duty cycle / thermal limit

Every motor turns electricity into heat as well as motion, and that heat has to go somewhere. The duty cycle is simply the fraction of time a motor is allowed to work hard before it needs to rest and cool down — like a person who can sprint for ten seconds but can only jog for an hour. If you push past that fraction, heat builds up faster than it can escape, and the motor approaches its thermal limit: the temperature at which the wires, magnets, or insulation start to weaken or burn out.

This is why a motor usually carries two numbers, not one. The continuous rating is how hard it can run indefinitely without overheating, and the peak rating is the much bigger burst it can give for a few seconds — to lift a heavy load or jump-start a wheel — before it must back off. Engineers design robots to live mostly within the continuous number and dip into the peak only briefly, the way you save your full strength for one big push. Ignore this and you get a motor that runs hot, slows down, and eventually fails; respect it and the same motor lasts for years.