STRENGHT GAINS FOR CYCLISTS

The Law of Diminishing Returns in Cycling Performance

“As the athlete becomes more trained, the question is no longer simply whether a training stimulus can create adaptation. The question is whether the expected adaptation justifies the cost of the stimulus.”

The Law of Diminishing Returns

A beginner cyclist can improve their performance relatively quickly. A well-trained cyclist who has been riding and training consistently for many years will generally improve much more slowly.

Why?

One important principle helps explain this difference:

The Law of Diminishing Returns.

What does it mean?

When you start cycling, almost every appropriate training stimulus can create a meaningful adaptation.

Your aerobic capacity improves.
Your ability to produce and sustain power increases.
Your movement becomes more efficient.
Your muscles become better adapted to the demands of cycling.
And you learn how to pace and perform the effort more effectively.

As you become more experienced and better trained, however, the same training stimulus produces a progressively smaller additional benefit.

The closer you get to your current physiological potential, the more difficult it becomes to achieve further improvements.

This does not mean that experienced riders cannot improve.

It means that the stimulus required to create additional adaptation becomes increasingly specific, carefully dosed and individualised.

More training does not automatically mean more adaptation

A common assumption is that increasing training volume will continuously produce greater performance gains.

In reality, the relationship between training input and adaptation is not linear.

Early in a rider’s development, a relatively small amount of appropriate training can produce substantial improvements.

As the rider becomes more highly trained, additional training may still produce adaptation, but the return on that additional training becomes smaller.

This creates an important challenge for well-trained cyclists:

To continue improving, the training stimulus needs to become more precise — not simply larger.

The objective is therefore not to maximise training.

It is to maximise the quality and relevance of the training stimulus while managing the cost of producing it.

Training stimulus: intensity, volume and specificity

The training effect of an exercise is influenced by several interacting factors.

Two of the most important are intensity and volume.

A useful way of thinking about this is:

Training stimulus = intensity × volume × specificity

This is not a mathematical equation that predicts adaptation. Rather, it illustrates that the training effect depends on the combination of how demanding the stimulus is, how much of it is performed and how specifically it targets the desired adaptation.

The same amount of training volume can therefore have very different effects depending on the intensity and nature of the stimulus.

Absolute intensity

Absolute intensity describes the actual external or internal demand of an effort.

In cycling, this could be expressed through measures such as:

• Power output
• Speed
• Heart rate
• Metabolic demand
• Cadence
• Duration at a given power

For strength training, absolute intensity can refer to the actual load being lifted or the force produced.

Absolute intensity tells us how demanding the effort is.

But it does not tell us the complete story.

Relative intensity

Relative intensity describes how demanding an effort is in relation to the individual’s current capacity.

For example, riding at 300 watts represents the same absolute power output for two riders, but it may represent a very different physiological demand for each of them.

For one rider, 300 W may be close to maximal.

For another, it may be a moderate endurance effort.

The relative intensity is therefore individual.

This distinction becomes particularly important when introducing a new training stimulus.

Novelty changes the training stimulus

Learning and performing a new movement or exercise introduces an additional component to training: skill acquisition.

When a movement is unfamiliar, the nervous system has to learn how to coordinate the movement and produce force efficiently.

As the movement is practised, coordination improves.

The athlete becomes more efficient at:

• recruiting the appropriate muscles;
• coordinating muscle activity;
• producing force;
• controlling the movement;
• and expressing maximal effort.

This means that a new exercise can create a meaningful training stimulus with relatively little volume.

As the athlete becomes more experienced with that movement, however, the stimulus associated with simply learning the movement decreases.

The athlete becomes more efficient.

This is one reason why training programmes need to evolve over time.

Strength training provides a clear example

Consider an athlete who has never performed structured strength training.

During the early stages of strength training, substantial improvements in strength can occur without a corresponding increase in muscle size.

A significant part of these early improvements is related to neural and motor adaptations.

The athlete becomes better at coordinating the movement and producing force.

They learn how to:

• recruit motor units more effectively;
• coordinate the involved muscles;
• stabilise the movement;
• improve technique;
• and express a higher level of force.

As the athlete becomes more experienced, these learning-related improvements become smaller.

Further increases in strength increasingly require a more carefully designed combination of training volume, intensity, exercise selection, recovery and progressive overload.

The same principle applies to cycling.

Cycling is no different

A novice cyclist has enormous room for adaptation.

Almost everything is new.

The cardiovascular system adapts to regular endurance training.
The muscles become more resistant to fatigue.
Pedalling becomes more coordinated.
The rider becomes more economical.
Pacing improves.
The rider learns how to tolerate and sustain higher workloads.

The result can be relatively rapid performance improvement.

For an experienced cyclist, much of this adaptation has already occurred.

The rider is already highly economical and physiologically adapted to cycling.

Adding another hour of relatively familiar endurance riding may therefore produce only a small additional adaptation.

That does not make the training useless.

It simply means that the marginal return of that additional training may be smaller.

The more trained you become, the more precise the stimulus needs to be

This is one of the most important principles in performance development.

For a developing cyclist, increasing training can often be an effective way of creating additional adaptation.

For a highly trained cyclist, simply adding more training is often a less efficient strategy.

Instead, the question becomes:

What specific adaptation are we trying to create?

And then:

What is the minimum effective stimulus required to create that adaptation?

This changes the way training should be designed.

Rather than asking:

How much more can we do?

We should ask:

What does this rider need, and what is the most appropriate stimulus to create it?

Training efficiency matters

As performance level increases, the cost of further adaptation generally increases.

A highly trained cyclist may need substantially more carefully structured training to achieve a relatively small improvement.

This makes training efficiency increasingly important.

Every training stimulus has a cost.

That cost can include:

• physiological fatigue;
• muscular fatigue;
• recovery requirements;
• time;
• interference with other training;
• reduced freshness for competition;
• and accumulated training stress.

The goal is therefore not simply to create adaptation.

The goal is to create the desired adaptation at an appropriate cost.

This is where individualisation becomes essential.

From more training to better training

The Law of Diminishing Returns helps explain why training strategies that work extremely well for a beginner cannot simply be scaled up indefinitely for an elite cyclist.

As the rider develops:

The gains become smaller.
The margins become narrower.
The stimulus needs to become more specific.
And the cost of error becomes greater.

For the developing cyclist, the priority may be to build basic capacity.

For the experienced cyclist, the priority may be to identify a specific limitation and target it with an appropriate stimulus.

For the elite cyclist, the question can become even more specific:

Which adaptation is currently limiting performance, and what is the most efficient way to influence it without compromising the rest of the performance system?

That is the essence of individualised performance training.

Performance development is not about doing more.

It is about understanding what creates adaptation — and applying the right stimulus at the right time, in the right amount, for the individual athlete.