One area not covered is are you allowing yourself rest days. If you are pushing yourself for speed, then rest days are very important to allow your muscles to recover. Recovery rides can be an important method for muscle recovery too.

One common training setup is to ride one day hard, one day easy and then take a day off. If you love to ride this plan can be hard to follow, but gives you an idea on how important rest days are.

Recovery rides are shorte and slower high cadence rides to get the blood flowing to the muscles for faster recovery and to reduce Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS).