Tadej Pogačar

Any of us who have followed road cycling for the last few years will know the name Tadej Pogačar. Since turning professional in 2019, he has won four grand tours, plus a further three podiums, seven monuments, a road world championship title, and copious other wins and accolades in cycling.

In such a short space of time, he has been heralded as the next Eddy Merckxand even lauded as the new ‘GOAT’ (greatest of all time). Given he is able to leave his rivals for dust and, on a good day, be in a complete league of his own, one wonders what training Tadej Pogačar does to achieve this obscene level of performance.

In general, most WorldTour riders spend the majority of their training time doing long-duration low-intensity training. Essentially, big hours riding at a pretty easy pace. In recent years this has been lauded as the Zone Two training movement, but it’s been around for decades. Polarised training structures (where riders spend time at low intensity and high intensity, with minimal attention on the middle section) and Pyramidal training structures (where riders spend the majority of time at low intensity, and decreasing amounts of time at higher zones to create a pyramid of volume at each intensity) are commonly used for professional endurance athletes, with both relying on a huge amount of low-intensity training at a high volume, with a smaller amount of time spent at higher intensities. The benefits that these low-intensity workouts have are many, but the key factors are an increase in mitochondria and a greater number of capillaries in the muscles.