John Wakefield is the coach you should know about if you've ever been dropped on the third climb of a long ride and wondered why. He runs the Science to Sport Performance Laboratory in Girona, currently leads coaching and sports science at Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe, and spent four seasons before that as Performance Co-ordinator at UAE Team Emirates working across the team that built around Tadej Pogacar.
His public position on low-cadence and torque-interval training is the reason Anthony talks about that kind of session as much as he does. The argument runs like this: most amateurs train at a single cadence, usually around 90 RPM, because that's what feels efficient on the flat. The problem is that the climbs they care about — sportive climbs, race climbs, the back end of a long day — sit at lower cadences, and the muscles being asked to hold that lower cadence at threshold have not been trained to. The fix is a deliberate block of 40–60 RPM work on a real climb, building the muscular durability that lets you stay in the saddle when the road tilts up and the cadence drops.
The 2024 PLOS ONE study from Habis et al. showed an 8.7% VO2max improvement in the low-cadence group versus 4.6% in the freely chosen cadence group — exactly the gap that coaches like John had been seeing in practice for years. That gap matters most for cyclists who can't add training volume: the Cat 3 racer with two kids, the masters rider with a real job, the sportive rider trying to peak for a single August event. Low-cadence work expands the aerobic engine without expanding the training week.
If you've ever read an article on torque intervals on this site, the prescription almost certainly traces back to John. The session is in the post linked below, and the podcast episodes go deeper.