Your Strengths, Your Weaknesses, Your Plan!

How do you draw your roadmap to success? Hannah Reynolds and Josephine Perry explain how to build your personal profile and turn self-knowledge into success

- Hannah Reynolds & Josephine Perry

A roadmap to success is a well-worn but nonetheless useful analogy when setting cycling goals, implying two key questions. The relatively easy first question, ‘Where do I want to get to?’ must be followed up with, ‘How do I get there?’. And before you get started, you need to know where you are right now. What are your strengths and weaknesses, and how can you work on them? Which areas need working on, and how best to prioritise them? This is where performance profiling comes in.

In this feature, we will explain how to identify your start point, and how to use your power and performance profiles to draw your roadmap to success. Performance profiling, developed by sport psychologists, examines your goal within the context of your strengths and weaknesses to construct a focused plan, entirely tailored to you. It looks at the elements of cycling that cannot be captured by your power meter alone. That’s not to say power data isn’t vitally important. The key is combining qualitative psychological assesment and quantitative physiological data. Just remember: mind plus body equals maximum goal-setting power!

Measuring the immeasurable

Some areas of cycling performance — power, speed, heart rate — are simple to measure. In other areas, you can’t assign numbers in the same way: motivation, form, raw potential. Performance profiling takes your goal and turns it into an actionable, focused plan.

Any cyclist who works with a sports psychologist will create a performance profile. It lets you flesh out your overall goal for the year and break it down into specific actions and processes. The profile states clearly what you need to incorporate into your training to reach your full potential. It turns your dream into a tangible plan. But it only works if you’re honest with yourself: to turn a dream into reality takes hard work.