MADS PEDERSEN'S COACH ON THE TRAINING BEHIND A WORLD CHAMPION | ROADMAN CYCLING PODCAST
with Mattias Reck — Head coach at Lidl-Trek and a former professional rider; has personally coached Mads Pedersen since 2017 along with a group of the team's WorldTour riders
Mattias Reck is the coach who took Mads Pedersen from a raw young neo-pro into a world champion, Grand Tour stage winner and one of the most durable Classics riders in the sport — and he did it over the better part of a decade. For the Roadman audience his value is a rare, honest window into how elite fitness is actually built: not through a secret session, but through years of patiently learning how much load one athlete can absorb, and treating recovery capacity and consistency as the things that set the ceiling. He is the antidote to copy-the-pro-spreadsheet thinking.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
01The number that matters isn't how much a pro trains — it's how much they can recover from. Reck has said it took him years to learn how much load Pedersen can absorb. Your training ceiling is your recovery ceiling, and for amateurs that's usually far lower than the volume the internet tells you to chase.
02Consistency beats heroics. Pedersen's roughly 1,100–1,200 hours a year aren't built from occasional monster weeks; they're the product of showing up, day after day, without digging holes he can't climb out of. The amateur version is simpler: the training you can repeat next week is worth more than the session that wrecks you today.
03Volume is specific to the athlete, not universal. Eighty hours in two weeks works for Pedersen because his engine and his recovery were built to handle it over years. Copying the headline figure without the base underneath it is how time-crunched riders bury themselves.
04Resilience is trainable, but slowly. Reck frames Pedersen's durability — the ability to turn brutal racing into controlled chaos — as something developed through patient, progressive loading, not a gift he was born with. That's the hopeful part for the "not done yet" rider: adaptation is a process you can still start.
05The rollers matter more than you think. That 37-hour week on the rollers is a reminder that a huge share of elite training is unglamorous, controlled, low-decision riding — exactly the kind of work amateurs skip because it feels like it isn't "real" training.
Everyone wants the session. The magic interval, the secret block, the thing Mads Pedersen does that you don't. So when I got Mattias Reck — the man who's coached Mads since 2017, from a raw young rider into a world champion — on the podcast, that's what I expected we'd dig into. Instead, he kept steering me somewhere less exciting and far more useful.
Key Takeaways
The headline everyone fixates on is the volume. Reck has said Mads does somewhere around 1,100 to 1,200 hours a year, and that at one Mallorca camp he trained roughly 80 hours in two weeks — 37 of them on the rollers in the first week alone. Those numbers are genuinely staggering. They're also, for you and me, completely beside the point.
Here's the line from Reck that actually matters: it took him years to understand how much training Mads can handle. Not weeks. Years. The volume isn't the cause of Pedersen being Pedersen — it's a consequence of a recovery capacity that was built slowly, patiently, over a long time. The training ceiling isn't the biggest week you can survive once. It's the biggest week you can do, recover from, and then do again. For a rider with a full-time job, a family, and a finite number of hours, that ceiling is a lot lower than the internet wants you to believe — and pretending otherwise is how people bury themselves.
The other theme Reck came back to was consistency. Not monster weeks. Not heroics. Just showing up, day after day, without digging holes he couldn't climb out of. That's the whole game, and it's the most transferable lesson in the conversation.
The Trap Of Copying The Number
There's a very specific way amateurs hurt themselves, and it starts with a number like "1,200 hours a year" or "80 hours in two weeks." You read it, something competitive fires in your chest, and you think: right, I need to do more.
But that volume sits on top of something you can't see. Pedersen has spent years building the engine and the recovery infrastructure that lets him absorb it — full-time sleep, professional nutrition, no commute, no spreadsheet-at-9pm, a team of people whose entire job is keeping him fresh. Strip that away and the same load doesn't make you fitter. It makes you tired, then flat, then injured.
Reck's point — the one he made without ever quite spelling it out as a soundbite — is that the volume is downstream of the capacity, not the other way around. You don't get Pedersen's engine by doing Pedersen's hours. You'd get Pedersen's hours by first, slowly, over years, building something that can handle them. That's a much less exciting message than "here's the secret block," and it happens to be true.
Recovery Is The Ceiling
If there's one idea from this episode to carry into your own week, it's this: your limiter usually isn't the hard session. It's your ability to back it up.
Most riders can do one brilliant interval workout. The question that actually decides whether you get faster is what happens on Wednesday after you smashed yourself on Tuesday, and again on Saturday. Can you repeat quality? Or does one good day cost you three ordinary ones? That's recovery capacity, and it's the thing Reck spent years learning how to read in a single athlete.
The practical version for you is unglamorous. Sleep is training. The easy days being genuinely easy is training. Eating enough — properly enough — to actually recover between sessions is training. None of it shows up on Strava as a hero effort, and all of it is what lets the hero efforts accumulate into fitness instead of fatigue. This is the same drum Professor Seiler bangs about intensity distribution, and the same one Joe Friel builds his training weeks around: protect the ability to repeat.
Consistency Over Heroics
The rollers detail is the one that stuck with me. Thirty-seven hours in a week, indoors, controlled, no descents or traffic or weather to break up the monotony. That's not a highlight reel. That's a rider doing the boring, precise, repeatable work that builds a base — the exact category of riding amateurs skip because it doesn't feel like "proper" training.
We've got the same problem in miniature. The temptation is always to make every ride count, to turn the easy spin into a tempo effort, to bury the endurance ride with a few extra intervals "while you're out there." And it feels productive. But consistency is what compounds. The rider who trains at 85% of their potential every single week for a year beats the rider who trains at 110% for three weeks and then gets sick, every single time.
What This Means For Your Riding
You're not going to do 1,200 hours a year, and you shouldn't try. But the principles scale down cleanly.
Set your volume to what you can recover from and repeat — not to what impresses you on paper. If your long-ride power is fading in the last third, or you're going backwards despite training more, that's almost always a recovery-capacity problem wearing a training-volume costume. Build the base slowly, keep the easy days easy, and treat sleep and fuelling as part of the plan rather than an afterthought.
And be patient with the resilience. Reck's whole message is that Pedersen's durability was built over years of progressive loading, not handed to him. That's the genuinely hopeful part for anyone who feels their best days are behind them: adaptation is still available to you. It just doesn't arrive on the timeline you'd like.
If you're putting in the hours and the results aren't following, the limiter usually isn't a missing session — it's somewhere in your volume, recovery or consistency. That's exactly what the Plateau Diagnostic is built to find. Three minutes, free, and it looks at the whole system rather than one symptom.
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For the science underneath everything Reck describes, go to Dr Stephen Seiler on 80/20 training — the definitive case for why most of your riding should be genuinely easy. For how to actually structure a week around recovery, Joe Friel on the ideal training week is the perfect companion. And if you want the coach's-eye view of what amateurs consistently get wrong, 13 years of coaching pros pairs beautifully with this one.
Want to build your own version of this with people who actually train seriously? That's what the Roadman community is for.
CLAIMS FROM THIS EPISODE
Each tagged with the strength of evidence behind it.
EXPERT
Mattias Reck is the head coach at Lidl-Trek and a former professional rider who moved into performance coaching.
Source: Mattias Reck, discussed on the Roadman Cycling Podcast and Cyclist Magazine Podcast; Lidl-Trek team pages
EXPERT
Reck has coached Mads Pedersen since joining Trek-Segafredo in 2017, developing him from a young rider into a world champion and Classics winner.
Source: Mattias Reck, Cyclist Magazine Podcast and Roadman Cycling Podcast; Lidl-Trek team history
STUDY
Mads Pedersen won the 2019 UCI Road World Championship and has since won multiple Grand Tour stages alongside major one-day Classics results.
Source: UCI results and Mads Pedersen career records (Wikipedia, ProCyclingStats)
EXPERT
Reck has stated that Mads Pedersen trains roughly 1,100 to 1,200 hours per year and has an exceptional recovery capacity.
Source: Mattias Reck, Cyclist Magazine Podcast
EXPERT
At a Mallorca training camp, Pedersen reportedly trained around 80 hours across two weeks, with 37 of those hours completed on the rollers in the first week.
Source: Mattias Reck, Cyclist Magazine Podcast
EXPERT
Reck has said it took him years to understand how much training Pedersen can handle, underlining that trainable load is individual and built gradually.
Source: Mattias Reck, Cyclist Magazine Podcast and Roadman Cycling Podcast
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Who is Mads Pedersen's coach?+
Mads Pedersen is coached by Mattias Reck, the head coach at Lidl-Trek. A former professional rider himself, Reck has worked with Pedersen since he joined Trek-Segafredo in 2017, guiding him from a young neo-pro to the 2019 world champion and one of the sport's most durable Classics riders. Reck also coaches a group of the team's other WorldTour riders.
How many hours a year does Mads Pedersen train?+
According to Reck, Pedersen trains roughly 1,100 to 1,200 hours a year. That works out to something like 21–23 hours a week averaged across the season, though in reality it's periodised — heavy blocks and camps balanced against lighter, recovery-focused weeks. The headline figure matters less than the fact that Pedersen has built the recovery capacity to absorb and repeat that load year after year.
Can amateur cyclists train like Mads Pedersen?+
Not by copying his hours — and that's the point of the episode. Pedersen's roughly 1,100–1,200 hours a year and his 80-hour Mallorca fortnight are only possible because his recovery capacity was built over years of progressive loading with full-time rest, nutrition and support. For an amateur with a job and a family, the transferable lessons are consistency, individually appropriate volume, and treating recovery as the thing that sets your ceiling — not raw training hours.
What is "recovery capacity" and why does it matter?+
Recovery capacity is how much training stress you can absorb, adapt to and then repeat without breaking down. Reck has said it took him years to learn how much load Pedersen can handle — a reminder that this capacity is individual and built gradually. For most riders, the limiter on progress isn't the ability to do one hard session; it's the ability to back it up and keep backing it up. Training that outruns your recovery just digs a hole.
Why do pros do so much training on the rollers?+
Rollers and indoor riding give a controlled, low-decision environment where a rider can hit precise durations and intensities without traffic, descents or weather getting in the way — which is exactly why Pedersen reportedly logged 37 hours on the rollers in a single camp week. A large share of elite training is deliberately unglamorous, steady, controlled work. Amateurs often skip this kind of riding because it doesn't feel like "real" training, but it's a big part of how the base gets built.
What makes Mads Pedersen so durable in hard races?+
Reck frames Pedersen's durability — his ability to turn brutal, chaotic racing into something he controls — as the product of patient, progressive training rather than raw talent alone. Years of gradually increased load, combined with an unusually high recovery capacity, let him repeat efforts and hold form deep into races and long seasons. The encouraging takeaway is that resilience is trainable; it's just built slowly.
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