At the Tour de France, preparation is about more than building fitness. It’s about finding performance advantages in the details: how efficiently a rider produces power, how quickly they recover, how well they handle repeated demands, and how consistently they can perform over three weeks of racing.
For Team Pinarella-36.5, TrainingPeaks helps turn those details into decisions. From planning workloads and monitoring adaptation to tracking CTL, ATL, TSS, recovery trends, durability, and Efficiency Factor, the platform gives coaches, sports scientists, and athletes a shared view of what’s working and where opportunities exist.
That’s why over 80% of the WorldTour teams on the start line in Barcelona trust TrainingPeaks to build, manage, and optimize their training data.
With We Speak Peak, TrainingPeaks is shifting the Tour de France conversation beyond race results to spotlight the coaches and performance teams behind cycling’s biggest stage. In this Q&A, Pinarella-36.5 Head Coach Carles Tur Carbonell explains how Team Pinarella-36.5, the Innovators, uses TrainingPeaks to prepare smarter, adapt faster, and create advantages where others see limitations.
Meet Team Pinarella-Q35.6, the Innovators
We see ourselves as a team that is constantly searching for better ways to perform. We may not always have the biggest budget or the deepest roster, but we believe intelligent preparation, innovation, and attention to detail can create meaningful advantages.
We embrace new ideas, challenge assumptions, and look for opportunities where others see limitations.
Q: How does your team specifically utilize TrainingPeaks to prepare for the unique demands of the Tour de France?
A: The Tour de France rewards teams that can adapt, innovate, and consistently make the right decisions under pressure. TrainingPeaks helps us build that process from the first training camp through the final stage.
We use TrainingPeaks to plan workloads, monitor adaptation, manage recovery, and align coaches, sports scientists, and athletes around a common understanding of performance.
The platform allows us to identify opportunities, optimize preparation, and ensure riders arrive at the Tour with the fitness and confidence required to compete against the world’s best.
For us, preparation is about more than building fitness. It’s about creating performance advantages.
Q: What specific data metrics or tools within TrainingPeaks are absolute keys to your team’s Grand Tour preparation?
A: The Performance Management Chart provides the foundation for understanding readiness throughout the season. We closely monitor:
- CTL (Chronic Training Load)
- ATL (Acute Training Load)
- TSS (Training Stress Score)
- Power-to-weight ratio
- Efficiency Factor
- Heart rate response
- Recovery trends
- Durability metrics
We are particularly interested in understanding how efficiently riders produce performance. The Tour rewards riders who can conserve energy, recover quickly, and continue producing high-level outputs over three weeks of racing.
Q: What are the key physiological indicators to you as a coach that your athletes are peaking and preparing in the right way?
Peak form is a combination of fitness, freshness, and confidence.
We look for athletes who are producing strong numbers with less physiological cost, recovering quickly between demanding efforts, and demonstrating consistency across multiple days of training and racing.
One of the strongest indicators is efficiency. When a rider can produce the required performance while spending less energy to do it, we know preparation is moving in the right direction.
