Iñigo San Millán has started working at Lezama
Iñigo San Millán has started working at Lezama
The Performance Director, who considers it is "a privilege and a great challenge" to join Athletic Club, met the group of professionals who will work with him
Iñigo San Millán has started working at Athletic Club. He arrived at Lezama early on Wednesday morning with Mikel González, director of football, and was introduced to the group of professionals he will be working with, such as Jon Larruskain, who will be his assistant
After meeting his new colleagues, San Millán watched the first team training session and was greeted by Jose Angel Iribar.
After a photo session for the media, he gave his first impressions to the Club.
"It's more than an honour, it is a privilege to work at Athletic Club, because of its historic DNA and what it represents for Basque society," he said.
🎙 Iñigo San Millán, Athletic Club's new Performance Director:
— Athletic Club (@Athletic_en) October 25, 2023
"It's a truly privilege to be here because of the historical DNA that Athletic has." #AthleticClub 🦁 pic.twitter.com/DR3Oz4dl2k
"It is a great honour, a great professional and personal challenge because of the idiosyncrasy of working for the future, working with the academy players.
"It is a great challenge for me to try to bring out the best of the players. We have to take care of the present, but look to the future."
San Millán has absorbed experiences from many different sports, but has had his greatest successes working in cycling.
He said: "There are many concepts that can be utilised from one sport and applied to another. I have worked in many sports and you always learn to incorporate new methodologies from all of them."
The sports scientist gave a brief outline of the relationship between cycling and football.
"In cycling, we work a lot on monitoring internal work load, in football the measurement of external load by GPS is very successful," he added.
"It has evolved a lot to see how many kilometres a player runs, their top speed, etc. For example, you can monitor how much the player sprints in the last 20 minutes.
"But what's missing is the internal load, why that player drops in performance. It could be due to lactatation, muscle micro-tears, general fatigue or high intensity sprinting.
"In cycling, these parameters are very well developed. Bringing together the external and internal load is a challenge."