The secret behind Pogacar’s legs is in his brain, how UAE is training motor control

More and more modern cycling is becoming an exercise in applied science. Marginal gains are no longer anecdotes but structured programmes built on physiology, biomechanics, nutrition, psychology and data analysis.

A clear illustration came earlier this week from Team Visma | Lease a Bike and the way it has dissected its battles with Tadej Pogačar. Speaking openly, Victor Campenaerts described how analysts broke down Tour de France stages in forensic detail, comparing how long Jonas Vingegaard and Pogačar rode above threshold, how much energy they burned, and whether tactical choices pushed one rider deeper into deficit than the other.

What UAE is adding to that scientific arms race is not another way to improve fitness, but a way to access it more consistently. The idea is straightforward: two riders can have the same engine, yet one gets more out of it because the body is better coordinated. In UAE’s view, that coordination starts in the brain, and it can be trained.

Michele Del Gallo, physiotherapist and osteopath with the team, says the project began with routine testing before the season. “Thanks to the tests we do at UAE Emirates before the season starts, we noticed that quite a few riders have a strength difference between one leg and the other,” he explains to Bici.pro. “So we asked ourselves where this difference came from. We were obsessed with bringing all athletes to the start with legs that push in the same way.”

For years, the standard response was to strengthen the weaker side with single leg work. It helped, but the imbalance often remained. UAE’s answer was to look beyond strength and toward recruitment, in other words how much muscle the brain actually switches on when the rider pushes the pedal.

“We found the solution through motor control, trying to put the brain in a position to recruit the same number of fibres on one side and the other,” Del Gallo says. “In the end it was a recruitment problem: on one side the athlete could recruit 100 percent of the muscle fibres, while in the other leg he recruited less. That was the reason for the strength difference.”

This is where the elastic band routines seen on race mornings enter the story, often misunderstood as a basic warm-up. Del Gallo disagrees with that framing. “It gets called activation so everyone understands, a muscular warm up with bands,” he says. “But it is not that, it is not a warm-up. What is the point of warming-up five minutes before a race that will last five or six hours, where the difference is made right at the end?” 

The objective is neurological: change the pattern so the rider pedals a little differently. Over hours, small improvements in coordination can mean less wasted energy, and a stronger base for the finale.

The effect, he notes, lasts through the race, but it is not permanent without repetition. “You need continuous stimuli for the improvement to become definitive,” he says, which is why the work happens away from competition as well as close to it.

Timing remains a constraint. “It takes fifteen minutes per athlete, so you cannot do them all,” Del Gallo says. “Cycling has very tight timing. So with someone you work the day before.” Race day routines are therefore standardised, while the deeper work done earlier is more individual.

The most striking part is that what looks like a leg issue often starts higher up. “In reality the work comes from the upper part, from the lack of control of the pelvic girdle,” Del Gallo explains. 

Put simply, the legs can only push as cleanly as the trunk allows. Riders may have strong cores and still lose efficiency if the brain does not call on that stability at the exact moment force is applied to the pedals. “You can have the core as strong as you want and be number one in those exercises, but if when you give an input, when you give the command to push on the pedal, the brain does not do it the right way, having that core so strong is useless.”

Movement, in his view, is driven by automatic patterns rather than conscious decisions. At racing cadence, no rider can think their way through which muscle to contract. The goal is to make correct activation part of the brain’s default sequence. Del Gallo describes the approach as influenced by newer methods from the United States and consistent with tools the team has used for years, with different techniques pointing in the same direction.

It also sheds light on why Pogačar has said the team feels nothing like the one he joined in 2019. The shift is not only in budgets or equipment, but in mindset. 

“It was another planet compared to where we are now,” Del Gallo says, describing a structure that rewards initiative and constant improvement across roles. 

The legs still decide races, but at UAE Team Emirates-XRG, the work increasingly begins in the brain.