I was the guy who wanted to know I’d slightly overachieved in training. In my head, if six hours was good, then six hours and two minutes had to be better than five hours fifty-eight. I’ve got no data to prove that, but mentally it meant something.

Same with efforts. If the session called for 400 watts, 402 just looked that little bit better. I wasn’t blowing the program apart, not turning a six-hour ride into seven, or a 400-watt effort into 460, but if I could keep things just a touch in the green, it gave me confidence. Maybe it was more psychological than physical, but that matters too.

At the start of a season, you come in fresh, fat, and training feels hard, but the gains are huge. It’s motivating. The problem is what happens when you get fit and get closer to your ceiling. When you’re sitting at 95%, chasing that last 5% can feel brutal.

The body is clever. It figures out what you’re trying to do and becomes efficient at it, whether that’s riding at 400 watts or dropping weight. As cyclists, we obsess over power-to-weight. And yeah, looking back, we didn’t always get it right. There were times we pushed things too far. Under-fuelling, chasing weight, doing things that probably were not sustainable or even beneficial to performance in the long run.

One of the biggest lessons I learned came from my coach, Kevin Poulton.

Stimulus.

Keep the body guessing. Don’t do the same thing for too long. Keep moving the goalposts.

The biggest gains often came when something felt new again, like the body had to wake up and respond. Once we had a solid block of altitude training, we didn’t just stay there longer and longer. We mixed it up. Five days up, two days down. Then back up again. Every time, the body had to readjust. “What’s going on here?” Then you’d get that response again, that boost in red blood cell production.

Same with training. It wasn’t about endlessly pushing harder until things became unachievable. It was about changing the stimulus. Heat, cold, altitude, intensity, duration. Keeping things fresh.

___________________________________

I pushed things pretty far nutritionally, too. Honestly, I think sometimes you need to find the limit to understand where it actually is. Learn what too far feels like. Learn your own body.

Back then I was doing a lot of “sleep low, train low” protocols. The last couple of hours of a long ride would be done on just water. No carbs, no fuel. Empty the glycogen stores completely. Then when you got home, still no carbs. Just protein and fats before bed; “Sleep low.”

Wake up the next morning and do it again. No carbs at breakfast either. Usually I’d have a bulletproof coffee, triple espresso blended with butter and MCT oil, then head out for another endurance ride. Again, zero carbs on the bike. Just let that engine grumble away, crying out for proper fuel until it realises it’s not coming and it adapts to use what it has.

The whole idea was to force the body into ketosis. Basically teaching the body to become more efficient at converting fat into ketones, which could then be used as fuel instead of relying purely on glycogen and carbohydrates.

The thinking at the time was that if you could improve the body’s ability to access fat stores for fuel, you could spare glycogen for the really important moments in races. Long climbs, attacks, hard finales. Instead of constantly topping up with carbs, you were trying to create a body that could survive and still perform while running a little leaner on fuel.

It was hell, you felt flat. Properly flat.

You did not feel strong. You just rolled along surviving. But mentally, it became fascinating. You realised the body could still keep going even when it felt like there was absolutely nothing left in the tank.

Looking back now, we’ve learned a lot about why that probably wasn’t the ideal way to train for racing performance. But I’ll argue it was an incredible stimulus. Not just physically, mentally too.

You learned how to suffer. How to push through those feelings telling you to stop. Honestly, I think that helped me later in races. Five hours deep in a Grand Tour stage, staring up at some fuck off mountain top finish, already on your hands and knees. But you had already been to that place before, it wasn’t going to be easy, but you were prepared for that mental battle.

When it came to dropping those off-season kilos, I had another little trick. One cheat day a week. Lock it down for six days, then on the seventh day, go for it. Eat the things you’ve been craving.

Why? Because mentally it keeps the light at the end of the tunnel.

During the week you are less likely to pick away at little things. Bit of chocolate here, packet of chips there, beer after training because “I earned it.” Those little moments add up. Instead, save it for one day. Get it out of the system. Then by Monday, mentally, you’re ready to lock back in again. You almost feel refreshed by it. Motivated again.

The point here is not to take nutritional advice from me. We probably got plenty wrong. It’s more the thinking behind it all.

Changing the stimulus. Keeping the body and mind guessing.

___________________________________

That’s probably the biggest takeaway I carried out of the pro peloton into how I train, or rather “exercise”, now.

These days it’s a bit more haphazard, but the principle is the same. I keep things interesting. A ride one day, a run the next, gym, hiking, training with the footy team, play golf, whatever fits.

Some days are full gas, other days long and easy. Sometimes I’ll train low on fuel, other times I’m fuelling properly and enjoying it.

Diet’s no different. Too much of anything isn’t great. A few too many beers? Pull it back for a couple of days, dry yourself out. Maybe fast for half a day, then enjoy a big breakfast with the family on the weekend.

Maybe it’s balance.

Or maybe it’s just this. Keep your body and mind guessing.

Cheers,

Mitch

The most important lesson I’ve ever learned about training is to be real.

Cyclists — athletes — are dreamers. Aspiration is the trait I’ve seen in countless riders over the years, and it’s one I recognise in myself. It’s that desire to be better, to be stronger, to do things in races or group rides that sit just beyond your current reach.

It’s the same everywhere. If you’re a second cat, you don’t think, “oh sweet, I’ll just roll around now I’ve got some points.” You think about winning a couple of races, maybe moving up a category, scoring more points or whatever it is. If you don’t race, you want to climb a hill faster or at least more comfortably. If you’re a good pro doing your job well, you’re probably dreaming about a Tour selection. If you’re a sprinter with a few .1 wins, you wake up thinking about that first WorldTour victory. And if you’re Pog, you want to win at least one of everything and at least five Tours de France.

Everyone is reaching. That’s why we train.

But here’s the thing — the thing I see more than anything else: people try to reach for something on a very high shelf while balancing on a broken kitchen chair, instead of making the effort to go to the shed and get the step ladder.

Training is repetition. It’s going out, over and over again, reaching on a daily basis for those small steps forward that form the foundation for big steps on race day. This is true on the bike, with weight loss, strength work, gym work, core stability — every part of training should be done until the rider is almost fed up with it.

Yes, you should aim for things out of your reach, things that push and challenge you. But for the majority of the time, that push should happen in training — not on race day. Race day is about confirmation, or occasionally taking a leap in self-belief. Just not in physical ability.

As a DS, one of the hardest jobs is matching riders’ ambitions with the reality of the work they’ve put in. We don’t coach in the traditional sense; our coaching happens in and around races. We build teams, shape racers, and balance competing ambitions. And sometimes you listen to a rider describe their goals for a race and quietly think, “you aren’t ready to do that.” We know. We see. We understand the true demands of a race — give or take a tactical miracle.

On the flip side, there are moments when you have to convince a rider that they can do it. Some riders bank green day after green day on TrainingPeaks — a calendar that looks like a lush meadow — yet on race day they lack the confidence to chase something that’s well within their capabilities.

It’s just a truth that some riders expect a miracle when they haven’t done the work, whilst others think they need a miracle when they have.

In Spanish, the word riders use for training camps is concentración. You don’t have to be linguist of the year to work out the translation for that one. It means exactly what it says on the tin: to train — really train. You go somewhere to knuckle down and concentrate on the work at hand.

Honestly, I think the focus needed for the real work of training is only getting harder to maintain. One of the modern athlete’s biggest challenges is sticking with one thing long enough to reach that point of productive repetition. You see it constantly: wanting to add altitude before the weight is right; fiddling with shoes or position before doing enough VO2 work.

These days, if you’re a cyclist and you glance at the world wide web, you’re hit with a million distractions promising free watts. Forums full of clothing hacks, shoe hacks, aero hacks. It’s probably even worse for amateurs — pros are limited by the team’s framework and the sponsor’s equipment, but if you’re racin

g for fun? There must be a hundred tempting gadgets or tweaks that feel like shortcuts to speed.

But all of that is icing on the cake. You need to get bored first. You need the unexciting routine — the repetition, the patience — to build the base you’ll eventually reach from.

If you don’t, and you kid yourself that you’ve done the work because you bought new white shoes or shaved your legs for the first time since September and suddenly feel fast, you won’t be in a real position to reach for your goals.

In my old rowing team, the coaches always used to say: keep it honest. And I think that’s the perfect summary of what an athlete truly needs to improve. Keep things simple, keep it honest, real. Keep the distractions at bay. The work is what moves the dial. The work is slow, tough, repetitive. That’s training. That’s where the difference is made.

I’m Luke Durbridge and I’ve been a professional cyclist for the last 15 years. It’s been a long journey and I thought for the second TrainingPeaks Peloton Experience, I would share 5 tips from my career to help any aspiring professional athlete looking to maintain a long and healthy career.

Enjoy!

Tip 1

Trying to tell a young ambitious athlete that rest, sleep and more is not always better can be like talking to a brick wall. You need that blind belief that you can always ask more of the body and it will respond. That’s in the years of building your engine so it’s important to get your ambitions mixed up with your capabilities. It makes you go further, deeper and push yourself to new limits.

But saying that, what goes up must come down.

So if I was to share some advice or some words of wisdom to a younger athlete, I would say being able to listen to your body is the most important thing to get great results, and have sustainable life as a pro athlete.

I turned pro back in 2012 and have always been a very coachable athlete. Whatever the coach had on the program, I ate up. I never missed a session or an interval; they said jump and I said how high.

A few years later the Yates twins turned pro and they both didn’t have a coach. I was so confused by this. They just did what they felt was needed to race well. If they were tired, they rested. If they felt good, they went hard.

Simple.

They had an incredible feel for what there body needed at any point in the season.

Obviously their results speak for themselves and I will not compare there engines to mine. But I use that example because at a young age they were able to stand up for themselves and back themselves to know enough is enough.

I took this approach on over the years and now, at 35 and going into my 15th pro season, I really embrace this. I listen to my body and make sure I do my training, but if there is a day it’s not happening I’ll shut it down and go tomorrow.

There’s a perfect plan that a coach will go for, but life is not perfect and your body doesn’t adapt like a linear line towards your goal. So listen to it.

I think deep down most people know how they feel, but it’s training yourself to really listen to your feelings and that takes time to train.

If you can master that then you will go along way in this sport.

Tip 2

We’re living in the watts/kg era and Strava times and training power files are all that are spoken about at the dinner table. I love a good stat myself but you always have to have in the back of your mind it’s a race. So it’s how well you can race that is important. The best racer is the guy who wins with the least amount of watts.

I mean, do we want to talk about a guy who can ride at 6-7watts/kg or the guy who won race?

Tip 3

My approach to training is it’s the day after day that builds your form. It’s the consistency not the one off mega day that we all have from time to time. Not getting overly obsessed or stressed about a particular day. If you have a session where you can’t quite achieve what the coach set out, then that’s ok. You do the session and line up again tomorrow.

Tip 4

Make training easy.

What I mean by this is finding a way to enjoy your training. If you’re going to be a pro cyclist then you’re going to spend 11 months of the year riding your bike, so you have to work out how to make that a part of your life, not a sacrifice or stress.

I’ve always been a social guy and I fell in love with cycling because I could ride with my mates for 5-6 hours, and that was a part of my training. You won’t find me doing to many solo rides. I will always find a rider to ride with and work my session in with. If it’s slightly different to what the coach had I will do that, as for me training is easy when you’re not alone. This comes back to my point about it being the consistency that makes you better.

Tip 5

I do enjoy a good plan. I love the process of building your engine with your team and getting your mind and body ready for the big targets in the season.

I use TrainingPeaks and have for the last 15 years. It’s my place where I can see all the work going into the body.

It’s important to learn from your mistakes. So having a place where you can log your training and your thoughts at any point in the year is so crucial.

As pro athletes we need a bit of a gold fish brain. You have a bad race, you brush it off and build towards the next race.

But if you never look back at why something went wrong, or what you did in the lead up to that race, then you never really learn how to improve. There’s been plenty of times in my career where I’ve had great races and then tried to replicate that entire build-up again. The same goes the other way around. When I’ve had a bad one, I’ve often been able to see it was because I got sick in the lead up or neglected certain training.

So log your work and enjoy that process, because it’s so important if you want a long career.

Cheers!

Durbo

Want to bring a bit more structure to your training? TrainingPeaks helps you track your rides, plan your sessions and train smarter.

LITP subscribers get 20% off TrainingPeaks Premium:
trainingpeaks.com/litp

This is real life training advice coming from three guys who have raced at the highest level of the sport.

First, there is Durbo; Luke Durbridge. Currently still racing as a pro with Jayco AlUla, Luke is heading into his 15th year in the WorldTour.

Then there’s Tom Southam. Southam raced for eight years as a professional before stepping into the team car as a Sports Director, now in his tenth year working with EF EasyPost.

Of course, then there’s me. I spent 13 years racing in the WorldTour peloton and now sit in the armchair, watching it all unfold and calling the action from the commentary box.

So no, we are not coaches. We are not here to tell you how to structure your season or what numbers you should be hitting - that is where TrainingPeaks and their qualified coaches come in. What we do have is a shit ton of experience when it comes to training, racing, and surviving in the peloton year after year. None of us are genetic freaks like Pogi or Van Der Poel, but we have all done a pretty good job of getting the absolute most out of ourselves as athletes over the years.

This space is about sharing that experience. We all know there are countless ways to train; Many of you already work with coaches and, if you are looking for one, TrainingPeaks gives you access to coaches who can tailor things specifically to you. What we want to add is a different layer. The stuff that doesn’t always fit neatly into a graph or a training block. The lessons that come from thousands of race days, training camps, hotel rooms, and long rides where you learn what works and what doesn’t.

We are not pretending to know your FTP, your goals, or what works best for your body. That is between you and your coach. What we want to offer are small insights that might help when you are out there doing the work. Little adjustments in mindset, approach, and how you interact with your training that can make the process more enjoyable and more sustainable.

For my first Peloton Training Experience, I want to talk about how riders approach training. In my mind there are two types of riders; those that like to explore, and those who are more systematic and want everything perfectly mapped out on the same stretch of road, repeated over and over until the session is done.

When I was racing, I always liked to build my prescribed sessions into a loop. The challenge was finding the right loop. Did it have a climb long enough to get through the first set of efforts, but not so long that I was completely cooked over the top? What was the gradient like? Once the climb was done, how long was it to the next one? Where could I recover properly without switching off completely?

For me, this felt realistic and race-like. Racing is never about doing perfect efforts on the same piece of road. It’s about responding to terrain, fatigue, and what is coming next. Riding loops gave me that feeling. I was ticking roads off, moving closer to the finish, not just staring at the same bit of tarmac- and the biggest bonus was the stimulation of exploring on my bike. New roads, different climbs, new places. It kept things interesting and kept me engaged - especially during long training blocks when motivation can easily drop.

On top of that, I also liked to let the route become the training from time to time. Stepping away from chasing exact numbers and instead watching heart rate and focussing on feel, letting the road dictate the intensity. I like to call it natural intensity. Bottom of the hill to the top. Out of the seat. Let’s go. The effort might be short or long, and the recovery might be the same. Some days that meant riding harder than planned, other days it meant backing it off without guilt.

After years in the peloton, one thing became very clear to me ; The riders who lasted were not just the ones who could follow a plan perfectly. They were the ones who could listen to their bodies, stay curious, and keep enjoying the process. Training is important, structure matters, and data is incredibly useful. But feel, instinct, and enjoyment matter too.

So I will leave you with this : Use your backyard as your playground. Explore. Mix structure with freedom. That is why most of us started cycling in the first place. Because a bike can take you on adventures you never quite feel from inside a car.

Let your terrain be your natural intensity.

Cheers!

Mitch

Want to bring a bit more structure to your training? TrainingPeaks helps you track your rides, plan your sessions and train smarter.

LITP subscribers get 20% off TrainingPeaks Premium:
trainingpeaks.com/litp