The 5 Signs You’re Under-recovering (not Under-training)

By Ric Stern

Most masters cyclists don’t fail to improve because they aren’t training hard enough. They fail because they don’t recover well enough.

This is one of the hardest things to accept, especially if you’re disciplined, motivated, and consistent. You’re doing the sessions. You’re ticking off the plan. You’re not skipping rides. So when fitness stalls, the natural response is to push harder.

For riders over 40, that instinct is usually wrong.

Under-recovery is the silent limiter of performance in masters athletes. It doesn’t announce itself with dramatic fatigue or obvious illness. It creeps in quietly, disguising itself as “lack of form”, “getting older”, or “needing a new training block”.

Here are the five most reliable signs I see that a rider is under-recovering rather than under-training — and what to do about it.

1. Your easy rides keep drifting harder

One of the earliest warning signs is that endurance rides stop feeling easy. Power numbers that used to sit comfortably in Zone 2 now feel laboured. Heart rate creeps up for the same watts. You find yourself nudging the intensity just to feel like you’re “doing something”.

This isn’t because your aerobic fitness has suddenly disappeared. It’s because fatigue has raised the cost of producing power. The system is stressed, so even low intensities feel expensive. When this happens, riders often make things worse by riding harder on endurance days. That just digs the hole deeper.

What to do: Pull intensity down deliberately for a week. Keep the duration, lower the watts. Easy needs to feel easy again before anything else will improve.

2. You can complete intervals, but nothing progresses

Another classic sign is stagnation inside the sessions themselves. You’re finishing your VO₂max or threshold workouts, but power isn’t increasing, intervals don’t feel sharper, and there’s no sense of momentum. This is different from being unfit. When fitness is the limiter, sessions feel brutally hard but adaptations follow. When recovery is the limiter, sessions feel flat and unrewarding. Masters riders are particularly good at grinding through fatigue. That toughness can hide the problem for weeks.

What to do: Reduce the number of hard sessions, not the quality. Two properly executed high-quality sessions with good recovery will outperform three compromised ones every time.

3. Motivation dips before the legs fail

If you find yourself procrastinating before rides, dreading sessions you normally enjoy, or needing an unusual amount of mental effort just to get started, pay attention. This is often central fatigue rather than physical weakness. The nervous system is tired, even if the muscles are still capable of producing power. Many riders misinterpret this as a mindset problem and try to “push through”. That rarely works.

What to do: Treat motivation as a training metric. When it drops unexpectedly, it’s often a signal to absorb load, not add more.

4. Strength training stops transferring to the bike

In well-recovered athletes, strength work supports cycling: sprint power improves, fatigue resistance increases, and riding feels more stable and controlled. In under-recovered athletes, the opposite happens. Legs feel heavy. Power feels blunt. Gym work seems to make riding worse rather than better. This is a common issue in winter when riders stack bike training, gym sessions, and life stress without enough consolidation.

What to do: Combine hard bike work and strength on the same day, with the bike session first, and protect true recovery days. Fuel aggressively on those hard days so you can actually adapt.

5. Performance drops after two or three good weeks

A very typical masters pattern is two strong weeks followed by a sudden drop-off. Riders often describe it as “everything just went flat”. This isn’t random. It’s accumulated fatigue finally tipping over the edge. You don’t need to feel destroyed to be under-recovered. You just need to be carrying more stress than you can absorb.

What to do: Build recovery into the plan before you feel like you need it. Deload weeks aren’t a sign of weakness — they’re how adaptations actually lock in.

Why this matters more after 40

As we age, our ability to adapt remains high, but our margin for error narrows. Recovery takes longer. Sleep matters more. Nutrition matters more. Stress outside training has a bigger impact. The mistake is assuming this means training should become easier or less ambitious. In reality, it means training needs to be better organised. Masters riders who manage recovery well often train harder overall across a season than those who don’t — because they can actually absorb the work.

The simple reframe

If your fitness has stalled, ask this before adding more work:

Am I under-trained… or under-recovered?

More often than not, fixing recovery unlocks progress that felt lost.

Want help getting this balance right?

If you want guidance on managing training load, recovery, and progression:

• The Collective offers structured training, education, and regular Q&A so you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.

• 1-to-1 Coaching with me, Glenn, or Neil gives you fully personalised planning when recovery is the main limiter.

And if you want to sanity-check your current training intensities, use the free MAP calculator on the site to review your zones and workload.

Recovery isn’t time off. It’s where the training actually works.