Hermes

With UAE and Tadej Pogačar's success in the Giro, I thought a revisit of San Millan's training philosophy would be in order and some might find interesting.

This is a solo video and not part of a podcast. IMO, he puts the right spin on zone 2 and backs it up with his experience with athletes in the lab and field along with his observations.

Iride01 

I watched the whole thing. Painfully long to get the same information that can be read faster. I didn't find anything to disagree with. So it's a good video. I like the part where he emphasized that if one didn't ever do any upper zone training and go anaerobic, then they'd not perform as good as they could even with all the Zone 2 training in the world. (Maybe I'm paraphrasing that too badly)

surak

ICYMI, UAE moved San Millan off of directly coaching Pogacar last winter. Maybe after 2 TdFs of being crushed by Vingegaard, it was time to try something different.

https://www.cyclingnews.com/features...ur-double-bid/

PeteHski

While Pog looks invincible in the Giro, I don’t think he has any serious competition this year. So I think it’s hard to judge whether or not he has improved relative to last season. We will have to wait for the Tour to see for sure!

Trakhak

He could have had all the coaches in the world advising him - the problem was that his team wasn't good enough. He was left to fend for himself early in almost every significant climbing stage. That was bad enough, but the double-teaming by Roglic and Vingegaard, especially in last year's Tour, forced him to chase first the one and then the other, over and over again, on the toughest climbing stages.

Isolated, and with two of the best climbers in the world determinedly working him over, Pogačar had no chance.

Jughed

I'm a big fan of San Millan.

His research goes beyond cycling - he is trying to cure diseases as well. His methods absolutely have merit for those of us with T2/insulin resistance. Much of this disease is caused by cellular/microdontia disfunction - I've used his principals, along with diet, to essentially put the disease into remission.

Pogs - this year he looks thinner, much thinner. He also looks much healthier. At the end of the TDF stages last year he looked absolutely ragged out. His face looked ill and he just looked beat down.

He looked fresh and healthy after the TT, queen stage and yesterday's crap weather stage. The queen stage was a monster & he looked like he was just coming off a training ride.

Team/no team, competition/no competition - he just looks better. Is he better than Vingo in mountains? Don't know. Does he look better overall - yep.

MoAlpha

If Mozart's piano teacher had access to social media.

Carbonfiberboy 

I also watched it, one comment: obviously each zone is a range, not a single point, but he doesn't indicated the range. My experience is that his single number is meant to be about in the middle of that range,

RChung

Leopold taught Wolfgang and tried to replicate his results with Wolfgang's sister Nannerl and Nannerl's son. Nannerl was, apparently, a very good player.

Jughed

I do believe that he was the man that genetically altered Pogs, manipulated his lactate tolerance and energy processing on a cellular level - creating the new LA...

Hermes

In 2014, I was training with a coach who was advising / training two of Team Sky' racers. He had trained them as juniors. At that time Froome was going to lead the TdF and one of the racers was friends with Froome and wanted to be his lead in the mountains and generally destroy the pro peloton on command. Making the TdF team was a very big deal with respect to money and extending contracts and prestige.

He ended up being assigned to GC rider for the Giro. He despised that assignment but it is part of pro racing. You do what management says.

With respect to Poga, he is trying to win the TdF and Giro. The Giro is going to take a lot out of him and his favorite mountain teammate Mica. It will be interesting to see who is carried over from Team UAE from the Giro team to the TdF team. And Poga does not control the competition. Teams could concede the Giro to Poga and UAE and target the TdF figuring they will be fatigued and vulnerable.

MoAlpha

…and so was Leopold. Evidence for nature over nurture in the cases of both prodigies.

RChung

When you're a theoretical mathematical demographer you have to have a Plan B so I used to work in health policy and health services research, focusing on the quality of care. When I did that, I wasn't looking at who produced the best outcomes, I was looking at who was producing good outcomes given the condition of the patient. I do the same for evaluating the quality of education: I want to know how much schools improve the students, i.e., how much value do they add? Harvard and Stanford turn out good graduates, but they started by selecting pretty good students so they're turning already good students into good graduates. Coaches like to talk about what their clients did, but we don't know how much they added to the client: my guess is that Pogacar would've been pretty good even with me as his coach. Leopold taught Wolfgang but Nannerl and Nannerl's kid never reached the same heights, so I'm thinking maybe a little had to do with Leopold but a lot had to do with Wolfgang.

terrymorse 

Fatigue -- boy, I don't know!

Fatigue seems to be the thing that separates the strong from the very strong. How much training can you pile on while avoiding fatigue? How much racing can you do and still recover quickly? How long does it take to recover from a big bout of intense training/racing? Maybe fatigue management is the new HIIT, or something like that.

(I write this while feeling beat upon. Did I just do two big weeks in a row? Yes, yes I did.)

Hermes

Previously, San Millan was a guest on Podcasts and guys like GCN lead the discussion and even said ridiculous things like he rode rode a lot of z2 and then sucked at an event. Duh. I thought San Millan stated it correctly when he said the purpose of his video was to answer questions that he gets in the mail. Personally, I thought he could have done a better job of using his chart that he referred to.

A little known fact is that I play classical piano - Chopin, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Debussy and etc. I wanted to freshen up my playing and a few years ago, I picked a teacher who was a professional pianist and formerly a professor of music department head of a Russian music academy.

My talent on the piano is the ability to memorize complicated patterns quickly so I would figure out the music on the keys from the printed notes and not have to look at the notes again. But my sight reading was not great.

So this teacher says, well, then you will play Bach and polyphonic music (multiple voices) only. You will have trouble memorizing that. She was correct. There are no patterns in Bach's music and one has to read a couple of measures ahead of what is being played. I now play the Art of the Fugue Contrapunctus I in four voices but yet to memorize completely. She raised my level of playing, reading and understanding music theory 10 fold. I am working on a Beethoven Sonata "Tempest" that seems easy compared to the Art of the Fugue and I am learning it much faster than before.

IMO, teachers, coaches, professors matter a lot. She made one key decision to challenge me with Bach, somehow knowing I would meet the challenge and it would make a difference. I seek out coaches, teachers, seminars that can take me to a spot that I cannot take myself.

In cycling, my experience is that excellent coaches seem to attract talent and then the two feed on each other. My cycling coach says we make him look great. That is true and some make him look greater than others. He is nothing without us and we are nothing without him. He has incite on how to take us to the next level.

San Millan is shown on the UAE website as a trainer. UAE has a staff of trainers and San Millan may be the lead guy. Does he inspire, identify traits, suggest programs or whatever, I do not know.

RChung

Oh, I absolutely believe there are good (and bad) coaches, just like I believe there are good and bad mechanics, plumbers, lawyers, physicians, piano teachers, cops, and demographers. It's just that I'm not sure you can look at the level of accomplishments of their adherents to figure out who the good ones are. Your example (which is a good one) is about improvement, not about the absolute level.