Cyclists have always liked to celebrate the brutality of the sport, equating the ability to endure pain with a sign of strength. It’s easy to confuse the difficulty of cycling with the difficulty of training. Many people think that the harder the training, the better, but in many cases, the opposite is true.

To understand why, it’s important to realize that only by recovering can you become faster. Training puts the body under stress, stimulating adaptation and subsequent improvement in fitness. Apply too much stress or allow too little recovery, and your body won’t be able to make these improvements, and you won’t get any faster. This is why the principle of minimum effective dose is so useful in training, using as little pressure as possible to achieve the desired result.

There are also important physiological differences in how easy and difficult exercises affect the body. Training programs are designed around this fact, which means that some exercises are intentionally easier than others. If every workout is hard, not only will you tire yourself out, but you may actually be neglecting the development of an important aspect of your fitness. There is a time and place for hard training, but not every training session.