If You Wanna Go Faster, You Gotta Go Easier

MUSINGS FROM A COACH - 21 OCTOBER '25

If you wanna be faster, you gotta go easier.

Most Endurance athletes have heard this or some variant of this over the years. Recently there’s been a flood of “Zone 2“ focus being touted as a new way to train. But, of course, as with many training “fads” often pushed by influencers or celebrity coaches, they're really just long-standing practices that are re-released with new descriptions.

But for the newer adult athlete entering the endurance sports world, it may seem counterintuitive to not go fast all the time to get faster. As with all things, training is individualized and unique for every athlete. While there will forever be the fundamentals of training, it really does depend on a number of factors to help plan out the path forward for each athlete.

For today, I’m going to talk about cycling as it’s probably the most abused of all endurance sports as it relates to this topic, primarily because there’s low impact and very little risk of injury (unless, of course, you’re hit by something or crash on your own). Because of that, we can safely go hard on the bike a lot.

A new adult athlete getting into cycling or multisport might think that joining a spin class that goes hard three or more times a week is the quickest way to get stronger and faster on the bike. Feeling exhausted after getting your heart rate up and sweating profusely makes us feel as if we've accomplished something. While this may show initial improvement in the short term, it will quickly lead to a plateau in fitness and won’t benefit the endurance athlete in the long run.

Why? Aerobic training (or going easy) actually helps improve stamina and aerobic threshold. That is, going easy helps us train for longer periods while also enabling us to train at higher intensities with less fatigue. Think of it as the foundation of our house of fitness. The bigger and stronger the foundation, the more fitness can be built on top of it.

One marker of aerobic fitness is an athlete's heart rate at different efforts. A newer endurance athlete might have a relatively high heart rate while just cycling at an easy or moderate effort. Why? Quite simply their heart (a muscle) is not fit or strong enough to deliver blood to the muscles without increasing its beating significantly. If the athlete only trained "hard" or "fast", this would barely change.

But if the athlete incorporated more aerobic training (i.e. easy or moderate training), their heart would indeed grow, and they'd see a decrease in heart rate at all efforts. While this is a bit of oversimplification, you get the idea. The athlete becomes more aerobically fit which then allows them to make real gains with harder sessions.

But in a world dominated by "get fit fast" fads, it tough for athletes to get on a bike and just go easy for 45+minutes. They often feel like it's a waist of time. Additionally, going easy was given a bad rap with over used and undefined phrases like, "Don't do junk miles". The reality is, for professional endurance athletes, 80-90% of all their weekly training is aerobic training. That's right, only 10-20% of the time do their go "hard" each week.

Now for a professional training 20-35+ hours a week, that's easier to understand. But what if you're an amateur only training 6-12 hours a week? Don't you have to go hard a bit more often? Sometimes, yes. But it comes back to that foundation of fitness. The more aerobically fit we are, the better our bodies will respond to harder training and the more fit we will get.

So let's get back to that endurance athlete who loves their hard spin class 3 or more times a week. I would suggest looking at reducing those classes down to twice a week and adding 1-2 easy rides. Believe me when I say, you will get faster if you go easier!