Iñigo San Millán training model

Ah, you must be really new to this. You’ll get there buddy, don’t give up.

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30-sec sprints at 450-700Watts. 90kg. I just did the math where y’all are training at 5.0 to 5.5 W/kg :wink:

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Hot ISM training news: zone 2 (shhh, its tempo) works for penalties!

So I’m in Spain at the moment and yesterday’s train was full of Bilbao supporters. My wife looked up their fate just now and…they won! On penalties!

Conclusion…:wink:

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tempo … the most meaningless word ever

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One of the biggest game changers for my training in the last year was a combination of really digging into @empiricalcycling 's podcasts, along with Andy Coggan’s short but intense tenure here on the forum, along with reading some of the WKO4/5 stuff. Part of the thing with zones is that it becomes pretty clear that “Coggan Zones” doesn’t just mean “zones as defined and named by Dr. Andy Coggan.”

What “Coggan Zones” really means is that these are the zones of Andy freakin’ Coggan; they were defined quite personally by his own training. I was re-listening to Kolie’s podcast about zones with Rory Porteous the other day, and Rory mentions that the Tempo zone exists because Coggan was doing some tempo fartlek training and needed a place to put it. So, Zone 3.

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Andy was a guest on the podcast as well so check that episode out. It’s not as informative as an ISM tweet or two but hey.

It seems that Pog was winning despite training under the ISM model.

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It really looks like it, indeed.

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Change in training stimulus with new coach?

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I have to believe there is some truth here. Just goes to show you how easily we can all be influenced. Not saying that all ISM training ideas are bunk, but I think many people wanted to believe he had some sort of magic formula. The magic is in Pog.

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Riding long hours of Z2 with a sprinkle of intervals being the ticket to success and high performance always sounded like those late-night “supplement” commercials.

Goodbye Z2, we hardly knew ye.

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Yes, but ISM never advocated this for high level athletes. Far from it. This is what social media made out of it.

And now everyone will buy a Core sensor.

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I’ll put this here for the everyone, @sryke is mentioning. :see_no_evil:

I think he did, at least if we believe what “Mou”, “leaked” in the forums.

For those that think ISM is/was snake oil - Pog did win two Tours and a crap ton of Monuments.

ISM for his part went on Peter Attia and told regular folks to ride a lot of zone 2 for health and fitness. Nothing wrong with that.

Did ISM ever tell people like us specifically how to train? No, nope, never. Lots of generalities and no specifics for those doing structured training.

A long time ago he might have given you a training prescription based on your lactate test if you showed up at his lab in Colorado. I recall seeing such a prescription one time as part of an article that some journalist wrote. And that is the closest thing to a training prescription that I’ve ever seen from ISM. He’s a gosh darn lactate enigma.

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There were some interesting comments on r/Velo. Sola is a WKO guy. He did the spanish language webinars. He’s also a TTE guy. TTE is vastly under-rated.

Still, these guys are leaving the dopers in the dust on steep climbs. :wink:

“The magic is in the man, not the miles.” - Bill Boweman

That said, his performances not only were successful previously but one year builds on the other. Would he be as good without the previous training as a foundation?

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Or maybe he would have won last year if he changed coaches sooner? But that is not the point. The point was that it isn’t hard to train a rider like Pog. As long as you are providing progressive overload without burning him out he is probably going to progress. That doesn’t make his coach’s training philosophy good, special, or the best. He just happened to work with a once in a generation talent.

For those that think ISM is/was snake oil - Pog did win two Tours and a crap ton of Monuments.

The point is that you or I could probably have coached Tadej and he would still have won races.

That does not make us world-class coaches. Though it probably would get us a banging Instagram following.

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To paraphrase Coach Tim Cusick, the job of a elite coach is to not screw things up.

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