Why Training Harder Isn’t the Answer (Especially After 40)

By Ric Stern

For most of your cycling life, the solution to getting fitter was simple: train harder. Ride more. Push deeper. Stack another hard session into the week and trust that effort would be rewarded.

After 40, that logic quietly stops working.

Not because you’ve suddenly become fragile, or because intensity is “bad”, but because performance is no longer limited by how much stress you can apply. It’s limited by how well you absorb it. And that requires a different skill entirely.

The skill most masters cyclists never consciously train is knowing when not to push.

The Trap: Doing More of What Used to Work

Most riders I speak to over 40 aren’t undertraining. They’re doing 8–12 hours a week, hitting sweet spot, riding hard group rides, racing online, adding VO₂max sessions, and often lifting weights on top. On paper, it looks like commitment. In reality, it’s often just accumulated fatigue dressed up as discipline.

The problem is that the body you had at 28 could tolerate frequent, overlapping stressors. You could train hard, recover “well enough”, and still adapt. That same approach at 45 or 55 doesn’t fail immediately — it fails slowly.

You don’t suddenly blow up. You plateau.

FTP stops moving. Endurance feels fragile. Hard sessions feel harder than they should. Motivation dips. And the instinctive response is to push again, because that’s what has always worked.

This is where most masters riders dig themselves into a hole.

Why Effort Stops Being the Limiter

After 40, your biggest limiter is rarely willingness to work. It’s recovery capacity.

That doesn’t mean you recover “badly”. It means recovery has become a finite resource that must be managed deliberately. When intensity, volume, strength training, life stress, and poor fuelling all draw from the same pool, the issue isn’t whether you’re training hard enough — it’s whether anything is being fully absorbed.

Training only works if it creates adaptation. Adaptation only happens when stress is followed by sufficient recovery. When that balance breaks down, training becomes maintenance at best, regression at worst.

More effort doesn’t fix that. Better sequencing does.

If this sounds familiar — training consistently, working hard, but not seeing meaningful progress — this is exactly the problem we help riders solve inside The CycleCoach Collective and through 1-to-1 coaching.

The goal isn’t to train less. It’s to make the work you’re already doing actually stick.

What “Smarter” Actually Looks Like

Smarter training after 40 doesn’t mean avoiding hard work. It means being selective with it.

Hard sessions need space around them. Not just easy spins, but genuinely low-stress days that allow systems to reset. Intensity needs to be purposeful — not every hard ride needs to be “all out”, and not every moderate ride should drift into tempo.

This is why many masters riders do better with fewer hard sessions done well, rather than trying to cram intensity into every available window. Two quality bike sessions that are properly fuelled, executed, and recovered from will beat four compromised ones every time.

It’s also why combining stressors matters. If you’re lifting weights, doing VO₂max, and racing online, those stresses need to be clustered intelligently — not scattered randomly across the week.

The goal isn’t to avoid fatigue. It’s to avoid persistent fatigue.

The Difference Between Training Hard and Training Productively

One of the hardest mindset shifts for experienced cyclists is accepting that restraint can be a performance skill.

Backing off on a day when the legs feel flat isn’t weakness — it’s pattern recognition. Keeping an endurance ride genuinely easy isn’t “wasting time” — it’s protecting tomorrow’s quality. Finishing a session feeling like you could do one more interval is often a sign you got it right, not wrong.

Masters riders who keep improving aren’t the ones who tolerate the most suffering. They’re the ones who make consistently good decisions over long periods of time.

That’s boring. It’s also incredibly effective.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

The irony is that after 40, the adaptations you care about most — aerobic efficiency, durability, sustainable power — are still highly trainable. But they respond best to consistency, not heroics.

Training harder feels productive in the moment. Training smarter often doesn’t. But one builds fatigue, the other builds fitness.

If your training has become a cycle of pushing, stalling, and pushing again, the answer probably isn’t another hard block. It’s learning when to hold back so the work you’re already doing can actually land.

That’s not a step backwards. It’s the step that allows you to keep moving forward.

If you want help structuring training so hard work actually turns into progress, there are three ways to work with us:

Training Plans
Structured, progressive plans you can run yourself if you’re self-motivated and just want clarity and direction.

The CycleCoach Collective
Group coaching with structured plans, ongoing education, community support, and regular access to the coaching team — ideal if you want guidance without full 1-to-1 coaching.

1-to-1 Coaching
Fully personalised coaching with Ric, Neil, or Charlotte, built around your life, your recovery capacity, and your goals.

Train hard when it matters. Recover properly so it counts.