UAE's Performance Chief Unveils Pro Cyclists' Training Secrets.

We released a video exploring how World Tour riders are training in 2025. Within it, I asked you to let us know if you'd like more content along the same lines, and judging by the comments, the answer is a resounding yes.

So we'll be working on similar content over the next few months. But in the meantime, we thought we'd release a longer, less edited version of the interview of Jeroen Swart.

Jeroen is head of performance at UAE Team Emirates, home of course to Tadej Pogačar. He spoke very eloquently and openly about a range of topics surrounding training in the modern era. So, enough from me — over to.

Give us a very quick introduction, and also tell us how long you've been in top level cycling for.

Oh, that's going back quite some time. I raced professionally as a mountain biker from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2003. That was after I studied medicine, and I'd gotten to the point where I had to give it a go.

When I finished that, I knew I wasn't going to be top 20 in the world and make a career out of it. So I came back to South Africa and started a PhD in exercise physiology.

At that same time, I started to work with athletes in our laboratory at the Sport Science Institute in Newlands, Cape Town, where I am now. And over time, that just grew and grew.

There were seminal moments in that. In 2006 I worked quite closely with Yan, and we managed to fix the problems that he had with his knee, and address many of his training issues.

He ended up losing quite a lot of weight, and then managed to get back to a level where he won the final time trial in the Giro d'Italia. And then the rest is history. But it was a moment in terms of moving into World Tour cycling.

From there I subsequently worked with John-Lee Augustyn, who was at the time on Team Sky. And then with Chris Froome — I did the physiological testing on Chris in 2015, which was quite widely publicized.

And then midway through 2018 I started working with UAE Emirates. And, well, the rest is history. It's been a great six and a half years since I started working with them.

We've had a lot of success in the most recent years, but already from 2020 things have obviously gone really well, with winning the Tour of France. So that's the very brief 20-year history of my participation in World Tour cycling.

You've got a lot of experience, so you're the perfect person to answer the questions that I've got, which are around how World Tour riders are training in 2025.

I think if you're a younger person watching this, 2006 sounds like a very long time ago, but for us it doesn't sound quite as long ago. And I think both of us at the time probably thought that the training world was already quite scientific in its approach.

So, as a first very broad question: what would you say are the biggest changes in the way that riders are training now versus, let's say, 15, 20 years ago?

It's been an evolution. If you compared it now to say 2005, 2006, they're not even comparable. Back then, Yan is a great example. Yan used to take at least two months off the bike following the end of the season, losing all of the training adaptations that he acquired during the course of the season.

We now know that doing that pretty much set you back to the beginning. In his case, he'd eat a lot of cake and probably a few beers, and gain approximately 10 kilos compared to his Tour de France winning weight.

Then he'd spend the first three months of the year trying to lose the weight, which involved six, seven hours of cycling at low intensities. And then riders would go to the races and race themselves into shape.

So they didn't really do the kinds of quality training that allowed them to arrive at a race ready to perform. They would go and see how they managed in the peloton — some would get dropped, some would pull out.

Over a period of two months of racing, they would progressively improve their form towards their goal, and then they'd be ready to compete for that particular goal.

Steadily over the last 15 years, but particularly the last five years, training science has drastically changed. There have also been some pendulum swings. In the late 2000s we had this paradigm of polarized training, where they presented various research studies.

Quite a few people, including myself, moved to promoting the polar opposites in training — in other words, doing very low intensity training and then doing high-intensity interval training.

That's now swung back to where we understand that a hierarchical sort of training intensity distribution is seemingly the most optimal for the kinds of racing that happens in the World Tour.

That's where you do the majority of your training at a low intensity, where you would comfortably have a conversation. A good portion, but less, at an uncomfortable intensity, but not going all out. And then the cherry on the top is the last little part of the training, which is the very high intensity interval training that athletes are doing now.

So that's gone swinging one way, then coming back and self-correcting, and that's where we are now. But then all the other different aspects of training have dramatically changed — not just the prescription of training, but everything that goes in and around training.

One of the big things that I implemented when I joined the team in mid 2018, and from the start of the 2019 season, is training load monitoring. Cycling is notorious for athletes doing, in the past back in the 2000s, 40,000 km a year. They'd accumulate these massive training loads, and to be honest, probably three quarters of the riders were completely overcooked going to most of the races.

So by implementing various methods of training load monitoring — and that's become very advanced. We use everything from heart rate variability through to ultrasound-guided assessment of muscle glycogen content. TrainingPeaks is sort of the standard in terms of external load monitoring, and various other aspects, and we use a whole conglomerate of different tests to assess that.

That's been a huge factor. Riders now are training a fraction of what they did back in the 2000s, but the training they're doing is much more specific. I think that's really the key — specificity. Instead of just riding around collecting miles, they're doing specific work.

Some of the fundamentals of that include functional strength work, which was quite contentious even three or four years ago. We used to have quite a lot of social media discussion, and there were some people who were quite overt in not supporting functional strength training, because there wasn't research to back it.

What we often see in professional sports and high level sports is that being at the coalface gives you a lot of insight that is later — maybe 10 years later, even 15, 20 years later — finally validated by science. And now in the last two years we've suddenly seen a plethora of articles published that support that. So functional strength work is a big one.

We're all familiar with Iñigo's Zone 2 concept, and that's something that we use extensively with our riders. I've seen recent debates about people saying that our riders are not sociable anymore because they're doing all their riding at that intensity. The reality is they're only doing a couple of hours a week at that intensity — maybe six or seven hours a week. The rest of the time they are still doing low intensity training, so there's still lots of time for socializing.

But a bigger percentage of the training is now very much focused on this Zone 2, or what I call metabolic training, which is aimed at really stimulating the metabolic processes that are involved when you're exercising at a high intensity, without inducing the kinds of fatigue that would make it impossible to continue training the rest of the week.

So we're really pushing the boundaries of what's sustainable in terms of intensity, and maximizing the stimulus on the body to create more mitochondria and mitochondrial enzymes and all the processes that are involved in generating energy.

It also simulates a lot of the intensities that the riders encounter when they're racing in the peloton these days, because that's also changed. The demands of training have also been justified by the kinds of racing that's happening. So it's almost a circular set of events: the riders are arriving at races in much better shape, and the racing has become far more intense.

You regularly hear about it — the intensity of the racing from the word go just doesn't let up. So the Zone 2 training gives them a very good foundation for that. And then there's also the traditional high-intensity training.

That's something that was neglected a lot in the past — those really high quality intervals that riders just used races to simulate and try to get into shape. Now they're done formally. We want to hit specific targets, we want to stimulate those different adaptations, so that when the riders arrive, they arrive at the race ready to perform.

So it's a vast number of different things that have been implemented, but those are just scratching the surface of some of them.

Quite a lot of responses to what you've said — really interesting. I mean, I'm fascinated, or always was fascinated, by training, and still am even though I'm not doing it as much anymore.

First, on the weight training front, that's an argument that's been going on for a long, long time. I remember in the winter of 2008 doing a whole offseason where I'd do at least two sessions in the gym per week, if not three, and I probably had my best spring in 2009.

But rather than put two and two together and say, well, I felt strong, could that in part be down to the weight training, I went onto some kind of wattage or Google Groups forum and read someone's argument that anybody can put out the same power as a Tour de France winning cyclist, or outdo it — they just can only do it for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, instead of 45 minutes.

Which made a lot of sense to me. It's like, I'm not lacking the power and strength as it were, I'm lacking the aerobic engine to be able to continue that on for long enough. And so I stopped it.

The other interesting thing that you were just talking about was the ability to monitor daily workload, and weekly and monthly. Because when I first used TrainingPeaks, they didn't have the graphs for ATL and CTL and TSB and everything else.

But I remember at the time Andy Coggan had already come up with the algorithms to create those numbers, and a guy called Bob Tobin, who I'm sure you're familiar with, had created a spreadsheet which he shared with me, which allowed me to plug in all those numbers.

It made sure that over the offseason and the preparation period, each week I wasn't going up by more than seven to 10 points. Which initially felt very easy — you felt like you weren't training hard enough — but it allowed me to train week after week without having the traditional three weeks on, one week off, because I was just very steadily improving things as I went along.

In that period I would say that I made huge improvements. I'd been a full-time cyclist for eight years or so, but over two or three winters I kind of bridged the gap towards people far more talented than I was.

Then when I finally became teammates with a couple of those very talented riders, I realized that as long as they were doing about 20 hours of any type of riding per week, I was never going to be quite as good as they were, however scientific my training was.

Do you feel like that level of monitoring has gone up a level since I was doing it in 2008, 2009, in terms of being able to really look at what the workload was on a particular day, and then build up the overall critical training load to the point where a race day can be easier than the average training day of a rider?

Yeah, absolutely. The technology that goes into those kinds of monitoring techniques has improved substantially in the last 10 years. So the concept that you're talking about, that TrainingPeaks incorporated, which is acute and chronic training load and the training stress balance — that's something that first came around in the 50s.

Hans Selye was a researcher in the 50s who came up with this, and not just for sport but for life in general — about this stress adaptation phenomenon, where you stress the body, you have a reduction in performance because you've got some damage to various different cells and structures, and then you adapt and then you improve.

He spoke about this model of having the optimal stress and the optimal recovery period, and then having the best adaptation rate. And that's really what that tries to do. But that's what we call external load monitoring, so it's telling us what the stress is on the human body from a purely power and work perspective.

But everybody's an individual, and so you need to understand the internal load, which is in other words how the body responds to that, to optimize that for the person. And that's where a lot of the research has happened.

So one of those variables is, for instance, heart rate variability. Resting heart rate and heart rate variability tell us how well the body's coping in terms of the stresses imposed on it.

In fact, the research shows that the single most effective mechanism to assess how a person is responding to their training load is to ask them. Because you've got a supercomputer sitting over here that processes billions of different things on a minute by minute basis. So simply asking an athlete how are you feeling and how tired are you is the most predictive of TSB.

We've got research that we're publishing in the next two, three months that actually incorporated three years' worth of data to look at that. And so self-reported wellness from the rider is very important. We monitor sleep metrics and a host of other factors.

So when you put all of these together, you don't have one single variable that is the gold standard that tells you what's happening. You have to look at the overall picture, and therein lies the art and the science of coaching.

Because you can't simply look at a little light that flashes red, green or yellow. You've got to actually have a look at everything, then make an informed decision about how to go forward.

So that's one of the things that we do. We are getting a lot of help now from AI. We have quite an advanced AI functionality already in a system that we've actually been building for the last three years, which incorporates every single bit of data that comes in — from the Ultrahuman rings that our athletes wear, from TrainingPeaks, directly from the Wahoo units into the system, self-reported wellness, and so on.

We use that to get further insight. So we can ask the AI, athlete A is aiming to do a flat classic, tell us which training load — so CTL as an example — was associated with their best two-minute performance during their career. And the AI will analyze the last five years of data and say he should be starting the race with a CTL of 115 versus 130 if he was doing a grand tour.

So those kinds of insights are very useful, and that also helps us balance the training loads for the different athletes.

So that's the training load metrics. And you spoke about strength training and what you did. Strength training is also something that's become quite nuanced, because I think a lot of that kicked off with Nino Schurter, actually.

Nino is famous for doing these incredibly hard gym sessions, and he used to post a bunch of them on social media, where he was doing all kinds of crazy stuff — balancing one leg on the top of a Swiss ball while doing single leg squats with 100 kilos on his shoulders. I mean, that's an exaggeration, but that's the kind of stuff that they were posting.

And I think a lot of cyclists, including me with some of the athletes, tried to replicate that. But the reality is, he's not a representation of the average cyclist. So many people overdid the strength training and ended up actually having counterproductive training, because overdoing the strength training tends to induce too much muscle damage and the athlete doesn't adapt to the endurance training.

So we incorporate a lot of functional activities in the strength training without overdoing the pure resistance. And that's also important from the way that the racing has changed.

So time trial positions are quite stressful on the upper body, and athletes need to have not only off the bike strengthening but also a lot of time trial specific training to adapt to those stresses and to be able to maintain the position.

And if you look at road bike positions, they've progressively evolved. If you look at the 2000s or the 1990s, riders were very upright, saddle setback was quite a lot. Newer road bikes and road bike positions are now a lot more forward, lower in front, and that's got to do with the fact that speeds have gone up.

The average speed in the peloton has increased progressively, and that means that aerodynamics is playing a bigger and bigger role. But to sit in that position, particularly if you're going to do that in a race for four or five hours, requires a high degree of functional strength and stability to maintain that body position.

So that's really a key part of our training focus. And Victor Marina, who's our strength and conditioning coach in the team, actually implements a rider specific strength program for every rider, based on a battery of assessments that we do in December and then throughout the year, which includes strength tests, stability tests, postural tests and so on. So it becomes quite specific.

It sounds like most teams have got a full-time strength and conditioning employee on their roster at this point.

I'm going to again reverse back to a few of the things that you said. I'm sure you get sick of talking about Zone 2 — it just seems to be a buzz term that's been around for the last two or three years, ourselves included, when we interviewed Iñigo San Millán a couple of years ago, and that video did a huge number of views at the time.

I think the cynical people watching will say, well, I heard of Zone 2 many years ago. And in fact, at the start of this video I talk about how my first ever coach in the late '90s did a ramp test on a Technogym spin cycle ergometer, and then programmed a training program predominantly of Zone 2 over the winter, where I held my heart rate fairly steady. It's what we're hearing everybody talking about now, where it's not particularly uncomfortable, but it's also not comfortable at the same time.

And I was also reading an article the other day about the riders on training camps in Spain doing 40 seconds on, 20 seconds off blocks in December. But again, I went back through my own TrainingPeaks, and with Cell back in 2010, in the January that year, I did a block of 10 minutes of 40 seconds on, 20 seconds off.

So again, the cynics watching this might say, well, how much different are things than they were 15, 20 years ago, given that there's evidence there that we were already doing similar kinds of training?

Yeah, there have been periods where similar kinds of training have been done. I think the key thing is pulling it all together and knowing what to do for each rider and being very specific about it.

So Zone 2 training — in the past, in the 80s and 90s, we used to talk about tempo training. What is tempo training? It's in that range, a little bit more intense than Zone 2 training, but it was something that a lot of riders did at the time.

The difference really with the Zone 2 training is getting the intensity just right. Because if you overdo the intensity, the athlete ends up overly fatigued, they don't recover, and they end up stale and in an overreached to overtrained state. And doing too little, you're not stimulating that maximally.

So we'll do a lactate test in December, we'll set the training zone, but a lot of riders these days will even have their own lactate meter, where they'll go out on a training session and during one of those sessions they'll stop at the side of the road, test their blood lactate, report back to the coach, and then fine-tune the intensity.

Because if you look at, for instance, an athlete like Pavel Sivakov, who's actually one of my athletes who I coach personally — when we started in December he would be doing those sessions for 30, 40 minutes at 285, 290 watts, and that's evolved to the point where he's now doing 310 watts for an hour.

So that's a good 5 to 8% change that you need to dial in from a 10 to 15 day sort of interval period to get that optimal stimulus.

So although those techniques have been around, it's really about getting them so fine-tuned that you don't waste time. Because, to go back to that 50s principle of Selye, if you have too great a stimulus and you end up inducing quite a lot of fatigue and you have insufficient recovery, you can end up on a pathway where you don't actually improve. And that's what a lot of riders did in the past.

To take that more extreme, you can have a decrement in performance when you're overtrained. So you want to try and get that stimulus and the recovery so optimized that every week you're making a step up, so that the performance progresses to the maximum that you can get out of the athlete for their chosen goal for that season. And hitting that optimal is, I think, the key thing that we're doing now, using the science and instrumentation that we've got to give the rider feedback on an almost daily basis to really get that dialed in and reach potential.

And are you fine-tuning that to a point where your riders don't really need the aforementioned rest weeks that we used to do? As in, it's a very progressive overload, but almost continually towards the first races of the season?

Yeah, we still do incorporate rest weeks. And that's because if you do five or six weeks of rigorous training, there's quite a lot of mental fatigue, and that's one of the things that's important to manage, particularly before you go into races.

And even during the course of a season, for instance, most of our athletes will do a block of racing of two or three months, and they'll actually take a 10-day period of recovery before building up to another set of goals later in the season.

That's not only been used by the team for quite a few years, but in fact the research that I did in conjunction with James Spragg, who's now at Tudor, and Peter Leo, who's at Jumbo, we looked at how training optimizes durability — which is the concept that's been spoken about a lot, in terms of how well you can perform late in races.

One of the key features that determined durability in the second half of the season was incorporating a period of Zone 1 training. So very low intensity training and volume in the middle of the season, which then restimulated durability.

So there are defined rest periods. And Zone 1 training is really easy — we're talking about just riding your bike, being able to have a conversation, and doing a few hours. So mentally that refreshes the rider, but physically it also has important aspects that improve durability.

And then even within those periods of racing and training, we incorporate a rest week from time to time, to just allow the body to recover. It prevents injuries from occurring, illness, because there is a progressive suppression of immunity that happens with prolonged training periods.

So you do need to still incorporate these rests. It's not, where in the past you may have had three weeks on, one week off — we're now talking probably five or six weeks of training and then a week of far easier training and recovery. So they spread out further.

That's really interesting. Yeah, I had sort of very big gains myself from doing a longer block before a bit of recovery.

I wanted to zoom in on the offseason that you briefly talked about, with Yan and other riders from his time, that could extend for eight weeks, a couple of months back in the day. How much has that reduced down to now? And what are riders doing in their few weeks off the bike at the end of the season? Are they just completely putting it to one side, and all exercise to one side, or how does that look now compared to back in the day?

Yeah, so these days the offseason is only about three or four weeks in duration. The season ends late — typically we have a team get-together in October, and after that training kicks off. So there's not as much time spent off the bike.

How they approach that is also different. They're generally, first of all, a lot more focused in terms of not losing their focus on how they eat. So there is obviously a reduction in how strict they are with their eating, and you can have a few slices of cake and indulge a little bit, but they try not to gain more than say two or three kilos in that offseason period.

And then in terms of exercise, most of them will take a week or so where they don't touch the bike or do anything. But then the other weeks we start to introduce other forms of training, because we know that spending too much time doing nothing reverses all those gains that we've made in the season.

Instead of having stepwise improvement from one season to the next, you end up having the same processes playing out. So we want to maintain those, but getting them off the bike and doing other things is important for the mental recovery.

So it involves hiking. If they're in an area with lots of snow, ski mountaineering or some cross country skiing. Ski mo is a great activity — it gets them in the outdoors, it's great to be out in nature without thinking about doing a similar kind of activity to cycling, which it is. Mountain biking, those kinds of activities.

And then eventually, in the second half of the rest period, getting back in the gym, to make sure that they do a little bit of strength work before they kick off with the on-bike training. So that's a loose summary of what we do.

It sounds like the idea now — correct me if I'm wrong — is to ensure that the riders resume training 100% fresh mentally, but at a slightly higher base level of fitness than the previous year, that they started training after the offseason.

Yeah, so some systems sort of decondition acutely. So if you spend two weeks of reduced training in the offseason, blood volume contracts up to 20%, and that's rapidly reversible. But what you want to maintain is those really key physiological adaptations, particularly mitochondrial mass and activity, and that starts to get reversed if you have three or four weeks of reduced activity or longer.

And in fact, if we look at long-term athlete development, that's really where the Zone 2 work changes things. Because if you take an 18-year-old youngster who's, for instance, been on the track as a pursuiter, they have super high VO2 max values. You have guys who have VO2 maxes in the high 80s, low 90s.

Why do they not come off the track and immediately win the Tour de France? Because VO2 max isn't really the determinant of whether you win the Tour de France or any other World Tour race. Metabolic efficiency is one of the key factors, and that's what drives durability.

So how you utilize your fuel sources, and particularly whether you can access fat as a fuel, and then if you can't access fat as a fuel, whether you can use carbohydrate the most efficient way possible.

If you take an athlete from 18 through to say 24, and you look at their VO2 max, their VO2 max at 24 is often lower or the same as it was when they were 18. But what changes dramatically is their lactate profile, and that shifts dramatically to the right and changes its shape, from sort of a steep curve to a flat curve with a sharp ramp at the edge.

And that really is a reflection of their ability to keep using carbohydrates in an oxidative way — burning them in the presence of oxygen to form ATP and produce carbon dioxide, in other words burning them in the mitochondria. And that's the thing that develops fundamentally with the Zone 2 training.

So Zone 2 training is important to develop the durability of an athlete. So an athlete going from junior to under 23 to World Tour level has to evolve to be able to do well in, for instance, the classics. If we look at Liège–Bastogne–Liège, younger riders are going to get dropped in the last 50 kilometers because they don't have that durability.

And that was understood already 30 years ago, we just didn't understand why it happened. So that's why the UCI introduced an under 23 category, and why riders had to work their way up to that level.

Now riders are getting that durability at an earlier and earlier age. We're seeing 19, 20 year olds capable of podiums at grand tours, because they're already doing this kind of training from age 16 onwards. So when they arrive at the World Tour level, they've already got many of these adaptations from doing Zone 2 training and the right kinds of training, because knowledge is now so much more freely available, equipment and expertise is so much more readily available.

So athletes are developing earlier and earlier. So we've got to look at 15 year olds now to see whether or not they're going to be the next Tadej Pogačar, whereas five, 10 years ago we were looking at 18, 19 year olds.

So that's pushing the envelope now in terms of being able to identify talent while they're still developing, because you never know if they're an early developer or a late developer. So yeah, some interesting aspects relating to that.

Yeah, that has been an interesting development. Certainly listening to Geraint Thomas's podcast, it sounds like a few of the young recruits that come through the door are teaching him what to wear and what wheels to use, etc, rather than the other way around.

I was going to ask you about training camps as well. I spoke to Jack Haig for this video, who was very interesting, and he said one of the main differences from when he started as a pro 10 years ago to now is the sheer number of weeks spent away, the majority of which are at altitude.

So he's up in a training camp in Tenerife for altitude in January, and says that he probably spent about three weeks at a training camp when he first turned pro with the team, and now it's up to 12, maybe 13 weeks throughout the year, the majority of which is at altitude.

Is that the case in terms of what you've seen? And if so, how much of the benefits of that are the altitude and the training, and how much of it is that the team is constantly monitoring riders because they're at the camp rather than doing it remotely through being at home?

Yeah, first of all, we don't do nearly as much training at altitude or training camps as Jack is pointing out. We have our grand tour riders do about six weeks of training camps per year if we exclude December.

So in December we have a training camp, but that camp is largely focused on meetings and biomechanics and medicals and so forth, so it's not a true training camp. But if you look at the training camps that happen in the season, we max out at about six weeks. So far less.

But those training camps are important, because we know that altitude does improve hemoglobin mass — we know that from research and from our own data — and that directly relates to your performance at sea level. So altitude training is a key factor that's responsible for optimizing performance for grand tours.

And so what's the optimal period at altitude? It's about three weeks. You can do shorter, two weeks, you get about two-thirds to three-quarters of the adaptation, and then the final week you get a little bit more.

We know that if you do have an exposure to altitude earlier on in the season, that you get a more rapid and significant response to the second training camp. So therefore two training camps is generally what happens.

And then, as you point out, it's not just the altitude, it's being at a training camp that's also key. It allows the coaches to directly monitor the athlete. A typical test is the breakfast room check — when the rider walks into the breakfast room, you can tell a lot by their body language, and back them off when they're doing too much.

But we also do a lot of monitoring, including, for instance, every four days at a training camp we do blood tests to look at how well they're responding to the training, in terms of monitoring for signs of overtraining. And we then calibrate the training loads for riders that are showing signs that they're decompensating. So that's also important.

Then there's just the whole aspect of the singular focus that you have at a training camp. You don't have all the distractions that you do in your home environment. Athletes are married, many with kids, and it's super important to be with your kids, but if you want to win the Tour de France you also need to focus, and family life does tend to add additional stimuli and detract from the singular focus of training and recovering.

So just being in a camp has its benefits, whether it's at altitude or not. So there's multiple factors that are responsible for the benefits of those training camps. But too much of it is also a problem.

So if you spend too much time at training camps, there's an element of mental fatigue. Athletes do want to see their families, they don't want to be away from their families. They're already racing around the season all over the world, they don't spend as much time at home as they should, and so you don't want to keep them away from their families for too long. And then the mental fatigue of having that constant training is also an aspect that you can easily overload.

So once again, titrating things to find the optimal is key.

There's a lot more specificity when it comes to training now. Does that mean that overall hours have reduced, and that the longest ride duration is reduced? I know you can't go into too many specifics, but when you come to a January training camp, pre-season, what would be a large number of hours to do in a whole week, and what would the longest ride look like in terms of duration?

Yeah, so definitely a lot shorter and lower total duration than it was 20 years ago. A big week of training would now be in the low 30s. So 30, 34 hours of training would be considered one of the biggest weeks of the year.

There is still scope for a long easy ride, so there are sessions where the athletes will do a five or even a six-hour ride. That's sort of reaching the highest durations for any given training session, and that's done at a really low intensity. There are a good couple of those training rides in the early part of the season, and then again, as I said, in the middle of the season when they take a break.

And from there it becomes progressively less and less. So in the two, three week period leading up to a stage race, the volume is going to be ranging from 15 to 25 hours in a week. Which is far less than it was in the past, but very specific stuff, and quite difficult to do because of the intensities, but significantly lower than 10, 15 years ago.

Also, we've seen videos recently of Sepp Kuss doing very low cadence work on a climb, and he's not the only one. Is that something that you as a team subscribe to, and if so, what's the reasoning behind that?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is the functional strength work. The gym part is one part of it, but actual on-the-bike functional strength work is a very key determinant of durability, which is the concept we were talking about earlier.

If you're four hours into a race and you're on the third col and you're climbing for 45 minutes at a time, one of the things that happens is that you get muscular fatigue, in terms of the inability to produce the torque to keep turning the crank over.

And that's also important when you get to steeper climbs. So when you get up to gradients of 12 or 13 or 14%, your ability to turn the crank over comfortably is something that is determined by your ability to produce torque.

And we can measure that quite readily. When we just throw the data into an analysis tool, we talk about power duration — so your power duration curve is your curve of what you can do maximally for different durations, from five seconds through to five hours. And you have a torque duration curve as well.

And what we've seen, for instance in athletes — and this is one of the key aspects that we have turned things around with in the last two years, particularly for Tadej for instance, and other athletes that I think this year will actually take another step up — is that when they were juniors they had intrinsically a lot of strength. You have a high VO2 max when you're 18 and you have a high functional strength.

Now you spend two, three, four years of doing a lot of volume without adding sufficient strength type of training and low cadence torque type of work, and what we could see is that their functional strength was dropping every season. So your mean maximal torque, newton meters per kilogram body mass for a particular period of time, was getting lower and lower.

And reversing that, by doing functional strength training, has in many riders' cases reversed their downward trend in performance. So it's a very key part of what we do.

And as I said, it was pooh-poohed 10 years ago because there wasn't enough research, but now suddenly there's ever more emerging research that shows that it's not only important from a purely performance perspective — so a five minute VO2 max kind of effort, which was published two months ago — to durability, which we see if we look at riders going from under 19 to under 23 to World Tour.

There's a tight correlation between their functional strength in newton meters per kilogram for a particular period of time and their durability, in other words the reduction in power output that happens after 4,000 kJ of energy expenditure, for instance. So a very important factor, and something to specifically monitor by looking at the data and intervening when we see that those values are suboptimal.

That's so interesting. I missed that study — I'm going to get you after this call to send over a link, if that's all right.

I've got one final question, again for the cynical people watching this. How confident can you be that the training you're doing for your riders in 2025 is working?

And that sounds like a ridiculous question given the results that you as a team have got over the last couple of seasons, but what I mean by that is that it's obvious that you as a team also have an abundance of extremely talented individuals in your roster at this point. So how confident can you be that what you're doing right now is the best thing for them, as opposed to, well, if we gave Tadej Pogačar a low carb diet for the next three weeks, the likelihood is he'd still win a hell of a lot of big bike races this year.

We can be very confident. If you look at the team in 2018 and 2019 — in 2019 we had pretty much exactly the same roster that we had in 2018. Tadej was on the team, and he obviously finished third at the Vuelta. But if we look at the number of wins, we more than doubled the number of wins, and we went from 16th, I think, in the UCI rankings to fourth in one year.

And that was the start of implementing incrementally greater focus on all of these different aspects. So if you look at the talent in the team on a year-to-year basis, it hasn't changed as dramatically as the performance has. And that's really just the stepwise introduction of all these different concepts.

Many of them were around in 2018, 2019, but it's very difficult coming into an environment — not only because you have existing staff who have a lot of traditions and can be resistant to change — to suddenly dump everything on everybody at the same time. So there has been this steady progression and introduction of steadily more of these different concepts, and also doing them better.

One we haven't even touched on is nutrition, and that's something that's dramatically changed in the last five years. Even when I started in 2018 with the team, the year before they were really restricting the amount of carbohydrates that they were taking in. So we immediately went to 60 to 80 grams an hour in races. Now the riders are doing 120 grams per hour in races, and that's fueled a lot of the improvements in the performance.

So we see direct correlations between the performance and what we're doing and how they've changed. Tadej losing the Tour, and then implementing three key changes, and then seeing the dramatic change in his performance — that's from one season to the next. I think if you look at 2023 versus 2024, it's black and white.

And so there's a lot of satisfaction from doing that, from putting that in place and then watching it play out. And that doesn't have to do with the budget and the talent. If you even look three, four years ago, there were teams with more talent and bigger budgets. We're still not the biggest budget in the sport, we're probably third or so.

I think it's important obviously to pick up the right talent, and we've been very good at that — Matxín is phenomenal at spotting talent and then recruiting that talent. It's not one thing, it's a conglomeration of all of these different aspects being brought together, that results ultimately in becoming the number one team in the world. But we can definitely see how each component that we've added has made a difference.

So, J, I could literally talk to you the entire day. I'm incredibly

fascinated by the modern updates in the science behind training. But thank you so much for taking the time that you have to speak to us, much appreciated.

You're most welcome. Yeah, let's do it again sometime. I'd happily do it. There's so many different areas to touch on. We've done a very broad aspect today, but we can delve down into the nitty-gritty with pleasure when it comes to future chats.

If you're watching through to the end here, I'm going to assume you found that chat as informative and entertaining as I did. My thanks go to Jeroen for his time. If you've got anything that you'd like me to ask him next time I interview him, please let me know in the comments section down below. Thanks for watching, see you soon.