How Ageing Affects Your Cycling Performance

Listen to the episode.

Key takeaways.

• Population averages describe groups. They cannot predict how many watts an individual cyclist will lose each birthday.
• Training history matters. Someone starting later can improve from their own baseline even as age affects their longer-term potential.
• Judge recovery through your response to training and the rest of your life. A birthday alone does not tell you how many hard sessions to schedule.

What changes in endurance performance with age?

The Tanaka and Seals review discussed in the original episode identifies declining maximal oxygen uptake as a major contributor to age-related changes in endurance performance. It also considers lactate threshold, exercise economy and changes in training.

Those group-level observations are useful context, but they are not a personal countdown. Reduced training, injury, motivation and time available can accompany ageing. It is difficult to separate all of those influences when comparing riders of different ages.

Can you still get faster as an older cyclist?

Improvement relative to your current level is different from retaining the best performance of your life. The original discussion separates long-term riders trying to preserve an earlier peak from riders building fitness after taking up cycling later.

Set a benchmark that reflects what you want to do now: completing a ride comfortably, producing more power over a relevant duration, or finishing a familiar course with better control. Keep equipment and testing conditions consistent enough that a comparison means something.

What should you change in training?

Start with the pattern you can sustain. The episode discusses structured training, recovery, nutrition, strength and mobility. The useful question is which part of your current routine is limiting consistency—not whether you can copy someone else’s week.

Keep a record of sleep, perceived effort and how you respond to demanding sessions. Use that alongside performance to adjust the spacing and amount of work. The historical audio includes age-based session counts and broad claims about hormones; these are not republished here as current recommendations.

Age alone is not a reason to abandon either endurance riding or purposeful intensity. Equally, being motivated does not make every hard session productive. A plan should respond to your training history, goals and recovery rather than prescribe the same week to everyone in an age bracket.