Why you stopped getting faster

For the first two years, cycling gives you progress for free. Almost anything you do makes you faster, and the numbers climb every month. Then one spring the climb stops, and eighteen months later you are within a few watts of where you were — despite training at least as hard.

Plateaus are ordinary and almost always explicable. Here are the six causes in roughly the order they turn out to be the answer.

The diagnosis that costs nothing

Before changing your training, look at what you actually did over the last six months rather than what you think you did. Two questions answer most cases:

• Has your weekly load been flat? If your training load has sat at the same level all year, a flat fitness line is the expected result, not a mystery. Ramp rate covers how to raise it without breaking yourself.
• Has your fatigue ever come down? A rider whose fatigue line never returns to baseline is not training, they are accumulating. Fitness, fatigue and form explained shows the shape to look for.

Changing one thing properly

The instinct on discovering a plateau is to overhaul everything: new plan, more hours, harder sessions, different diet. That reliably produces a fortnight of enthusiasm followed by illness or boredom.

Better to make one substantial change and hold it for six weeks. Candidates, in rough order of how often they work:

1. Add a genuine down week every fourth week if you have not been taking one. Costs nothing, frequently fixes everything.
2. Make the easy rides easier and the hard rides harder. The polarised shift, covered in polarised vs pyramidal training.
3. Change the kind of intensity. If everything you do is threshold work, try a block of 30/30s. If everything is short and sharp, try over-unders.
4. Concentrate the work. Block periodisation is specifically a tool for riders who have stopped responding to a varied week.
5. Add one longer ride a week. Unglamorous, and the thing most time-crunched riders are genuinely missing.

The uncomfortable possibility

Sometimes the honest answer is that you are training as much as your life allows, eating well, recovering properly — and you are simply at the level that produces. Not everyone has another 30 watts available, and the search for them can take a genuinely enjoyable hobby and turn it into a source of disappointment.

If that is where you are, the useful move is to change what you are measuring. Ride further than you have before. Ride somewhere you have not been. Get better at descending, at group riding, at finishing a hard event strongly rather than at a number on a test. Those are all real improvement, and none of them show up on an FTP chart — which is a limitation of the chart, not of you.

Moveee tracks the things a single test cannot: your power curve across every duration, how it has moved over the season, and whether your long rides are getting easier at the same pace. Quite often a rider convinced they have plateaued turns out to have improved substantially at exactly the durations their event depends on — see durability for why that is the number that matters.