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Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast - Presented by TrainerRoad

WHICH CONTINENT HAS THE FASTEST CYCLISTS? | Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast 589

Ask a Cycling Coach Podcast - Presented by TrainerRoad

TrainerRoad

Sports

4.94.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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// TOPICS COVERED

(00:00:00) Which Continent Has the Fastest Cyclists?

  (00:02:52) Power-to-Weight: Europe Sets the Pace

  (00:05:16) Raw Watts: 20-Min, 5-Min & Sprint Power

  (00:08:25) Body Weight Differences by Continent

  (00:09:28) How Each Continent Actually Trains

  (00:11:56) Who Trains the Most (It's Not the US)

  (00:13:57) Indoor Riding, Structure & Climbing

  (00:16:02) Who Races Most & What They Race

  (00:19:25) Awards & Wooden Spoons by Continent

  (00:21:48) Are You a Sprinter or a Diesel?

  (00:26:09) The Best Training for Your Phenotype

  (00:29:06) Strength Training vs More Bike Hours

  (00:33:30) Swap or Add Gym Time? The Real Cost

  (00:37:22) My Lost and Found & Leadville Race Plan


Which continent has the fastest cyclists in the world? Coach Jonathan Lee breaks down training data from over 85,000 TrainerRoad athletes across 150+ countries to compare every continent by FTP, watts per kilogram, 20-minute power, sprint power, body weight, weekly TSS, indoor vs. outdoor  riding, and racing habits. Europe posts the biggest engines at 2.79 W/kg, Oceania sprints hardest, Asia trains the most, Africa races the most, and South America is the most structured. Then, two listener questions get full data analyses: are you really a sprinter or a diesel (spoiler: true polarized phenotypes are rarer than you think), and does swapping bike hours for strength training make you faster? Finally, Jonathan shares his Lost and Found gravel race pacing and fueling plan as he builds toward the Leadville 100.


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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Which continent has the fastest cyclists in the world? Where do they live? What do they do?

0:04.0

And maybe what aren't they so good at, surprisingly? We're going to go through all of that today.

0:08.5

We have a massive database of cyclists that train using trainer road every day in over 150 countries around the world.

0:14.7

So we wanted to do this continental comparison to see how we compare. So you can vote on your team, whichever continent you

0:21.3

belong to, and then we can look at how you compare in different ways in terms of FTP, Power, PR's

0:27.1

weight, in terms of your training habits and lots of other fun details. We're going to go through

0:31.5

all of that today as well as answer some questions that you've submitted down below in the

0:35.2

YouTube or Spotify comments. You can do that. Now, if you're watching this, if you have any questions or comments, please drop submitted down below in the YouTube or Spotify comments. You can do that.

0:38.2

Now, if you're watching this, if you have any questions or comments, please drop them down

0:41.4

below, like this video on YouTube, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and rate this podcast

0:46.4

on Spotify.

0:47.4

That would be hugely helpful for us or on iTunes, however you found the app or the podcast.

0:52.1

But let's just jump straight into things.

0:53.6

The question that we

0:54.2

wanted to ask was this continental comparison, which one has the best cyclists? What we did is we

1:00.4

looked at, uh, we cleaned things down from all the different athletes around the world that use it.

1:05.8

And we try to get athletes to just have reliable data that we are able to then use as a comparison point from one cyclist against another.

1:13.8

That pairs things down pretty significantly, but in this case, we still had a fairly large group of over 85,000 cyclists.

1:21.0

And then these athletes, again, have clean data. It allows us to compare things. We looked at data from June of 2025 to present day, June of 2026. And we have everything. It's all like every metric is computed per rider. And then it's averaged out thereafter. So that makes it so that, you know, each rider accounts equally when we look at this. So if you're not, if you're just listening to this, I highly recommend using YouTube or Spotify because then you can actually see what we're looking at.

1:46.8

And it's going to be a very visual episode here.

1:49.2

So if we look at each continent at a glance here, this is a spider chart that shows us what each different continent is good at and maybe what they aren't so good at.

1:59.0

We are comparing North America, Europe, Oceania, Asia, South America, and Africa.

...

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