Bent Rønnestad

He is a professor, PhD, and chair of Exercise Physiology at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, where he founded and developed the Exercise and Sport program in 2005. In addition to advising several international elite coaches/teams, he is also an advisor to the Norwegian Olympic Federation, where he conducts physiological research and supervises elite Norwegian coaches and athletes in endurance and team sports. Dr. Rønnestad’s research focuses on the unique and combined effects of strength and endurance training on elite sports performance, as well as health factors in the general population. He has published over one hundred international peer-reviewed articles, edited three books, written fourteen book chapters, and supervised thirty master’s students and seven doctoral students.

Facundo Ahumada

He began his studies in Physical Education in 1997 in Córdoba, Argentina. He later went to the National University of Catamarca to study Exercise Physiology with Juan Carlos Mazza from 2001 to 2002. In 2008 he graduated in Chemistry from the Department of Physical Chemistry at the National University of Córdoba and researched lactate biosensors for a year. That year he also did a research stay at the European University of Madrid where he worked with Jonathan Esteve-Lanao and other sports scientists and endurance coaches. In 2018 he obtained a master’s degree in Endurance Sports from the University of Murcia in Spain. Facundo is the founder of Endurance Tool, an online platform that connects endurance coaches and athletes, and allows coaches to design and control the training process of their athletes. As a coach, he has worked with endurance athletes for over fifteen years and is the head coach of Entrenamiento Óptimo, a team that focuses on evidence-based cycling training. For the past five years he has been one of the coaches of the Argentine mountain bike XCO team. He is currently one of the exercise physiologists at the human performance laboratory Ergolab in Córdoba (Argentina).

After many years of writing informative articles about endurance sports for his magazine, in early 2022, José Enrique Quiroga from Sportraining, a specialized Spanish magazine on endurance sports, invited Carles Tur and Facundo Ahumada to write a book edited by them. They had been editing books on endurance sports by different experts in this area for some years. The initial proposal focused on a book covering endurance sports in general, which was interesting. However, we found that there were already other proposals with those characteristics, and our main purpose was to generate something new that would truly add value to professionals, particularly coaches of endurance sports and athletes. For that, it was important to develop a topic that we mastered, and at the same time work as a team with top-level professionals.

That’s how we came to the conclusion that interval training, also known as high intensity interval training, or intermittent training, or in Anglo-Saxon literature as HIIT (high-intensity interval training) or HIT (high-intensity training), was a very relevant topic, widely used by coaches, and that it was also appropriate to focus it on a sport. We concluded that cycling was the appropriate one, considering that both Carles and Facundo had been working in it for many years. In the case of Carles, for some time as head of performance of the Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team, a professional cycling team, and in the case of Facundo as one of the coaches of the Argentine mountain bike national team, and cyclists of all levels, and having founded the platform for training control Endurance Tool, and having analysed thousands of workouts of cyclists of all specialties. And to complement our knowledge and experience, it seemed appropriate to try to add to the team who we consider the sports scientist who has contributed the most to the science of interval training in cycling in the 21st century, the Norwegian scientist Bent Rønnestad.

We contacted Bent, and he found it a challenging project, and agreed to join. That’s how we started working and the HIT for Cycling Project was born, a project that went through several difficult times, even where we thought we were not going to be able to continue, and that generated many doubts about whether we could be successful with the objectives we had set ourselves.

It was really challenging to work with Bent, and write the English version of the book, since naturally Bent does not speak Spanish. We worked hard and had meetings of up to 120 minutes frequently to be able to advance with our project. We always sought to make the task easier for the reader and develop everything as simply as possible. In each of the many revisions to each chapter, Bent would tell us “Help the reader”, seeking to simplify, remove information that was not relevant, support what was stated based on the most recent scientific evidence, or the appropriate context to each figure. We reviewed every letter, every phrase and paragraph of each chapter over and over again, looking for the right way to present and develop our ideas.

Bent and Facundo in Bent’s office in Lillehamer in September 2024, with the versions of the books published in Spanish and English.

Facundo and Carles in Carles home in Barcelona (Spain).