Key Takeaways

• Burnout in cycling can start while power, load and recovery data still look normal. Michał Pustuła, founder of MPCC, watches for shorter training comments, more missed sessions and relief when a ride is cancelled, signals that tend to appear before performance falls.

• Burnout and overtraining syndrome are different problems with different fixes. Overtraining syndrome is a prolonged disturbance in performance and recovery (Meeusen et al., 2013). Burnout is psychological: exhaustion, reduced accomplishment and devaluing the sport (Raedeke and Smith, 2001). Rest fixes tired legs, not always a rider who no longer wants to train.

• Training age, not today's power, sets how fast a rider can progress. Two riders with similar power can tolerate very different training. Years of consistent work cannot be reproduced by one aggressive winter, and that holds for a 42-year-old amateur as much as a junior.

• Vekta separates the parts of training stress instead of giving one fitness number. Vekta Load-2 and Strain rising together, with worse recovery and higher RPE, is a training-load question. A stable Load-8, CP and W′ alongside falling motivation points the coach somewhere else.

• Long-term development means hard training that can be repeated across seasons. Pustuła progresses volume and intensity by training history, plans recovery before the athlete needs it, and judges a nineteen-year-old on whether they still want to train, race and learn.

Michał Pustuła is a cycling coach and the founder of MPCC in Poland. A former UCI Continental rider with a master's degree in Physical Education, he holds UCI coaching certification and a Polish Cycling Federation Level II licence, has coached cyclists for over ten years and coaches with Vekta. Here he writes about the athletes whose numbers still look good while their will to train fades. What follows is in Michał's words.

One of the more difficult situations in coaching is when almost everything you normally use to judge progress still looks good.

Power is improving, the athlete is completing the work, training load is where you expected it to be and there is nothing particularly alarming in the recovery data. From a performance point of view, there may be no obvious reason to change anything.

But the conversations start to change.

Comments after sessions become shorter. Easy rides begin to feel like something that needs to be ticked off. The athlete starts missing the occasional session, usually for a perfectly reasonable reason. A cancelled ride brings relief rather than frustration.

None of this has to affect performance immediately, which is precisely why it can be easy to miss.

Over time, this has changed the way I think about long-term development. I am interested in whether an athlete is getting faster, but I am equally interested in whether the process that made them faster is repeatable.

A successful season should leave the athlete physically capable of building another one and motivated enough to want to do it.

Long-Term Development Is Not Just a Youth Concept

Long-term athlete development is usually discussed in the context of juniors, talent identification and pathways towards elite sport. The same principle applies just as well to a 42-year-old amateur with a full-time job.

In some ways, it may be even more important for that rider because nobody has designed a pathway for them.

Most adult athletes come into coaching with a mixture of training history, work, family, inconsistent seasons, periods away from the sport and a fairly clear idea of how fast they would like to become. The temptation is to look at the gap between their current level and their goal, then work backwards from there.

I think the more useful starting point is often their training history.

A rider with two years of consistent training should not necessarily progress volume and intensity at the same rate as someone with eight years behind them. Two athletes can have similar power today and still have very different capacities to tolerate what comes next.

That is why training age matters. Years of consistent work create something that cannot be reproduced by one aggressive winter.

When I think about an athlete over several seasons, I tend to follow two things in parallel.

The first is physiological development. Aerobic capacity, Critical Power, durability, economy, recovery and the ability to produce useful power after several hours of work all take time. This side of the process is relatively familiar to coaches because we can measure much of it.

The second is less visible. It includes motivation, autonomy, identity, the athlete's relationship with training and how cycling fits alongside the rest of their life.

The physiological side usually changes gradually. The second one can change much faster.

An athlete can still be fitter than they were three months ago while becoming less interested in the process that produced that fitness. If that continues for long enough, physiology stops being the main limitation.

Burnout and Overtraining Are Not the Same Problem

Burnout and overtraining are often discussed as though they are different versions of the same thing. They can overlap, but I find the distinction useful.

Overtraining syndrome involves a prolonged disturbance in performance and recovery (Meeusen et al., 2013). Burnout is primarily psychological and is typically described through emotional and physical exhaustion, reduced feelings of accomplishment and a growing devaluation of the sport (Raedeke and Smith, 2001).

In practice, the difference can be quite obvious.

An athlete carrying too much physical fatigue may desperately want to train but simply be unable to perform normally. An athlete moving towards burnout can still produce good numbers but increasingly not want to be there.

Reducing training load is an obvious intervention when the athlete is physically overloaded. It does not necessarily solve the second problem.

I have had riders take a substantial break, return physically rested and still feel almost exactly the same about cycling. Their legs were no longer the issue. Training had gradually become another obligation in a week that already contained enough of them.

This is also why normal recovery data does not reassure me completely when an athlete's behaviour is changing.

Overtraining syndrome: legs low, refilled after a break; the will to train stays high. Burnout: legs full; the will to train low, and still low after a break. Illustrative, from Michał Pustuła's text. Sources: Meeusen et al. (2013); Raedeke and Smith (2001).

What I Tend to See Before Burnout Becomes Obvious

There is rarely one dramatic moment. More often, several small changes start appearing together.

One common pattern is that every ride slowly becomes a test.

Power meters are excellent tools, but they can create a poor relationship with training if the athlete starts judging every session by whether the numbers are better than last time. Most training days are not supposed to produce a personal best. An endurance ride is allowed to be an endurance ride. A recovery session does not need to prove that fitness is improving.

Once every ride carries a pass or fail judgement, the athlete can train well for several days and still finish the week feeling that they have achieved very little.

Another common problem is treating the rest of life as though it carries no load.

The training plan might say twelve hours, but it does not automatically account for a difficult week at work, a sick child, poor sleep or several hours of commuting. The athlete experiences all of it regardless of whether it appears in the training file.

For that reason, one of the first things I want to understand with a new athlete is what their normal week actually looks like. There is little value in designing the physiologically perfect training programme if it repeatedly exceeds what the athlete can absorb once the rest of their life is included.

I also see problems when structure never really stops. One block follows another, every ride has a purpose and the entire year is viewed through training targets and race preparation.

Some athletes can tolerate that physically for a long time. Mentally, it can become very repetitive. A few weeks without intervals or performance targets can sometimes do more for the next training cycle than another carefully optimised block.

Identity matters as well. When being a cyclist becomes too closely tied to being a successful cyclist, a bad race carries more weight than it should. This can happen at any level, but I am particularly conscious of it with younger riders because the expectations of teams, parents and coaches can reinforce it.

The coach can also become part of the problem.

If every check-in feels like an audit, or the athlete feels they need to perform to avoid disappointing me, then I have added another stressor. I want athletes to be able to tell me that they are tired, frustrated or simply not enjoying a part of the process without having to defend it.

Some of the earliest warning signs therefore have very little to do with power.

The training comments disappear. Messages become shorter. A rider who almost never missed a session starts missing one every week. RPE rises even though power remains similar. Questions about the purpose of training change from genuine curiosity to frustration.

One of the signals I pay particular attention to is relief when a session gets cancelled.

Rain, work or a mechanical problem suddenly removes the need to train, and the athlete is pleased about it. One occurrence means very little. When it becomes a pattern, I want to understand why.

Where the Data Helps, and Where It Stops

This is where I find Vekta particularly useful, because I can look at different parts of training stress rather than relying on one combined fitness number.

If Load-2 and Strain have both moved up, recovery is worsening and the athlete reports higher RPE, there is an obvious training-load question to investigate. If Load-2 is rising while Strain remains relatively stable, that points me in a different direction than a period where volume is stable but intensity pressure has increased.

The more interesting case is when the training data does not give me an obvious reason to intervene.

Load-8 looks appropriate for the athlete's history. Recent load is not unusual. CP, W′ or durability are stable. Recovery markers are acceptable.

But the athlete is commenting less, motivation is falling and missed sessions are becoming more frequent.

The dashboard is not failing in that situation. It is simply measuring a different part of the problem.

This is one reason I rarely make a coaching decision because a single metric moved for one day. I am much more interested in trends, combinations and situations where the signals disagree.

A reduction in HRV after a heavy block means something different from normal HRV accompanied by three weeks of declining motivation. Falling power, rising RPE and poor recovery are relatively easy to interpret. Good power combined with declining enthusiasm is more difficult, and probably more important to notice early.

The data gives me context. The athlete's behaviour gives me more context. Neither should automatically overrule the other.

Illustrative. Load-8 (white), Load-2 (blue) and Strain (orange) in Vekta, 1 August to 2 November 2026. Peaks: Load-8 34, Load-2 47, Strain 44. On 19 September: Load-8 24, Load-2 19, Strain 29.

How This Changes the Way I Coach

The practical consequence is that I have become more conservative about progression than I was earlier in my coaching career.

I still want athletes to train hard. I still use overload, high-intensity work and periods of substantial volume when they are appropriate. Long-term development does not mean avoiding difficult training.

It means making sure the difficult training can be repeated across seasons.

Training history therefore influences how quickly I increase volume and intensity. I would rather progress slightly too slowly while maintaining continuity than repeatedly build an athlete to a level they cannot sustain.

Recovery is treated in the same way. I prefer it to be part of the plan before the athlete becomes desperate for it. That does not mean using the same three-weeks-on, one-week-off structure for everybody. It means accepting that backing off is part of progression rather than evidence that the previous training has failed.

Life also affects the decision.

If an athlete has slept badly for several nights or is entering an unusually stressful week at work, I have no problem changing the plan before there is evidence of a performance decline. Protecting one interval session is rarely more important than protecting the continuity of the next month.

I also try to keep enough variation in the process.

Consistency matters, but consistency does not require the same roads, the same intervals and the same training environment every week. Sometimes the best way to preserve a training stimulus is to change how the athlete gets it.

For some riders, I have removed the power field from the head unit for certain periods or sessions. That is not an argument against data. I use power extensively in my coaching. It is simply a way of keeping the data in the role I want it to have.

The power file is information for making decisions. It does not need to become the athlete's score for the day.

The other part is giving the athlete enough ownership to understand those decisions.

I do not want somebody to follow a training plan for three years and still need me to explain every small adjustment. Athletes should gradually understand why the work is structured the way it is, what we are trying to change and why we occasionally decide not to do more.

That autonomy becomes particularly valuable when something does not go according to plan.

Younger Athletes Need a Longer Horizon

I am especially conscious of all of this when working with juniors and under-23 riders.

Being around young riders during stage races gives a coach a perspective that is difficult to get from training files alone. You see how they behave at breakfast, in the team car, after a bad stage and during the evening briefing. You can often see who is still curious about the sport and who is already treating it like a job they are tired of.

Some riders who were exceptional at sixteen reach their early twenties with very little appetite left.

The reasons are never identical, but I repeatedly see combinations of early specialisation, heavy race schedules, pressure around results and very little separation between sporting performance and personal value.

That has made me cautious about judging development too early.

The best nineteen-year-old is not automatically the athlete with the best long-term prospects. At that age, continuing to improve matters, but so does still wanting to train, race and learn.

A successful junior career is useful. It is not the final objective.

The Athlete I Am Trying to Build

Long-term development is sometimes presented as though the coach has to choose between performance and enjoyment. I do not think that is the choice.

The goal is performance that can be built on.

I want an athlete to finish a season stronger than they started it, but I also want the training history created during that season to make the next one possible. That requires enough physiological progression to move forward, enough recovery to absorb it and enough motivation to continue.

For self-coached athletes, this can be harder because there is no natural distance between the person setting the target and the person trying to hit it. Having somebody outside the process who is allowed to say that enough is enough can be surprisingly useful.

For coaches, the responsibility is slightly different. We have to be willing to react before the performance data forces us to.

I am not trying to build the fastest possible version of an athlete for next August. I want this season to add another year of useful training without taking away the willingness to do another one.

Performance matters. Results matter. But neither means much for long-term development if the process required to achieve them cannot be repeated.

The riders who make it, at every level I have worked at, are not the ones with the best winter.

They are the ones who are still here.

Work With Michał

The way Michał writes is the way he coaches. He reads the training file and the life around it: sleep, stress, work and everything else an athlete carries into a session. And he wants his riders to understand why the work is built the way it is, so they can own it.

He coaches amateur and high-performance riders, from juniors and under-23s upwards, across road, MTB, cyclocross, gravel and track, in Polish, English, Spanish and Czech. The goal is the one this article sets out: a season that makes you faster and leaves you wanting the next one.

If that is the coaching you are looking for, or you simply want to know more about how he works, start at his website.

Learn more about Michał and work with him at mpcc.pl →

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References

Meeusen R, Duclos M, Foster C, Fry A, Gleeson M, Nieman D, Raglin J, Rietjens G, Steinacker J, Urhausen A. Prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the overtraining syndrome: joint consensus statement of the European College of Sport Science and the American College of Sports Medicine. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 45(1): 186 to 205 (2013). doi:10.1249/MSS.0b013e318279a10a

Raedeke TD, Smith AL. Development and preliminary validation of an athlete burnout measure. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology 23(4): 281 to 306 (2001). doi:10.1123/jsep.23.4.281

Further reading: Sors F, Tomé Lourido D, Damonte S, Santoro I, Galmonte A, Agostini T, Murgia M. Former road cyclists still involved in cycling report lower burnout levels than those who abandoned this sport. Frontiers in Psychology 11: 400 (2020). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00400

Photos: Artur Ciachowski