THE SHORT ANSWER
Vasilis Anastopoulos, worldtour performance coach, formerly astana and quick-step, has appeared on the Roadman Cycling Podcast 2 times. Here's where Anastopoulos lands on reverse periodisation. The positions below are drawn from those conversations, quoted directly.
WHO IS VASILIS ANASTOPOULOS?
Vasilis Anastopoulos is one of the more underrated performance coaches working in the WorldTour. He has held senior coaching roles at Astana Pro Team and Soudal Quick-Step and has consulted with multiple Grand Tour-winning teams on aerobic-base development, threshold work, and altitude camps. His public conversations on the differences between Grand Tour and one-day Classics preparation, and his frameworks for periodising a 9-month racing season, are some of the more practical pro-tour insights in the cycling podcast world. For amateurs trying to understand how a Grand Tour team really structures a year, his work is a primary reference.
ANASTOPOULOS ON REVERSE PERIODISATION
Anastopoulos’s key positions on reverse periodisation.
- Grand Tour preparation is built on multi-week aerobic-base blocks, not on threshold intervals.
- Altitude camps produce repeatable physiological adaptations when sequenced correctly with the racing calendar.
- Classics preparation is closer to track-and-power work than to GC training — the demands shift fundamentally.
- Periodised season planning works backwards from one or two A-races, with everything else as build or recovery.
- Recovery between racing blocks is the limiting factor for season-long form — most amateurs ignore this entirely.
IN ANASTOPOULOS’S OWN WORDS
Verbatim from Vasilis Anastopoulos’s appearances on the podcast.
“In zone 2 in reality, the zone 2 concept came after Dr. Inig Milan. And uh for the riders that are using uh the zones, the Kogan zones because almost everybody is familiar with that. It's the high end of zone two and the lower end of zone three. So it's close to your tempo zone. Uh but in order to be able to per to do some long sessions in this zone, you have to to build your zone one first.”
“If you skip this step, the first step, uh, one thing is for sure that probably can see a rise in your performance. But then you are going to see immediately a decline. So after 2 three months, you will start watching what happened. The first month I was flying, I was going really well and now I cannot turn the pedals.”
“We know that for example you need to do uh 5 minutes in X bars per kilo after 4,500 kilogjles in order to to win a uh a war to race. So this is something that we can stimulate on training nowadays uh that it wasn't possible to do it uh previously because we didn't have all this uh as I said all these softwares.”
“if you put him in a lab she get the shittiest data you can have she's not good at all yeah really really she's not good at all in the lab I don't think has ever finished the lap to be honest he just f it uh on the other hand he's super super efficient”
HEAR IT ON THE PODCAST
Episodes where Vasilis Anastopoulos covers reverse periodisation and related ground.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
What does Vasilis Anastopoulos say about reverse periodisation?
Vasilis Anastopoulos, worldtour performance coach, formerly astana and quick-step, has appeared on the Roadman Cycling Podcast 2 times. Here's where Anastopoulos lands on reverse periodisation. The positions below are drawn from those conversations, quoted directly.
What is Anastopoulos's main point on reverse periodisation?
Grand Tour preparation is built on multi-week aerobic-base blocks, not on threshold intervals.
Which Roadman Cycling Podcast episodes cover Vasilis Anastopoulos on reverse periodisation?
Anastopoulos discusses reverse periodisation in these episodes: "Astana Coach on Zone 1 Training | Roadman Cycling Podcast", "Did Cavendish's Coach Reveal The Secret To Winning? | Vasilis Anastopoulos".
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EXPLORE THE TOPIC
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