Fifteen years in the WorldTour. Tour de France stage wins. The 2017 green jersey. And the first thing he says about how he trains is that he does not do base miles.
That sentence tells you most of what you need to know about Michael "Bling" Matthews.
Listen to the full conversation on the Roadman Cycling Podcast →
I sat down with Bling for round two of the podcast. Fifteen years a pro. 2010 U23 World Champion. Three wins in Quebec, multiple Grand Tour stages, a green jersey on the Champs-Élysées. He has straddled the era from "starve yourself and produce the watts" to the current "120 grams of carbs an hour and ride harder." And the way he rides his bike in November of his fifteenth pro season is not the way the cycling internet would tell you to.
The "Always Pedal" Method
Most amateur training plans look like this. A long slow base ride at the weekend. A couple of "easy" recovery spins. Two or three hard interval sessions. The intensity sits in the intervals. The volume sits in the cruise.
Matthews builds his weeks the other way around.
His normal training day sits at high 200s to low 300s watts for the whole ride. Not warm-up. Not the work set. The whole ride. Then on top of that, his coach Brian Stevens prescribes the day's efforts — climbing intervals, sprints, race-specific blocks — and he layers them onto an already taxing endurance load.
He puts it like this in the episode. "I would say high high 200s low 300s most of the day. All day."
Not a session. Every session.
This is also why he and Tadej Pogačar end up training together. Same approach. Most pros want the recovery rides easy. Matthews curates his training partners around the fact that very few riders want to sit on his wheel for five hours at 290 watts before doing the actual work.
The reason this works for him — and not for everyone — comes down to one thing he tried in 2020 and rejected.
What Happened When He Went Polarised
A short experiment with strict polarised training. Easier rides. Harder efforts. The 80/20 model that has been the dominant amateur framework for the last five years.
His own words: "In the past, around 2020 with the COVID, we were sort of playing a little bit with riding easier and doing harder efforts. But then I felt at the race, I was good for the effort, but I wasn't fit enough to get through the race."
That sentence is worth re-reading. He had the top-end. He could hit the wattage on the prescribed efforts. What he could not do was get to the finish of a five-hour classic with anything left in the tank.
Let me be really clear. This is not Matthews saying polarised is wrong. The 80/20 model is well-evidenced — we had Stephen Seiler on the podcast and the science is solid.
The more interesting point is that polarised was originally developed around endurance specialists — pure GC riders, marathon runners, cross-country skiers — whose job is to ride efficiently for very long. A sprinter-classics rider has a different demand. He needs to absorb the brutal middle of a 240km classic, then have one explosive five-second window at the finish that nobody else can match.
When he tried to build that engine on easy base, the engine arrived at the finish. The chassis to carry it through 200km did not.
This is the bit nobody tells you about copying pro training online. The session matters less than what kind of rider it was designed for.
A Pro Sprint, One Week Off the Couch
Here is the number that tells you everything about pro physiology.
Matthews takes four full weeks off the bike every offseason. No riding. No turbo. No thinking about cycling. He goes home to the family, walks the dog, eats what he wants. Most pros take two or three. He takes four. Always.
One week into his current training block — one week — he is already hitting 1550 watts in a sprint. He says with a bit more structured work he expects to be back to 1650.
For context. A strong amateur sprinter at the front of a club run is in the 1100 to 1300 range. A category one rider might touch 1500 in race-day conditions, fully tapered, after years of work. Matthews is doing 1550 watts in November, after a month off the bike.
He is not training that. He just has it. Genetic ceiling.
The reason this matters is that it explains why copying pro sessions almost never produces pro results. The session you saw on Strava is sitting on top of a foundation you cannot replicate by riding harder this Saturday. The ten thousand hours, the three to four altitude camps a year, the sleep, the soigneur work, the genetic ceiling that puts him at 1550 watts cold — none of that comes from the workout file. The pro outcome is downstream of the surrounding system. Not the session.
The Real Golden Thread
I have done well over a thousand podcast episodes. Pros, sports scientists, coaches, Olympians, Tour winners. The question I get asked most often is the same one. What is the common thread? What is the one thing the people at the top do that the people in the middle do not?
I gave my answer to Bling on the episode. He did not push back. He confirmed it.
It is the really boring stuff. Done repeatedly. For nearly unsustainable periods of time. Sleep. Food. Recovery. Showing up. For a decade.
His version is precise. Bed at 10pm every night. Up at 7am every morning. Same routine, every day. No drinking. Even in the offseason — when he is off the bike for four weeks — he is using that time to recover, not to make up for a year of sacrificing. He calls it old school. He says it almost apologetically. As if the real answer should be more exotic than that. It is not.
Heat Training, Breathing Apps, the Rest of the Internet
When I asked him directly what amateurs are missing — heat training, altitude tents, breathing protocols, lactate testing — his answer was almost dismissive.
"Heat training is not going to make you go from here to here. It's the consistency over years and time of doing the same thing."
His coach agrees. Most of the marginal interventions are real but small. They are not sustainable. You will do heat training for three weeks, get bored, switch to breathing exercises, get bored, move on. None of it will compound the way an extra two hours of consistent sleep a night will compound over six months.
This is not anti-science. Matthews uses everything available to him. He is just clear-eyed about the relative size of the levers.
The fixable bit for almost every amateur listening is not adding another protocol. It is removing the things quietly robbing the existing protocols of their effect. The two pints on a Saturday after a long ride. The 11.30pm bedtime that has crept in. The carb-restricted Sunday that wrecks Tuesday's intervals. Small little leaks that add up.
The Kit Trap That Catches Young Pros
One of the more underrated bits of the conversation was about how junior racing has changed.
When Matthews was coming through, his under-23 team was not allowed to use race wheels except at the World Championships. Caffeine was off the table outside of major events. Aerodynamic kit, power meters, nutritionists — none of it. Stripped right back. The point was that by the time you arrived in the WorldTour, the gear and the support felt like a step up. You had something to look forward to.
Today's junior pros arrive in the WorldTour having already done altitude camps with full nutrition support, riding the same disc-brake carbon-wheel bikes the Tour de France contenders are on. There is nowhere to step up to.
This is not a "back in my day" complaint. It is a useful warning to amateurs who think buying the next thing is going to deliver the next breakthrough. If unlimited gear and support cannot do it for a 19-year-old at a WorldTour development team, it will not do it for a 45-year-old club racer either.
What Amateur Cyclists Can Actually Take From This
You are not going to ride 300 watts all day. You probably should not. The Bling method works for a sprinter-classics specialist with a fifteen-year base of WorldTour conditioning under it. Drop it on top of a 38-year-old amateur with a full-time job and you will burn out in three weeks.
But the principles underneath what Matthews does are the bit worth taking home.
1. Match the training to the rider you actually are. Polarised did not work for Matthews because his demand is different from a GC rider's. Yours is different again. A masters rider chasing a gran fondo PB is a different animal from a Cat 3 racing crits. Copy methods that fit your event, not the methods of the rider you wish you were. The age-group FTP benchmarks piece is a good place to start calibrating.
2. The off-bike weeks count. Four full weeks off, used for genuine recovery rather than catching up on what you sacrificed during the season, is what lets him come back and hit 1550 watts in week one. The amateur version is two weeks off properly in November — not "active recovery" with three rides a week.
3. Consistency is the work. Bed at 10pm. Up at 7am. Same routine, every day. Unglamorous and free. We come back to this every time we cover the biggest training mistakes from coaches.
4. Stop chasing the thing somebody on Reddit is doing. Heat training, lactate meters, fasted rides, low-carb high-fat — Matthews has tried most of it and dismissed most of it as small relative to the boring stuff. If your consistency is dialled, experiment. If not, no protocol is going to bridge that gap.
5. Strip back, then build up. Save your A-race kit, your A-race gels, your A-race mindset for actual A-races. If you go full gas on every Tuesday club run with the latest $1,500 wheelset and $15 of carbs, you have nothing left to escalate to when the day actually matters.
Listen to the Full Conversation
The full episode with Michael Matthews is on the podcast and on YouTube. It also covers the death of the pure sprinter, what is going on inside UAE, the points-chasing problem ruining team tactics, and a near-death scare from blood clots that almost ended his season.
For more pro insights distilled into amateur application, the Ben Healy tactical reset post and the Vasilis Anastopoulos breakdown of Cavendish sprint training are the natural next reads. If you want help building a year that actually compounds the way Bling's career has compounded, the Roadman coaching system is where to start. For a fast answer to a specific training question, ask the AI coach — it is trained on every episode we have ever published.