When I talk about coaching, I am not thinking about single sessions or pretty-looking plans. I am thinking about how to reshape an athlete’s physiology over years. Training is only useful when it changes what your cells are capable of doing. Everything in my work starts from that point.

The body adapts to what it experiences often enough and clearly enough. If the signal is chaotic, the adaptation is weak. If the signal is precise and repeated, the adaptation is strong. This is where structure matters. Not as a rigid prison, but as a language you use to talk to your mitochondria, capillaries, enzymes, nervous system. Every interval, every easy ride, every block is a line in that conversation.

A central idea in my philosophy is that the aerobic system is the real foundation of performance, even for very high intensities. When you increase mitochondrial density and function, almost everything gets better. Power at threshold rises. The cost of submaximal efforts drops. The body can tolerate and clear higher amounts of lactate. Sessions that used to feel like a fight start to feel organised and within reach.

Lactate has a special place in this picture. Many athletes feel it as a limit, something that arrives and shuts things down. I see it as a currency. With the right training, the body learns to transport and use lactate as fuel. That changes how you can ride at and above threshold. We spend time in the zones where lactate is produced yet still manageable, teaching the system that this state is safe and repeatable. Over time, what used to be decisive intensity becomes something you can hold and control.

Thresholds are not just numbers on a lab report. They are doors between different ways of producing energy. I am interested in how you move between those doors. How smoothly you can go from easy endurance into strong tempo. How long you can stay near your maximal lactate steady state before things break. How quickly you recover when you come back down. Training blocks are built to shift these limits slowly and irreversibly.

Session design reflects all of this. I do not like random “hard days”. I prefer carefully chosen combinations of duration, power, cadence and recovery that speak clearly to one system at a time. Sometimes that means long intervals just under threshold, sometimes shorter repetitions above it with tight control of rest, sometimes very easy aerobic work that lets mitochondrial adaptations consolidate. The art is in sequencing these elements so that the body keeps learning, without being constantly exhausted.

Data is useful when it has context. Power, heart rate, lactate, HRV, RPE, all of these are tools. On their own they tell only a part of the story. Together with your feedback, they describe how your physiology is responding to the stress you place on it. I use numbers to confirm what I already expect from the structure and to catch small signals before they turn into problems.

Recovery is part of the stress pattern, not a pause between “real” training. Cells need time to rebuild and upgrade after work. This is why there are weeks in my plans that look gentle from the outside. They are not lost time. They are the period when adaptations from the previous weeks lock in. Athletes who respect this rhythm end up stronger, more stable and less fragile when the real demands arrive.

All of this has to live inside a real life. Work, family, sleep, environment, psychology, these are not noise. They define how much training your system can carry and still adapt upwards. My philosophy is to build the hardest possible structure that still fits your world. Ambition is welcome. So on some blocks we will push very far. The line we do not cross is the one where load stops creating progress and starts creating chaos.

In the end, my job is to take your potential seriously. To assume that you can become much stronger than you are now, if the next months and years are organised around the way your body truly works. The interesting question is how far that process can go when every session starts serving this philosophy instead of fighting against it.