This is a topic with a lot of nuance and potential answers. It depends a lot on the context of the race, your fitness and abilities, and what your best cards to play on the day are.

Are you a strong rider but not the best sprinter? In this case, it makes a lot of sense to follow more attacks, and possibly make attacks, than it does to be passive in the field. You have to use tactics that will maximize your best chance to win or place better. If you are fit and have good recovery ability, initializing attacks may work well. If you are not as fit but being in a breakaway is still your best chance, then following is smarter.

If the peloton is very excited like an “angry bee’s nest”, sometimes having a bit of patience can be useful. If you are paying attention, you can feel the point when there is a collective fatigue after a long wave of back to back attacks, and at the right moment there is a collective lull in pace or aggression. This is the perfect moment to attack or follow. It’s the move directly after the crescendo.

If you are having a difficult moment in a race, the right choice might be to hide, follow, drink and eat. It is easy to imagine that once things go bad, they will only get worse but often this can change after 20-30 minutes if a rider is good at conservation. There are times to hold back. Do you have teammates to work with? Sharing the duty of covering attacks can really help distribute load and ensure your squad is represented in the breakaway

Stretching is commonly under appreciated by cyclists and it has the ability to really help both your form on the bike, but also to help reset post ride. If you’ve been holding a position for a long period of time - you’re naturally going to want to stretch out after you’ve finished.

You should also note that pro riders receive massages in order to facilitate recovery and increase circulation to the muscles, which helps the repair of damaged muscle tissue. Stretching can absolutely help in a similar way, and if you’re not getting a massage after your ride, it’s good to take the time to stretch and massage your key muscles in order to repair as quickly as possible. Stretching gently [7/10 maximum in any given position] after a ride, while focusing on slow, deep breathing can help relax the nervous system after the stress hard efforts.

So - in short, the answer to this is - it depends.

For a rider who is new to the sport, has never ridden and has a poor aerobic capacity (perhaps they’re weightlifters) any training time will show you results, as it’s putting load onto a system you don’t use.

Beyond this point though, it becomes about the content of your time versus the quantity. Six hours filled with high intensity and workload could see you continue to be competitive at local crits and races, whilst six gentle hours might just keep you on the level to ride competitively with friends.

In short - if six hours is the time available, work out what you want to achieve. Working with a coach, they’ll be able to tailor this to what you’re aiming for.

Stay fuelled - but don’t overeat. As always, there are a couple of approaches. Bonking is another word for hypoglycemia - it’s essentially when your body runs out of easily available energy sources from sugars or carbohydrates, which it can convert to sugars. This is why much of the nutritional products are sweet as they provide that quick fix.

As for body weight’s impact on your fuelling - it comes down to your goal. If you’re looking to shift some weight, maintaining a calorie deficit will lead to the biggest results - but if you’re wanting to build muscle or perform at your very best, a deficit won’t sustain your performance.

Generally speaking, if you are training really hard, it won’t work to simultaneously try to run a caloric deficit and lose weight at the same time. These are best done at different points in the season. If a rider is adding load in terms of volume and/or intensity, and also under-eating, they are burning the candle at both ends and the likely result is a compromised result, or a health challenge.

Very good question. Ultimately, it comes down to the load you put onto your system. If you’ve not got time to go on those 100 mile rides, then you need to put that stress onto your body in shorter periods. Riding at higher intensity in shorter periods at around 8-20 minutes will provide targeting that will work well during those longer races.

If you want to go uphill quicker in summer, there are a good number of workouts that you can implement now. Primarily, and as a starting point, you’d be well served to start incorporating more hill climbs into your rides.

Training for longer sustained climbs, it’s a good idea to perhaps try some longer time trial style rides - efforts of around 10-30 minutes at tempo where you’re pushing against your limits, but never going into the red. This overall will help you get faster on climbs, but to beat your friends, perhaps focus more on 5 minute fatigued efforts - as it’s during these shorter attacks that you’ll really get gaps.

Also ensure that your core conditioning is on target. Climbing means increased torque demand on the legs and lower back, and without the required core conditioning, the rider will hit a performance ceiling. The weakest link in the chain will limit the rider.

This is a tough one. Providing that you’ve got a dinner at the other end of your indoor session, keeping things light is perhaps the way to go. You’ll certainly need to hydrate, and it might be worth using a mix with carbohydrate in order to ensure that you’re replacing fluids you lose when riding indoors.

Consider your meal or snack timing; you want enough time before your indoor session to allow some digestion to happen before the intensity ramps up. If you eat lunch at noon and ride at 5, this is most likely too much time and blood sugar may be low for the workout. One option is to have a light snack about 90 min before your ride, which is easy on your stomach and gives you energy for a productive session. This probably means a bit of complex carbs with just a touch of fat and protein. Examples are a bit of yogurt with banana and granola, or a small sandwich with meat and cheese or avocado. It depends on what foods you like and what foods give you good energy. Note that sometimes the foods we like [example: donuts] don’t always give us good energy [stomach ache, sugar crash].

Core muscles, specifically exercises that target the Inner Unit of core: transversus abdominis, multifidus, the pelvic floor and the diaphragm are frequently undertrained in cyclists. Most riders have hip flexors that are quite strong, but the range of motion is limited. Most riders would benefit from additional mobility in the hips, rather than additional strength. But, every individual is different.

Exercises such as side steps with a band [AKA “Monster Walks”] are good to get the athlete moving in the frontal plane [cycling is nearly 100% sagittal plane movement]. Movements with rotation of the spine are also a good compliment to cycling. Most cyclists tend to have shoulders that are rolled forward from the cycling position, so exercises that open the chest and extend the spine [like a cobra] can be very beneficial.

The best scenario is to hire a knowledgeable and experience local trainer to do an assessment on your body and help write a corrective exercise program. Nothing beats an experienced eye.

Wash the bike, wash yourself, stretch, eat, rest. It’s pretty simple - and while at races, pros won’t be caught washing their bikes and will slip off to get a leg massage - on their average training ride, they follow a schedule that’s not dissimilar to anyone else.

Broadly, there are some touch points from a training perspective that you should hit - and among them, you definitely need to refuel [preferably with real food], rehydrate, you need to stretch out, and you need to recover. The order in which you do those things will be up to you - and we’d always recommend you grab a shower, because, ew.

The single most important recovery tool we have is sleep. When you are training really hard, sleep more.

Funnily enough, plateau in French is also the word for a chainring, and if you’re struggling to improve, there is a world in which gearing is a factor. If your capacity is improving but your times are not, it could be due to the torque you’re pushing.

Working on short burst high cadence and high torque exercises can put load onto your explosive and aerobic systems, and over time, this can help you to push through those times.

It also depends on what type of training have you been doing to try and improve your time. The body won’t respond with endless improvement to the same stimulus. If you are riding a lot of long threshold efforts in training, it may be time to change to some over/under style efforts, or some shorter, more intense intervals of 3-6 minutes which will “raise the ceiling”.

Visualization and self-reflection. Sometimes, the anxiety you’re feeling can simply be reframed as excitement - you’re not anxious about the race, you’re eager to get racing. That can also be within reason though. Sometimes we’re anxious as we’re invested into achieving a result, and then that comes down to not knowing if we’re capable of it.

In the latter scenario, why not reflect on what it might take to win, how that might play out in the race - how you would come around the outside or attack on the climb and drop the field to take the win? The brain is made of neurons that make connections, and the unknown aspect of racing is what causes this anxiety - by forging those connections, either through visualization or by racing more, you can overcome.

It also may be helpful to consider the bigger picture of the race. Imagine yourself 10 or 30 years from now, wiser, with more life experience. Look back on your racing period from this perspective and see what happens if you win, if you perform poorly, if you finish mid pack. What do you learn? Does this race placing effect your life in 10 year? How? Zooming out can help us see where we are in our journey, and help us understand the lessons that we can gain from being in sport. Most of all, zooming out can help us understand that everything that unfolds in our lives is exactly as it should be.

By definition, a deficit isn’t sustainable. It’s something you continue until you reach an equilibrium. Continue a deficit forever and you’ll starve. In terms of times of year, there’s never an easy time particularly.

Most pros will naturally be looking to shift weight in the early part of the year, ready for early season stage races, because until it warms up, a little extra blubber can keep you riding through the winter.

Generally speaking, if you are training really hard, it won’t work to simultaneously try to run a caloric deficit and loose weight at the same time. These are best done at different points in the season. If a rider is adding load in terms of volume and/or intensity, and also under eating, they are burning the candle at both ends and the likely result is a compromised result, or a health challenge.

Weight loss that occurs as a result of hard training is a side effect of the training, not a goal in most cases - which is why nutrition is so important!

Anything that’s polarized combines the extremes of the spectrum, without accounting for the part in the middle. In the realm of training, it comes down to high intensity blocks (think shorter, more explosive training or maximal efforts of less than about 15 min in duration) and lower intensity, longer slower rides that essentially build your base. This means that rather than going out and sitting at an endurance tempo for a 70km loop, you might up your hours and go for a slower ride, go further and bring down the intensity and later in the week do an intense hour long session.

Polarized training can absolutely work, and the basis of it is that it changes your default to spending more time on the bike, meaning that your body’s ability to recover is improved through sheer practice. That said, a polarized program will be more effective for athletes who have time in their lives to ride with more volume. If you are time crunched, riding a low intensity may not be enough load to get the training stimulus needed for improvement. A polarized program requires long duration at low intensity, contrasted by shorter, high intensity efforts.

Your capacity to go faster is aided by the fact that your maximum intensity efforts continue to push at the limits of your capacity.