INTRODUCTION: Women cycling has grown in popularity in the last couple of years. Since the introduction of the Women`s World Tour in 2016, the quality of performances of riders and competitions has increased [1]. However, although the factors affecting women`s road cycling performance may be different from those affecting men, the number of studies carried out on this topic is still scarce. Therefore, the main purpose of this systematic review is to analyze the studies focused on factors affecting performance in women competitive road cycling. METHODS: A systematic review following PRISMA guidelines [2] was conducted, using the terms performance AND bicycle OR bike OR cyclists OR cyclists` OR cyclist AND women OR female OR womens OR woman in five different databases (Pubmed, Medline, Sportdiscus, Scopus and Google Scholar). After the duplicates were removed, titles and abstracts were screened against the inclusion criteria (i.e., primary studies, 1990-present, written in any language that could be translated into Spanish or English, and full text available). Finally, a full-text review was carried out to verify that the study participants were a minimum of five elite competitive or competitive recreational women between the ages of 15 and 50. RESULTS: A total of 1630 studies were retrieved from this search, resulting in 1065 studies after duplicates were removed. 277 studies remained after the title and abstract screening, and of these, 55 studies were finally selected after the full-text review. The selected studies were classified into 7 different factors affecting performance (i.e., physiology, nutrition, training, competition, biomechanics, psychology, and sociology) according to their main purposes. The majority of the studies focused on nutrition (24.6%), followed by physiology (31.6%) and training (22.8%). Six studies analyzed competition (10.5%), four focused on psychology (7%), and only one study focused on biomechanics (1.8%) and sociology (1.8%). CONCLUSION: Despite the recent growth of women`s competitive road cycling, currently only 55 studies have analyzed factors affecting performance. Specifically, a lack of studies focused on the biomechanics, sociology and psychology of female cyclists has been identified. Therefore, more studies focused on women`s competitive road cycling are needed to fully understand the requirements of these competitions.
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