Now that you have learned about a rider type in detail, does it work for you? More importantly, what type of rider do you want to be? What type of events do you want to ride?
It’s ok to feel like you are a cross between two. In general I find that most people have one genetic Rider Type and then one Rider Type tendency. What I mean by tendency is that this is where mentally you tend to go when under pressure to make a real-time decision.
For example, I often find Sprinters riding with All-Rounder tendencies. Attacking themselves rather than waiting to follow attacks from others. Thinking they can solo away rather than focusing on the simple need of making the front selection rather than winning the sprint. I see the same with Puncheurs having Climber tendencies. Attacking at the bottoms of long climbs, rather than being patient, trying to follow, and then winning the climb with an explosive effort.
The best way to truly know the difference is to critically look at your past cycling performances and what you deem to be your physical strengths and see how they best line up with the Rider Type details.
Learning and then training like your rider type will make a huge difference in your long game cycling progression. But they’re not perfect. Strict, unchangeable rider types wouldn't be very useful. We can all change within physiological limits of course. In fact, your rider type can change over time as you improve your fitness and focus on different areas, including the strengths and weaknesses that profiling identifies.
But this type of profiling has limitations if not matched with power profile testing.
Power is the way I profile athletes and I’ve been doing it for years. But one of the issues I come across is them not accurately representing the athlete’s strengths and limiters.
The chart below is a good way to see the athlete’s values across a power curve and also compare these values against other cyclists to get an idea of the magnitude of their strengths or limiters.
The issues around power profiles are things like misrepresenting the rider by only showing the result of specific training, rather than the type of rider they are. Or not performing the best on the day - from fatigue to performance anxiety etc.
Take this athlete for example - take a guess at what type of rider they are?
Puncheur? Kilo rider?
How about this rider?
Climber?
The punchline is that these two athletes are the same.
This is good and bad.
To explain it better, think of it like this. We all have physiological and psychological tendencies that define who we are as cyclists. I bet inside you, you had already decided which rider type suits you before you took the profile. And you might be correct. I have also found that people have a tendency to define themselves in unrealistic ways.
And honestly, I don’t want you to spend hours or days thinking through your rider type. Not until you have completed a full set of power profiling tests.
Here’s something you can takeaway though…
Lead with your rider type when it comes to your thinking and your strategy. A road sprinter shouldn’t just say, “Climbs are bad for me.” They should say, “I know who I am as a rider, so I’m planning to climb in a way that suits my own strengths.” You don’t have to hate climbing to be a road sprinter. And for that matter, you don’t have to love climbing to be a climber.
The idea here is don’t let your rider type hold you back. You should never look at a ride or event and say, “Well I shouldn’t do that because I’m a climber (or sprinter or any other type)”. Instead, knowing your rider type empowers you.
Most riders who have a bad time on a ride are unaware of their rider types and how to use their talents strategically. Well, now you know yours, so use it to set yourself up for success.
Knowing your Rider Type won’t always win the race for you, but I promise you’ll finish each day knowing that you made the most of your own talents.
A final note on problems even basic power profiling has. A basic power profile covering set power durations is a common place to start. But as I just showed, it might not tell the right story. There are more layers that can’t quite be understood here with these cycling power charts.
We need more parameters and metrics. And that’s why I use as many metrics that we have available to make decisions for your performance. There are also other factors to consider.
Repeatability: It's one thing to measure your best effort at any time, but what about how often you can do that? This depends on a number of things, like how well you eat, how much you train overall, and your anaerobic threshold. Nothing, however, beats going to work and seeing how many times you can do a certain number of watts for a certain amount of time.
Fatigued Power: Depending on your discipline or level of racing, your events will last a different amount of time, and you will have to do your best when you are tired. Before racing starts, anyone coming out of a base/build period should pick a KJ burn amount and then test their race-winning power efforts.
Raw Watts Vs. W/KG: Raw watts vs w/kg is another important difference. W/kg is usually correct, but not always. On flat roads and some short gradients, raw power will be more important.
Example: Two riders go flat-out for 20 minutes. One weighs 65kg and can do 5 w/kg (325 watts), while the other weighs 85kg and can only do 450w/kg (382 watts). The 382 watts will go much faster than the 325 watts because the course is flat and the main resistance is wind, not gravity.
As speed increases, exponentially more power is needed to create more speed. Large and small riders must compare their strengths. Simply thinking w/kg may be good for Zwift, but not for crits or flat-finish road races.
A smaller rider will likely have a smaller frontal profile and create less drag, but all other elements remaining constant, smaller riders need to be more focused on race winning power in raw watts than in W/kg, otherwise they may wonder all season why their w/kg that show they are in an elite class aren't winning them races every week.
It’s true that a smaller rider will likely have a smaller frontal profile and therefore create less drag but all other elements remaining consistent, smaller riders need to be more focused on their race winning power in raw watts than in W/kg, otherwise they might be wondering all season long why their w/kg that show they are in an elite class aren’t winning them races every week!
I can hear the words as clearly today as I did on the day I found out what type of rider I was. Through the slumped body and puffing after just completing a Wingate (30 second all-out) test, Kate, the sports scientist running the test, says, “Are you sure you’re not a sprinter?” after looking at the watts from the test.
Coming from mountain biking, I’d always thought I was a climber. I could climb with the best in the country and never had a problem on longer climbs. But looking back, I always had a kick, and would crush my slow twitch training partner on the sprint into town (and still hold the KOM today!).
It turns out I’m more of a puncheur than a pure sprinter, but even after this comment, my perspective of myself within cycling had changed. I had a better understanding of where I should put my effort in races, which types of courses suit me better, and I always had confidence in winning a 2-up sprint.
Fast forward to today, and we are starting to see the science catch up, and it’s more than just racing strategy, your rider type impacts your training and recovery. And, looking back (and at the riding I do know), I can see how certain types of training are detrimental to my performance. I’d struggle to ride a lot of volume or do any type of effort around threshold. So it’s even more important to understand because you could be wasting your time by doing certain types of training.
