Team Sky - Truth or Lie?

Did some digging myself and found this article. Very thought provoking but wont sit well with the sceptical members of the forum. Its a bit long winded but very interesting.

Anyways after the 2010 season, Kerrison sat down with Brailsford to show him what Kerrison had observed and his overall conclusions. Brailsford said afterwards he was "blown away" by what Kerrison presented to him...

Here are his main conclusions...

What is startling from there primarily is how they make so much sense but due to the fact that they come from a mind which has not been whatsoever influenced by the sport and therefore does not concur with the stigmas and stereotypes which many of the tradiotional European teams have been influenced and therefore restricted by. Particularly as he says the reliance on doping, has stunted the coaching aspect of the sport whilst the best coaches and doctors in the past, have not been the ones who are the best trainers, but rather the ones who have the best doping techniques.

1) Kerrison could not understand why it was common practice for riders to use races for training.

This technique was instituted years ago due to prize money... now the top riders dont need the prize money all that much, then why do they still use the races as training and build up when they can do it in more controlled environments at their own leisure, when they were not subjected to the racing peloton who has a mind and rhythm of its own.

Yet people still believe that quality efforts would be done at the races, whilst the inter periods would be done at home for resting and lesser intensity training.

Edit: I found this quote which backs up this explanation

"Wiggins said last month, while on camp in Tenerife, that he doubted if any single day on the Dauphine would be as hard as his training in, on and around Mount Teide and he was manifestly right. To these eyes the one full day's hit out I witnessed in Tenerife was immeasurably tougher than either of the two high mountain stages at the Dauphine".

2) Another concept of his was "reverse periodisation". This is what people have witnessed with Porte, Wiggins and Rogers over the past year, where they have seemed to be at peak form, a step ahead of the other riders throughout the season.

Effectively it gets rid of the athlete originally focusing on his endurance and building an aerobic base, and then only afterwards to move only on to high intensity exercises only towards the end of the training period or cycle.

And instead it makes the rider focus on introducing all the power and speed work early on and then they would gradually increase the duration of the training of those attributes as the rider's fitness improved, AKA. in this case closer to the Tour.

In the Wiggins case this was very evident wherease many so called "experts" questioned as to whether Wiggins was not peaking a tad too early. If these "experts" had understood that the "reverse periodisation" allows Wiggins to produce maximal perfomances even prior to his peak they would have realised Wiggins was in perfect shape for the Tour.

They assumed that if riders are outputting maximal efforts then that would fastrack a rider into and out of the other side of their best form.

Once again this is another one of the misgiving which has stunted cycling and without it, it seems cyclists can perform much better.

Furthermore another example is that of Wiggins's time trialling which as markedly improved over the past two years. This is due to the fact that Kerrison has made Wiggins race his TTs at a lowed cadence.

Indeed Sky have rightfully applauded their genius coach and Wiggins has specifically attributed his Tour win down to Kerrison's coaching.

My feeling is that he is a massive nerd who is clearly not comfortable in front of a camera, probably has very strong views on doping and would love to name and shame those he probably knows are doping but has to answer diplomatically.

No one likes to be asked questions like that and i would bet even the likes of Garmins performance bloke would get the same responce.

But keep digging you will probably find Lord Lucan and Elvis first.