Tadej Pogačar's training: What sessions does the three-time Tour de France champion do?

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 Merckx and 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.

These two training adaptations set the foundation for aerobic sports performance, which in road cycling, makes up most of the conditions spent competing in save for sprints and short sharp efforts. Increased muscle capillarisation means greater oxygen delivery to the working muscles, while more mitochondria means greater capacity to use that oxygen and break down a greater amount of substrates. The net goal of this is an increased capacity to produce and maintain power on the bike.

However, if these riders just trained at ‘Zone Two’, they would be fantastic at maintaining a high power output for a very long time, but they wouldn’t have the same capacity to do blistering attacks or produce greater sprint power, both key elements when it comes to actually winning a race. This is where the high-intensity portions of the Polarised or Pyramidal training models come in. To find out exactly…

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Tadej Pogačar’s training: What sessions does the three-time Tour de France champion do?

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