In cycling, there's a common belief: longer rides equal better training. But at CINCH, we've seen something different.
While long endurance days have their place, shorter, more focused rides can actually create faster progress for most athletes: physically, mentally, and metabolically.
This is especially important to discuss now during the "base" or foundation season for cycling training. I've made this mistake countless times myself, and I want to share what I've learned.
Here's why shorter rides deserve a permanent spot in your training plan.
The World Tour Dream That Proved It
When I say we "see it" differently, I mean we've actually seen shorter rides help riders improve faster.
Early in my coaching career, I worked with a Cat 2 rider who wasn't getting results in races. When I looked at their physical potential, I saw someone capable of reaching the World Tour level. The challenge? They were in full-time college, working a job, and living in Colorado where winter weather wasn't ideal for training. We had a 1.5-hour window during weekdays and 3-5 hours on weekends.
This is exactly where I learned shorter workouts can be ideal if created properly.
I had other clients at the pro level who had entire days to train without external stresses like school or work. They loved putting in long hours with friends and found confidence in stacking big rides.
What I found next was wild: The rider training with 1.5-2 hour rides during the week was progressing faster than riders doing 3-5 hour rides during the week.
Remember, I was fresh out of pro cycling and honestly loved to overdo it in training. This was a revelation.
Over time, I realized shorter rides were like a cheat code to amplified progression. We could make sessions hyper-focused on the key efforts needed to build zones and the timing and combinations needed to win races. We were raising his zones quickly while he was learning what I called "plays"—high-performance zone combinations that represent key race actions. The short rides were easier to mentally lock into and served as study sessions for learning the sport.
In contrast, the pro doing longer hours couldn't complete hard workouts consistently. They tended to overdo longer rides with "in-between" zone riding to keep up with friends' pace. They also didn't "lock in" on concepts I was teaching and had difficulty remembering the "plays" in races.
The result? My "short ride student" progressed incredibly fast, learned what I was teaching extremely well, and had the energy, both physically and mentally, to maximize his races and get results.
He made it from Cat 2 to the World Tour in two years while graduating college.
The best part, and what I'm most proud of, was that he arrived at the World Tour trained for success. He had the ability to get results there and the physical state to continue improving without breaking down. This is critical, many arrive at a high level from unsustainable training or by gaming the system, training for one race to get noticed but lacking the depth to perform at other race types.
That Playbook we created worked like a charm both to get results and to understand where we needed to improve.
This is where I learned the importance of doing more with less and wrote that concept into the CINCH methodology moving forward.
I used these same principles to train Lauren De Crescenzo to win Unbound while working a full-time job and riding 8-12 hours a week. I could go on, but the system we have works, and it works best with less.
So let's talk about how the CINCH "shorter ride" methodology can work for you.
You Can Train Harder and Smarter
It's the reps that matter, repeating the specific intervals and efforts that train each part of your cycling fitness. Just like training in the gym, there are exercises that build fitness, and you have to do targeted exercises to get important gains.
I find it wild how in cycling people somehow overlook this and follow generalized trends sold to them. "Do Zone 2." "Sweet spot intervals are the best bang for your buck." "8-minute threshold intervals are better than 4-minute intervals."
You need to do them all, and you need to do them in specific ways at specific reps. You're crazy to think one is all you need. Just like the gym and how the rest of the world trains, you need to train in calculated ways with progressive reps and watts.
Short rides allow you to bring full energy and focus to the workout to do the needed specific work.
Instead of holding back to survive a three or four-hour ride, you can go all-in for 60-90 minutes and hit every detail. Just like the gym.
When you're not pacing for survival, you can push deeper into the zones that matter, the controlled intensity that builds sport-specific fitness, technique, and power. Think threshold intervals while working on technique and changing variations of threshold, then repeating this exact variation over and over. You're teaching your body how to do it. You just can't add this level of attention when you've still got two hours left in the tank.
The result? Much higher quality work that drives real adaptation. No wasted miles. No fading focus. Just pure, purposeful training that gets you optimal stimulus.
The Zones Are Real
I have a saying within CINCH: "The Zones are Real." Each performance zone we have is trained to perform at a certain duration. It's the design of the zone and the consistency in training it that gives you endurance in that zone.
You can train a 20-minute climbing effort from a series of 4-5 minute efforts if you're training the right zone for 20-minute climbs. At the same time, you can train the zones for a 5-hour race with a series of 30-minute efforts if you're training the right zones needed for that race. It's all in the specificity.
An example: We have three Zone 2 (medium zones) that can be mixed together to cover your entire race or training ride. But you do not need to train them to the full duration of your target race or event to be able to use them in the race. By doing less training with them, you're still training the body to use them the way they need to work, but you're leaving energy in the body and creating less muscle and tendon damage for faster recovery.
We also believe durability comes from practice and repetition with your zones, not from replicating the total energy expenditure of the event you're training for. It comes from training your muscles to do the reps over and over.
You Can Dial In Fueling and Nutrition
Here's a counter-intuitive benefit of short rides: You can actually lose weight and improve your daily workout performance easier with short rides. The reason is all in nutrition management.
When your ride duration is shorter, it becomes dramatically easier to precisely calculate your calories, macros, and timing.
You can learn exactly how much to eat before, during, and after to optimize energy and recovery and align that with your weight-loss or body-composition goals. No more guessing whether you burned 1,500 or 2,500 calories on that variable-intensity four-hour ride.
Short rides make nutrition measurable and repeatable. You're no longer estimating and hoping you're gathering data and learning exactly how to fuel your performance. For athletes pursuing weight loss, this precision is transformative: you can create a sustainable caloric deficit without the ravenous hunger that often follows marathon training sessions.
You Recover Faster and Progress Exponentially
What most people don't understand is it's not the workout itself that makes the difference. It's the program design and the use of workouts together that drives the best results. I believe this is where the foundation of the art of coaching exists.
What most people also don't understand is that recovery has less to do with all the tricks off the bike and more to do with what happens on the bike. In other words, part of engineering the workout design includes stressing your body the right amount to get the desired response while leaving needed energy in reserves to recover. Then part of the engineering around program progression places workouts near each other that complement the recovery time needed in each focus area.
When this is done well, the coach can train the athlete to improve their late-race endurance as each progressive day trains the body's fuel economy and zone durability under fatigue.
Shorter rides work better for optimizing growth while allowing for daily recovery. One big reason: We're talking about getting growth. This means either the power is increased or the total time at a power is increased. This factor alone adds stress the body must react to and adapt to. If we also add fatigue from work in zones we're not training to grow in this session, we give our bodies more to recover from, which often slows growth in the targeted area and works as interference.
So many athletes overlook the importance of this and instead chase harder workouts and longer rides, focused on seeing their TSS and Strava scores go up instead of their actual performance improving. From the coaching side, I'll admit the ability to engineer such a plan requires experience and understanding the athlete very well. But I guess that's like all things in life, experience separates the best from the rest.
Shorter and more specific rides placed strategically around each other give the body the right recovery to make incremental daily gains which over time lead to new heights.
Instead of one massive effort that leaves you drained for half a week, you can stack multiple high-quality sessions throughout the week with consistent energy and enthusiasm. That consistency, showing up fresh, training with intensity, recovering fully, is where real progress happens. It's the compound interest of athletic development.
You Gain Clarity on Technique and Mindset
Just like other sports, cycling has a playbook full of different techniques and timing. I've found that shorter sessions are better for people to practice them in. Simply put, a shorter time frame creates sharper focus.
There's something about a longer ride that shifts the rider's focus more onto completion and away from the details of the workout. I think the shorter workout also allows the athlete more time to stop between efforts to review what they're going to do before each one.
Whether it's working on climbing position, practicing cornering lines, or refining pedaling technique, the shorter ride allows the mind to stay engaged, the body to stay responsive, and new movement patterns to actually stick.
In shorter rides, there's also more mental space to carve out intentional practice of mindset strategies, visualizing your race-day performance, learning to manage discomfort productively, or reinforcing the positive self-talk that carries you through hard moments. These aren't bonuses squeezed into a long ride, they're primary objectives that receive your complete mental bandwidth.
Shorter rides make these mental and technical reps deliberate, not accidental. And what you practice with intention becomes permanent.
You Can Mentally Check In Where It Counts
Shorter rides sharpen your mental engagement, a much-overlooked skill in cycling. You can practice "checking in" for each interval and give every interval, every climb, every technical cue your full attention. Then between efforts, you practice checking out, you relax, let your mind wander, feel free, and let go of the pressure and tension you felt during the effort.
That level of presence is nearly impossible on a long ride, where mental fatigue dulls focus long before your legs give out. Long rides often lend themselves to a distracted mindset more focused on navigating the route, which takes mental capacity away from focusing on training details.
On shorter rides, you can tune into the details that matter, your breathing rhythm, the technique of your pedal stroke, subtle shifts in form and make real-time adjustments that stick.
This is how you transform "riding hard" into "riding with purpose." Every pedal revolution becomes an opportunity for refinement rather than just another rotation toward collecting fatigue instead of performance.
Long Rides Still Have Their Place
For riders who enjoy long rides or are training for events with long distances, I think one long ride on the weekend is good for practicing fueling, pacing zones, and getting used to the discomfort that fatigue brings on a long ride.
I like to have riders do the long ride on the last day of the training week block and on the last day of the weekend set. This allows them to do higher-intensity work on fresher legs that are more topped up with glycogen.
The Takeaway
Short rides aren't "less." They're more focused, more intentional, and more effective at building the cyclist you want to become.
They let you train harder when it counts, think clearer throughout the effort, fuel smarter for your goals, recover faster for consistency, and build both your physical capabilities and mental control as an athlete.
This is how you do more with less and get better, faster.
