I have had Dan Lorang on the podcast a couple of times now, and every time I come away with my head spinning. Not because he says anything wildly complicated — the opposite, actually. The stuff that sticks with me from Dan is always disarmingly simple. He is the head of performance at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. He coaches Primož Roglič. He has worked with Jan Frodeno, Anne Haug, Mark Cavendish. The man operates at the absolute peak of endurance sport. And yet the advice he gives for amateurs is not some watered-down version of a pro plan. It is fundamentally different thinking.
The one that rewired my brain was his approach to building a training week. Most of us — and I was guilty of this for years — start with an ambitious plan and then try to squeeze our life around it. Dan does it the other way. He asks: what is the smallest week you can do every single week without fail? That is your starting point. Not your goal week, not your peak week. Your floor. And then you build from there. I cannot tell you how much that shifted things for me. I stopped missing sessions, stopped feeling guilty, and weirdly started getting fitter because the consistency compounded.
In this episode I pull together the biggest lessons from my conversations with Dan — his thinking on heart rate versus power, why easy days need to actually be easy, why the plan is a floor not a ceiling, and how he manages load for riders who have full-time jobs, families, and all the chaos of real life.
Key Takeaways
- Build your training week from the minimum you can sustain, not the maximum you hope for
- Heart rate integrates life stress, sleep, and fatigue — making it a more honest daily metric than power alone
- Easy days must actually be easy. The pros at Bora go easier on recovery days than most amateurs do
- A realistic plan done consistently beats a perfect plan done sporadically every single time
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