4 min read
This clip of Tadej Pogačar ahead of a stage in the Tour de France last year has been making the rounds online as a lesson in “mobility.” But what Tadej is doing isn’t actually mobility work; it’s a warm-up, and what he’s doing specifically is activation. That distinction matters because mobility training and warm-up work aren’t interchangeable, and they’re not trying to accomplish the same thing. (And yes, we need them both!)
Mobility training has a specific job: restoring or expanding your available range of motion. What Pogačar is doing in this clip is different. What he’s doing here is activation. He’s waking up key tissues, sharpening muscle coordination, priming his nervous system, and preparing his body to produce force on the bike. That’s really smart programming, and for a cyclist about to race, it’s exactly the right thing to be doing. But it’s still different from mobility training.
Based on the clip, Pogačar appears to be performing three simple activation drills: a banded bridge variation, a banded monster walk, and a banded rear foot elevated split squat, often called a Bulgarian split squat or split lunge.
The bridge is in there to wake up the glutes and hamstrings. Cyclists tend to be quad dominant and live in hip flexion, so a bridge activation is a fast reminder that the body’s posterior chain still needs to contribute.
The monster walk targets the lateral hip musculature, especially the glute medius and other hip stabilizers that help control the pelvis and keep the knees tracking well. Those muscles are not flashy, but they matter if you want stable force transfer instead of side-to-side slop.
The banded split squat brings it all together. It is a single leg strength and control drill that asks the glutes, quads, adductors, foot, and core to work synergistically. For cyclists, that makes sense: pedaling may look symmetrical, but it’s essentially a repeated single-leg task.
In the video, Tadej’s trainer has also added in upper body activation to this move to further fire up the core, as well as the shoulders, back, and arms. This full-body functional approach is super smart, and certainly no surprise coming from the training staff of one of the best cyclists in the world.
Put those three moves together and the goal becomes obvious: Wake up the posterior chain, turn on the hips and core, and clean up control from the pelvis down. Then go ride fast!
Think of it like this: mobility training helps improve the positions you can access. A warm-up that includes activation moves helps you use those positions. Both matter. They just solve different problems. And unless Tadej is dealing with something specific, he wouldn’t be out there trying to do mobility training in full race kit minutes before the start. He’s getting ready to perform. That’s a warm-up, and it’s a very good one.
Why Activation Matters for Cyclists
Cycling is repetitive and largely fixed in terms of movement. You spend hours in hip flexion, locked into the same basic pattern, asking the same muscles to fire thousands of times. That makes a good warm-up especially important, not just because riders need to feel loose, but because they need to feel ready.
Activation helps bridge the gap between standing around in your kit and actually being prepared to make power. It raises your body temperature, sharpens muscle recruitment, and reminds the body which tissues are supposed to do the work. For cyclists, that usually means the glutes, hips, core, and the single-leg stabilizers that help keep the pelvis organized.
Research supports the value of this kind of preparation. In one study of trained cyclists, a pre-ride warm-up improved 3 kilometer time trial performance by roughly 2.6 to 2.8 percent compared with no warm-up, likely because riders reached efficient oxygen uptake faster once the effort began. Broader sports research has also shown that warm-ups can improve performance by increasing muscle temperature, enhancing neural drive, and improving force production. In shorter, high-intensity efforts, warm-ups have also been shown to improve sprint performance.
In other words, this isn’t about chasing extra range of motion in a parking lot. It’s about getting the right muscles online and firing so that you can pedal efficiently under load.
The Bottom Line
If you want better performance and more durability on the bike, don’t confuse a warm-up with mobility work. Both matter. They just solve different problems. Mobility training improves your positions, and warm-ups help you use them.
What Pogačar is doing in that clip isn’t mobility, but rather a smart, simple activation sequence from an athlete who understands exactly what his body needs before a race start. And for regular cyclists, that’s the real takeaway: It’s not that you need a more complicated pre-ride routine, it’s that you need a purposeful one that’s the right tool for the job.
Natascha has been a NASM-certified personal trainer for over ten years, focusing on functional strength training and corrective exercise—which is a fancy way of saying her passion is teaching people how to move better, with more strength and less pain. She holds multiple certifications, including specializations in corrective exercise, stretching and flexibility, behavior change, nutrition and more. She’s also been into bikes for almost three decades, and has at various times been a bike mechanic, a frame builder’s apprentice, a grunt at a bike messenger company, a fitness studio owner, a Spin instructor and a few different things at a few different bike companies. These days, she’s one of Bicycling’s Health and Fitness editors.