The Winning Edge Journal

Why working harder stops producing results and why it’s not a sign that you’ve reached your potential

Part 1 of 6 of The Winning Edge Series

Many cyclists experience a plateau and assume it means they’ve reached their limit. When progress slows or stops despite consistent training, it’s natural to conclude that ability, talent, or potential must be the issue.

In most cases, that conclusion is incorrect. A plateau is rarely a sign that a cyclist has reached their ceiling. More often, it reflects how training and development have unfolded up to that point, rather than what is ultimately possible. Importantly, this means that stalled progress does not indicate that your best performances are behind you.

This distinction matters because it reframes the plateau from a fixed endpoint into a temporary state. When plateaus are interpreted as limits, cyclists often respond by either pushing harder or disengaging altogether. When they’re understood as part of the development process, they become something that can be addressed constructively.

To understand why plateaus occur — and why they are so commonly misinterpreted — it helps to first look at what the typical path into a plateau actually looks like.

What a Plateau Typically Looks Like

The path into a plateau is usually logical and well-intentioned. Most cyclists begin by riding more consistently, then gradually increase the distance and frequency of their rides as fitness improves. This early progression feels natural because it aligns with how fitness responds at the start of a training journey.

As confidence grows, cyclists often begin to push harder within their rides. Familiar routes are ridden faster, average speeds increase, and additional efforts are added informally. Over time, this develops into more frequent hard riding, as intensity becomes the primary way to continue chasing improvement.

Initially, this approach works. Fitness improves, performance rises, and the relationship between effort and return feels clear. However, as training continues, the rate of improvement slows. Despite maintaining or increasing training load, progress begins to stall.

Eventually, many cyclists notice that fatigue accumulates more quickly, recovery becomes less reliable, and sessions feel harder to repeat consistently. Training effort remains high, but performance no longer responds in the same way. This combination of sustained effort and stalled progress is what most cyclists recognise as a plateau.

This experience often leads riders to assume that the solution is to push harder still — a belief that deserves closer examination.

Why Effort and More Volume Aren’t the Issue

When progress stalls, most cyclists assume the problem is insufficient effort, usually expressed as a need to ride more. Earlier improvements often came from increasing weekly volume, so it seems reasonable to conclude that further progress must require the same approach.

This assumption persists because more volume did work earlier in development. Adding kilometres, riding more frequently, or extending ride duration reliably produced fitness gains at the start, reinforcing the belief that increased volume leads to improved performance. When that relationship breaks down, it’s easy to conclude that the solution is simply more of the same.

However, plateaus rarely occur because a cyclist is not riding enough. In most cases, they occur when weekly volume is already high relative to the rider’s current capacity — and when that volume is repeatedly applied in the same way. Riders are not undertraining; they are accumulating work without creating the conditions needed for further adaptation.

This is why increasing volume at this stage often leads to greater fatigue without meaningful improvement. When additional riding no longer produces a return, it indicates that volume itself is no longer the limiting factor — and that something else is constraining progress.

Understanding why this pattern occurs requires shifting attention away from effort expressed as more volume and toward how training adaptations unfold over time.

Why This Outcome Is Predictable: The Toothpaste Tube Analogy

The reason plateaus occur so reliably is that early training adaptations are fundamentally different from later ones. At the beginning of a cyclist’s development, the body responds broadly to almost any consistent stimulus, which makes improvement feel easy and relatively automatic.

A useful way to visualise this is through the toothpaste tube analogy. When a tube is full, only a small amount of pressure is needed to get toothpaste out. Early in training, the system is highly responsive, and modest effort produces noticeable gains. Where the pressure is applied matters very little.

For a period of time, you can apply more pressure and continue to get more toothpaste out. In training terms, adding more volume or riding harder continues to produce improvement, reinforcing the belief that doing more is the key to progress.

As development progresses, the situation changes. The toothpaste tube is no longer full, and squeezing harder in the same place does not produce more toothpaste. Instead, pressure needs to be applied deliberately, in the right place, to get a result. Simply increasing force leads to diminishing returns.

Training follows the same pattern. Early gains come easily because the system is broadly adaptable. Later gains require more precise inputs that reflect what the system now needs. When the same type of effort is repeated without addressing those needs, progress predictably stalls.

This is why plateaus are not random or unexpected. They are the natural result of continuing to apply effort and volume in familiar ways long after the broad adaptations have already been made.

Recognising this shifts the focus away from effort alone and toward a more important question about what actually drives continued improvement.

The Question That Changes the Conversation

Once effort expressed as more riding and more volume is removed as the primary explanation, the way cyclists think about progress begins to change. If increasing weekly hours, adding kilometres, or riding harder is no longer producing results, then continuing to apply the same strategy is unlikely to resolve the plateau.

This leads to a more useful and more productive question: if effort and volume aren’t enough, what actually drives progress? This question shifts the focus away from simply doing more and toward the underlying factors that determine whether training leads to adaptation or stagnation.

For many cyclists, this is an unfamiliar way of thinking about improvement. Training is often framed as a test of motivation or discipline, where progress is expected to follow increased volume and effort. When that approach stops working, it can feel as though progress has become unpredictable or out of reach.

In reality, progress has not become random. It has simply become more dependent on how training is structured and what capacities are being developed, rather than how much riding is being done.

This is the point at which understanding why doing more stops working becomes essential.

Gina’s Story

This is a pattern I see frequently in coaching. Throughout this series, I’ll be sharing—piece by piece—the story of one of the riders I coach, Gina, so you can understand her journey from plateau to her best performance.

When Gina first came to me, she was training between 11 and 14 hours per week and had been stuck in a plateau for some time. Despite the amount of work she was doing, performance was no longer improving, and she had begun to believe that she might not be capable of progressing any further.

In an attempt to break through the plateau, she had recently completed a 21-hour training week, hoping that a significant increase in volume would restart progress. It didn’t. The plateau remained, reinforcing the sense that she might have reached her limit.

When we began working together, I reduced her training to around five hours per week. Within a few months, she achieved performance bests across multiple efforts. More importantly, her perception of what was possible changed. What she had assumed was a limit turned out to be a temporary stall in development.

Those changes showed up clearly in her data:

• 15 sec: 424 W → 468 W (+10.4%)
• 30 sec: 331 W → 423 W (+27.8%)
• 60 sec: 302 W → 373 W (+23.5%)
• 4 min: 238 W → 250 W (+5.0%)
• 10 min: 220 W → 239 W (+8.6%)
• FTP: 210 W → 224 W (+6.67%)

Her experience is not unusual. Plateaus often feel final when you’re in them — but they rarely are.

Conclusion

Plateaus are one of the most misunderstood stages of cycling development. They are often interpreted as evidence of limited ability or exhausted potential, when in reality they are far more commonly the result of how progress has been pursued up to that point.

What makes plateaus particularly frustrating is that they tend to appear when commitment and effort are highest. Riders are training consistently, pushing themselves, and doing what has worked before. When progress stalls under those conditions, it’s understandable that confidence begins to erode.

The key takeaway is this: a plateau is not a verdict on your potential. It is feedback. More specifically, it is feedback that effort alone — and simply doing more — is no longer what drives improvement.

At this point in development, progress becomes less about how much work you’re doing, and more about what that work is developing — and whether it’s being applied in the right order. When that shift isn’t made, plateaus aren’t just possible; they’re predictable.

Understanding this changes the question from “How do I push harder?” to “What does my training actually need next?”

That distinction is where progress begins to reopen.

In the next part of this series, we’ll look more closely at why doing more stops working — and how riding more, sooner, and harder can quietly create the imbalances that lead cyclists into plateaus in the first place.

Continue to Part 2 of The Winning Edge Series: Why Doing More Stops Working — How too much riding too soon creates hidden imbalances that eventually stall performance