Over the last few decades the cycling world has had quite a makeover. From baggy shirts to  skintight suits, from sober training to training the gut, from Ulrich winters to personalised plates & from gray efforts to black and white training schedules. It seems like there are few performance areas cycling hasn’t charted. But what if I told you there is one area in which the cycling world still has lots to gain! I’m talking of course about improving your performance on the bike by using the power of the mind. In this article I’ll give you three tips on how you can dig deeper and boost your performance on the bike by using the brain.

Dissociate from the pain

Imagine the last time you left all your watts on a long climb that took you over an hour to conquer. Can you remember the pain in your legs, your lungs, your mind? Can you remember your body and mind screaming at you to stop? Can you remember how you coped with the pain and managed your thoughts? Did you try to find excuses to stop the pain? Did you feel like turning around or were you able to embrace it? Even though it can feel heroic, suffering is rarely a lot of fun in the moment. But what if I told you there are ways to perceive the pain as less painful!! One promising technique you can use is called a dissociative strategy. Basically what it entails is you are able to distract your attention from the pain towards something else, something irrelevant. You can be as creative as you want with this, as long as it distracts you from the pain. This could mean finding a point on the road you want to ride towards, sing yourself a song or think about a funny moment you’ve encountered lately.

Don’t let your brain trick you!

The goal of this technique is to let your unhelpful thoughts not have any impact on your effort. Because we have plenty of thoughts that can have a big influence on our persistence & performance. It is suggested that we have an average of 6.5 thoughts per minute. Helpful thoughts sometimes, but unhelpful thoughts just as well. When we are going full gas in a race or on a climb, our brain can play tricks with us. It wants us to stop because it is trying to protect us from a dangerous, perhaps life threatening situation. That is why it is implementing all these protective thoughts in your mind. Imagine the negative effect on your performance of having 6.5 protective thoughts per minute! So let me tell you the secret to using this technique. We could of course make these dissociative thoughts up while doing the effort, on the fly. The issue with this though is that we leave ourselves with a decision while our heart rate is through the roof and our thought process isn’t peaking to put it mildly. We are prone to choosing the option that requires the least amount of thinking in these situations, which will be the option we are used to. In this case: keep wallowing in our suffering.

Tip 1: The plan to dig deeper on the bike

A more effective way to use this technique is mentally prepare ourselves before doing the effort. Beforehand, let’s say a couple of hours or even a day before the effort, start thinking about different cues that could be the trigger for using this technique. Which protective thoughts might occur? When are they most likely to occur? Which dissociative technique are you going to use? What point in the distance? What song? Which moment are you planning to think about? Write this all out on a piece of paper or in your smartphone if necessary in the following statement: If .... then....So if I recognise myself questioning why I’m out here doing this effort then I’ll start singing the complete Bohemian Rhapsody to myself. Or if I catch myself thinking about the pain in my legs then I’ll divert my attention to trying to reach the next corner.

By thinking about this technique beforehand we are crafting a plan and it becomes much
easier to recognise our unhelpful thoughts in the moment and use it as cues to start
disassociating from the pain.

Practice suffering

Cycling = suffering, it is part of the deal. It is what makes this sport so attractive to watch and what makes it so epic to participate in. It is what makes the beer afterwards taste 10x as tasty and the meal 10x as fulfilling. 180 riders in a peloton, 180 interesting stories to be told afterwards. Some people love the suffering, others like it a little less, but it doesn’t matter if you like it or not, it is going to happen when you want to improve on the bike. So you’d better embrace the pain and become a better sufferer. Even though there are multiple physical methods to train suffering, in this article I want to highlight the mental strategies that you can use to become better at suffering on the bike. Because for a big part, the ability to endure the suffering happens in the mind. Our goal here in practicing suffering on the bike is to reduce our RPE or rate of perceived exertion. How can we reduce an 18/20 to a 16/20 on the pain scale by using our mind? That is what we are trying to achieve. There are a couple of ways you can mentally practice suffering on the bike and become better at it to enhance performance. To keep it simple I want to stick to two strategies.

Self-talk as a performance booster

The first one, self-talk, is a mental skill you can use to improve your performance on the bike during a long and hard effort. There are two helpful ways to use self-talk in your performance. There is positive self-talk & instructive self-talk.Positive self-talk refers to the practice of using affirmative, encouraging, and constructive inner dialogue to enhance your mindset and emotional state. It involves consciously replacing negative or critical thoughts with positive, supportive statements that can boost confidence, motivation, and overall well-being.

You can use positive self-talk to motivate yourself when you are struggling to hold on to the peloton or when you want to give up halfway up the mountain. It works as a boost for your confidence, self belief & makes you able to dig deeper on the bike. You want to use powerful phrases like ‘you can do this’ ‘this is the moment to push your boundaries’ or ‘don’t give up now’, but you could also use evidence from previous, maybe even harder efforts from the past as positive self-talk. ‘Remember when we were up against this and this mountain, we didn’t give up then, so we are going to push through today!’. ‘You’ve had way worse, you can do this’.

Tip 2: Write them down beforehand, otherwise... forget it

Writing these phrases beforehand makes it much easier to use it as a strategy when you need them. Because if you need to create them when you are suffering, you’ll be a lot less creative and there's a big chance you won’t commit to them as much as you would otherwise.

Instructive self-talk is a form of self-directed dialogue where you give yourself specific, task related instructions to guide your performance. It focuses on providing clear, actionable steps to help you execute a task effectively or improve your performance in a given situation. What can happen with cyclists who are in a big effort is they find it hard to keep their composure. They start breathing ineffectively, lose their aero advantage, their corners are not as great as they should be or are not pushing their pedals up and down effectively enough. Reminding yourself to keep focusing on the pedaling, the breathing or your corners can not only keep you from a decreased performance, but it can also keep you from having distractive unhelpful thoughts during the hard effort.

Visualise your way to the top of the mountain

Enough talks about self-talk, the second mental skill to increase your ability to suffer better on the bike by using your mind is visualisation. Visualisation is a mental technique where you create vivid and detailed images of successful outcomes or desired performances in your mind. It involves mentally rehearsing actions, scenarios, or achievements before they happen, which helps improve focus, confidence, and preparedness. Cyclists often use visualisation to mentally practice movements or anticipate challenges, enhancing their physical and mental readiness for competition.

The reason visualisation is such an incredible mental tool to use is because it allows us to gain experience in a situation without being there physically. When you learn something new or gain experience in an activity your brain creates neural pathways between your brain cells. This makes it easier and easier to perform a certain activity.

The first time you had to take a sharp corner in a cycling race for example was probably a terrifying experience. But the more you practiced this, the stronger the neural paths for ‘taking corners in a race’ became until it became second nature. Well the same thing happens in the brain when you visualise regularly.So why would this help us dig deeper on the bike you ask? Well why do you think pro cyclists do recons of important climbs that will be in the next Tour de France. Because they will be prepared.

There are endless possibilities when using visualisation. Before we do our hard effort we can visualise the pain and already choose our coping strategies with the pain. We can visualise the length of the effort and imagine when it is going to hurt the most and imagine this feeling. This way you will be better prepared and we will feel confident when the suffering happens, because you recognise it and know how to act.

We can visualise from an eagles eye perspective, seeing every corner of the climb and know how long we have to keep pushing still. This will reduce insecurity and will reinforce our determination.

Tip 3: How to use visualisation to dig deeper on the bike

Step 1: Set the Scene

• Close your eyes and picture the start of the climb. See yourself at the base, ready
  and confident. Imagine the road stretching up ahead, the cool air, and the surroundings (trees, mountains, or winding roads).

Step 2: Feel the Beginning

• Visualise yourself starting strong, pedaling smoothly. Your breathing is steady, and
  your legs feel powerful. Hear the sound of your bike and the road under your tires. Focus on your form—feeling in control.

Step 3: Visualise the Struggle

• As the gradient increases, imagine the challenge building. Your legs burn, but you embrace it. Picture yourself staying focused, telling yourself: "I can do this. One pedal stroke at a time." Break the climb into sections to keep pushing forward mentally.

Step 4: Overcome the Toughest Part

• Visualise the hardest part of the climb—steep, 9%, 10%, 11%, tiring, and long. But
  instead of backing down, see yourself shifting your focus inward. You stay calm,
  control your breathing, and feel your determination rising: "This is where I get
  stronger."

Step 5: Reach the Top

• Finally, imagine reaching the summit. Feel the relief and pride as you conquer the
  climb. The wind on your face, the view around you, and the satisfaction of pushing
  through. Embrace the feeling of success, knowing you’ve got this for tomorrow.

There are many ways to dig deeper on the bicycle by using your mind

As we’ve learned in this blog, there are lots of ways to practice digging deeper by using the mind. Now you know you can dissociate from the pain and you’ve learned the brain can trick into giving up. If we say the right things to ourselves we can boost our performance on the bike. We can give ourselves instructions or just motivate ourselves while suffering on the bike. Also we’ve learned visualisation is an incredible mental skill for cyclists, because it allows you to mentally prepare and rehearse most any scenario without having to leave your bedroom!

Would you like to know more about mental skills and how to become a better cyclist through mental training? Check out my website www.mindmyride.nl for more info