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ENTITY · PERSON

TIM KERRISON

Australian performance director who arrived at Team Sky from swimming and rowing, and quietly designed the coaching system that produced seven Tour de France wins between 2012 and 2019. The architect of the modern Grand Tour training camp, the altitude block, and the Sky/INEOS approach to long-form race-specific preparation.

Anthony's reference point for what an entire training programme — not just a workout — looks like at the very top of the sport. The Sky/INEOS-era principles that Roadman content keeps coming back to (race-specific work, the climbing camp, structured altitude blocks) all trace back to Tim's framework.

CANONICAL NAME

Tim Kerrison

ROLE

Performance director and ex-Head of Performance, Team Sky / INEOS Grenadiers

AFFILIATION

INEOS Grenadiers

WHY KERRISON’S WORK MATTERS TO YOUR CYCLING

If you have ever wondered who actually designed the training system that won seven Tour de France titles in eight years, the answer is Tim Kerrison. He's the Australian performance director who arrived at Team Sky in 2010 from swimming and rowing, found a sport that was still mostly coached on intuition, and quietly built the framework that produced Wiggins, Froome, Thomas, and Bernal at the top of the GC standings.

The system he built is more interesting than any single session. It rests on a small number of ideas: the entire year should be designed around the specific demands of the target race, the highest-leverage training block is a long structured altitude camp on terrain that replicates what the rider will face, sweet spot has a defined role inside a periodised plan rather than as a default mode, and coaching is mostly about subtracting work that doesn't earn its place. Almost everything the modern World Tour now does — the Sierra Nevada and Tenerife camps, the targeted return-to-racing schedule, the late-spring altitude block — was either invented or refined under Tim's framework.

For an amateur rider, the lesson isn't that you should fly to Tenerife. It's that the structure matters more than the workouts. Most amateur seasons are built session-up: pick a hard ride for Tuesday, an easier one for Thursday, repeat. The Kerrison approach is the inverse: pick the event, work backwards, and make every block of training defensibly relevant to the day you actually care about. That is the principle Anthony comes back to in almost every conversation about how to structure a real training plan, and it traces directly to Tim's work at Sky.

Tim is not a podcast guest, but his fingerprints are all over how the rest of the Roadman expert network — Dan Lorang, John Wakefield, the Sky/INEOS-trained coaches now at other teams — talks about training the sport.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

CYCLING COACHINGSWEET-SPOT TRAININGALTITUDE TRAININGRACE-SPECIFIC PREPARATIONGRAND TOUR PERIODISATIONPERFORMANCE SCIENCE

NOTABLE POSITIONS

Positions Kerrison is publicly on the record for. Each one is something the rest of the Roadman content network leans on.

Race-specific training is the core principle — every block in the year should look like the demands of the event being targeted, not a generic fitness ladder.

The reason Sky/INEOS riders peaked precisely on the days they meant to peak, year after year.

Long, structured climbing camps in altitude are the highest-leverage block in a Grand Tour rider's year — they replicate the demand they cannot replicate at home.

Now copied by every World Tour team — but Sky did it first at the volume and structure they did.

Sweet spot work has a defined role inside a periodised plan — it builds repeatable threshold capacity, but only when paired with adequate easy volume and proper recovery.

The nuance Anthony quotes when correcting the "sweet spot is everything" Trainerroad framing.

Performance is built across years, not weeks. A rider's ceiling at 28 is set by the work done from 22 to 26.

Echoed by Dan Lorang and others — but Tim's roster of GC winners is the longest-running practical demonstration.

Coaching is mostly about subtraction — removing the sessions that don't earn their place, defending the easy days against the rider's own ambition.

A line that captures the harder-than-it-looks discipline behind Sky/INEOS-era programming.

TRAIN WITH THE KNOWLEDGE

Apply what Kerrison has put on the record to your own training — coached by Anthony, $195/month with a 7-day free trial.

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