What Does it Mean to Actually Train Like an Athlete?

When you think of an elite athlete, what comes to mind?

Perhaps someone training twice a day, meticulously measuring their food, analysing every session and organising their entire life around performance. Someone with a coach, a nutritionist, a carefully structured training programme and, importantly, the time to do it all.

And yes, for many professional athletes, that is the reality.

But does that mean someone training six hours a week, juggling work, family and everything else life throws at them, can't approach their training with the same level of thought and commitment?

We don't think so.

In fact, we'd argue that training like an athlete has surprisingly little to do with how many hours you spend on the bike, or even how fast you can ride it. It's much more about how you approach those hours.

Training with purpose, not just accumulating hours.

There's a difference between going out for a ride and going out to train. Neither is better than the other. Sometimes riding simply because you love it is exactly what you need; not every ride needs a purpose, a power target or a detailed analysis afterwards.

But when you're working towards a performance goal, understanding why you're doing something becomes important. Take an easy endurance ride, for example. It's tempting to push a little harder when you're feeling good. Perhaps there's a hill you fancy attacking, or someone comes past you and suddenly your carefully planned Zone 2 ride becomes something rather different. We've all been there!!

But that easy ride was prescribed for a reason. The aim might be to accumulate aerobic training volume while keeping the overall physiological stress manageable, allowing you to recover sufficiently for harder sessions later in the week. If you turn every easy ride into a moderately hard one you risk accumulating fatigue without necessarily getting the training stimulus you (or your coach) intended.

The same applies to high-intensity sessions. The objective isn't simply to finish exhausted. It's to deliver a specific physiological stimulus that contributes to your longer-term development.

Training like an athlete means understanding the purpose of a session and having the discipline to execute it accordingly.

And sometimes that requires more restraint than effort.

The session isn't where you get fitter

This is one of the most important concepts in training, and one that is surprisingly easy to overlook. Training itself doesn't make you fitter, it provides the stimulus that encourages your body to adapt. Those adaptations occur through the processes of recovery and remodelling that follow.

When you train, you place stress on various physiological systems. Depending on the nature of that stress, your body may respond by increasing mitochondrial content, improving aerobic enzyme activity, expanding plasma volume or developing greater muscular strength. But these processes require time, energy and appropriate recovery. If you're constantly adding more training stress without allowing sufficient recovery, you may find yourself working increasingly hard for increasingly little return.

This is where nutrition, sleep and the less glamorous parts of training become important.

Adequate carbohydrate availability helps support training quality and replenish glycogen stores. Protein provides the amino acids required for tissue repair and remodelling. Sufficient overall energy intake supports the physiological processes involved in recovery and adaptation. And sleep? Well, there's a reason athletes take it seriously.

You can have the most beautifully structured training programme in the world, but if you're chronically under-fuelled, poorly recovered and permanently exhausted, you're making it considerably harder for that programme to deliver the results you're hoping for.

An athlete doesn't just take their training seriously. They take the things that support their training seriously, too.

The unexciting stuff is often the important stuff

It's easy to associate commitment with the big sessions; the five-hour ride in terrible weather. The final interval when your legs are screaming, the early alarm when everyone else is still asleep. Those things certainly require determination.

But we'd argue that some of the most important decisions an athlete makes are far less exciting. It's keeping an easy ride easy, even when you're feeling fantastic. It's eating properly after a session rather than rushing straight into the next part of your day. It's doing your strength work consistently, even though you'd much rather be outside riding your bike. It's accepting that a recovery week is part of your progression, not an interruption to it (something I’m still learning)!.

And perhaps most importantly, it's having the patience to follow a process without constantly needing proof that it's working. Physiological adaptations take time. Some happen relatively quickly, while others develop over months or even years of consistent training. You can't rush that process simply by wanting it more.

This is something we see regularly in coaching. Athletes are often incredibly willing to work hard, convincing them to do less when it's appropriate can be the greater challenge. But commitment isn't measured by how much discomfort you're prepared to tolerate, sometimes the smartest decision is to push. Sometimes it's to back off.

Knowing the difference is a skill in itself.

Being serious doesn't mean being obsessive

We think this distinction is particularly important.

Taking your performance seriously doesn't mean training has to dominate your life. For most amateur athletes, it simply can't. There are jobs, families, holidays, social occasions and countless other responsibilities competing for your time and energy. And that's fine, training should add something positive to your life; not become another source of constant pressure.

The aim isn't to replicate the lifestyle of a professional athlete. It's to apply the same principles within the reality of your own situation. For someone training six hours a week, that might mean identifying the two or three sessions that will provide the greatest benefit and protecting the quality of those sessions.

It might mean learning to fuel properly rather than trying to squeeze in another hour of training. Or recognising that after a particularly stressful week at work, the best thing for your performance might be an easier weekend.

Good training isn't about following a plan at all costs. It's about making the right decisions with the time, energy and resources you have available.

And those decisions won't always be the same from one week to the next.

Taking ownership of the process

One of the things we particularly enjoy about coaching is working with athletes who are curious.

Not necessarily the fastest athletes, or those with the most ambitious goals, but the ones who want to understand what they're doing and why. They ask questions, they notice how they respond to different training sessions. They communicate when something isn't working.

They become active participants in their own development rather than simply following instructions. That's important because training isn't an exact science. We have decades of research helping us understand how the human body responds to exercise, but individuals don't all respond in exactly the same way.

Two athletes can follow an identical training programme and experience quite different outcomes. Training history, genetics, nutrition, sleep, psychological stress and numerous other factors all influence the response.

This is why good coaching involves more than prescribing intervals and watching numbers appear on TrainingPeaks.

It involves understanding the person behind those numbers. And from the athlete's perspective, it means being willing to learn, provide honest feedback and occasionally question whether what you're doing is actually helping you move towards your goals.

So, what does it mean to train like an athlete?

We don't think there's a minimum number of hours you need to train, a particular power-to-weight ratio you need to achieve or a level of competition you need to reach before you're entitled to call yourself an athlete. We've coached riders with extraordinary physical ability who struggle with consistency; and others with far more modest physiological capabilities who approach their development with intelligence and commitment.

Both can teach you something.

Of course, mindset alone won't turn everyone into a World Champion. Genetics, opportunity, training history and plenty of other factors influence what we're ultimately capable of achieving. But the principles that underpin successful athletic development aren't exclusive to the professionals.

• Training with purpose.

• Fuelling appropriately.

• Respecting recovery.

• Being consistent.

• Remaining curious.

• Understanding when to push and when to be patient.

None of those things requires you to be “elite.” They simply require you to care about the process and be willing to learn.

And whether your ambition is to win a national championship, complete your first 100km ride or simply become a stronger, more capable cyclist, we believe you deserve access to the same quality of coaching, knowledge and support.

Because taking your performance seriously shouldn't be something reserved for the elite.

Elite. It's a mindset thing.