
Having the ability to stick to a plan when it’s clear that the planned session is the correct and appropriate course of action to take (i.e. fatigue state is low, weather conditions are safe etc) is vital for the self-coached athlete.
Whilst having a good supply of motivation is important, enthusiasm for training isn’t a finite resource or guaranteed to be there each day for many different reasons.
In such situations, it’s key to have the discipline to be able to train in the absence of motivation.
A helpful idea to keep in mind here is that rather than relying on motivation to stimulate action, see this process as a cycle, where action creates motivation, which fuels further action, and so on.
We also like to encourage athletes to apply the “5-minute rule” for this, which means committing to at least riding 5 minutes and not initially worrying about completing a session as a whole.
The reason for this is simple – just about everyone can muster the energy to ride for 5 minutes in pretty much any situation!
Given that getting started with an action is often the hardest part (think Newton’s law of inertia here), the 5-minute rule aims to get over this initial hurdle and build momentum quickly, where the likelihood is that once into the task, you’ll almost always stick with it for longer.
There are little nudges you can put in place to help with this too, including laying out your riding clothes and getting the bike ready the day before to reduce the friction associated with getting started with a workout.
7: Adaptability
As the point above outlines, the ability to stick to a plan will serve the self-coached athlete extremely well most of the time, but that doesn’t negate the idea that sometimes you need to be adaptable and willing to modify the program if doing so is the right call.
Not every day will present ideal conditions and circumstances for training and this often means taking a flexible approach and having variations/alternatives for key sessions can be really helpful.
For example, this could mean having 2x variations of a workout for that day and ideally having an indoor setup that you can fall back on if the immediate environment isn’t conducive to the originally planned session.
8: Analytical
The ability to make good sense of your day-to-day training data, interpret results from testing and decode your race performances will give any self-coached athlete a competitive advantage.
There are lots of tools out there to help with this, and self-coached cyclists are encouraged to learn about what metrics they should be tracking for their particular cycling discipline and at different phases of the season, since these can change from the early base period up to your competition periods.
As important as looking at daily workouts is spotting trends in your data over time to help determine if your training approach is resulting in the desired outcomes or not.
Part of being a good analytical self-coached athlete is knowing what data to look at and which to ignore. Cycling is a sport where enormous amounts of data can be generated from every ride and trying to examine everything can quickly become overwhelming and result in analysis paralysis.
Instead, spend time learning what metrics are the most important for your physiology and the demands of what you’re training for and prioritise these. A post that might be able to help here is one we put together on the physiological demands of different cycling disciplines.
Our Cycling Physiology and Training Science Guide is another great resource for understanding your training data better, covering how to identify key thresholds, what certain metrics can tell you and strategies for improving the execution of your workouts.
Programs we use to manage the training of both amateur and professional athletes include TrainingPeaks, WKO5, Intervals.icu and Exphyslab.com, among others.
9: Rationality
Similar to the ability to be objective, the self-coached cyclist aspiring to improve needs to act rationally most of the time, and this carries into all kinds of areas, including planning, during mid-training racing and post-event too:
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If we firstly take planning as an example, being rational here could mean progressing training load sensibly from week to week and learning from your training history and increases in load you’ve previously managed to inform the plan.
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Another example during your actual workouts could be knowing when to call time on a workout because the effective training dose has been completed and carrying on, even if the plan arbitrarily says so, would cause excess fatigue and may risk injury or illness.
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Whilst racing, an example of being irrational (i.e. what you DON’T want to do) would be trying to hold the wheel with another rider or group when RPE is too high and values like power output and HR are clearly above your current ability level to sustain. Exercising rationality here would see you focusing on producing your best performance and not trying to fool yourself that you can beat a much fitter competitor.
If you’re prone to these irrational decisions, then using mantras and self-addressed messages can be helpful.
Examples we have seen athletes have good results from are those like “stick to your perfect pace”, “trust yourself”, which can be attached to the bike in visible places like the stem or handlebars.
Even putting power numbers as guidance in similar places can be really helpful to keep you in check and prevent you from letting the adrenaline-fuelled nature of an event lead you to irrational decisions.
10: ’Healthy irrationality’
As much as point 9 remains true, there are undoubtably times where you need to have a little bit of faith that you can achieve something like a race result or a new performance breakthrough (“faith” meaning belief in the absence of evidence).
Whilst acting rationally in the vast majority of cases will help with continuous progress, in critical moments where there’s little to lose, throwing out otherwise rational decision-making can sometimes pay off! An example might be seen at the end of an important race; you might have a good amount of evidence that you don’t have the ability to win the bunch sprint, but it’s important to still try on the off-chance you perform much better than you expected and/or get lucky.
Another instance where healthy irrationality might prove useful is in setting “stretch” goals…
Such goals sit atop your main performance and outcome goals and act a bit like a bonus, providing extra motivation and can be a way to help you more easily achieve your more primary goals (at the risk of being trite, something along the lines of a “shoot for the stars, land on the moon” situation could happen.
11: Mental strength
Finally, it’s clear that being mentally strong is a help to just about anyone, particularly so for athletes and even more so for those who manage their own training and performance.
Well-established sports psychology tools and frameworks can help you recognise and control your emotions, avoid being an obstacle to your own progress and ultimately allow you to gain and practice all of the points listed previously in this article.
The self-coached athlete will need mental strength in situations like pushing hard in their key workouts and managing their nerves before high priority races, but will also call upon this strength to exercise confidence and restraint when recovery and time away from the bike is needed.
Good skills to garner under the mental strength umbrella include visualisation, self-talk as well as the goal-setting frameworks like SMART and the Process, Performance and Outcome method, which we’ve written about here.
There are plenty of great resources out there for self-coached athletes to work on building their mental strength, including the posts and books by Josephine Perry of Performance in Mind.