El Profe – The secret to Atletico Madrid’s fitness

Behind every elite sporting success is a snarling trainer with a whip.

In the case of Atletico Madrid, they have Óscar Ortega ‘El Profe’, ‘The Professor’. He is a short, 60 year-old Uruguayan and he’s been vital to all of the club’s success since Diego Simeone took over as head coach.

In the words of Mickey Goldmill, the fictional trainer of Rocky Balboa, to crap thunder you need to eat lightening. Ortega would be a big believer in this.

As Atletico’s fitness coach Ortega is the man responsible for making sure Simeone’s teams are able to last a whole demanding season. Given that the club’s financial resources pale in comparison to some other clubs Atleti must compensate by being able to run a few extra hundred meters per game.

Additionally, their style of football sometimes sees them play predominately without the ball, a position in which elite fitness is necessary to maintain team structure and to still have the energy to break when opportunities arise.

When Simeone arrived in 2011 he brought Ortega with him. The pair had first met during the 2003/04 season when Ortega was the Atletico fitness coach under Gregorio Manzano and Simeone was a player at the club.

So impressed was the Argentine with his fellow South American that when he launched his own coaching career at Racing Club de Avellaneda in 2006 he called Ortega and asked him to work as his fitness coach. They’ve been together ever since working throughout Argentina, in Italy and eventually moving to the Spanish capital.

Ortega’s background is extensive, having worked in far-flung places such as Mexico, Colombia and Japan. Before starting to train La Liga sides at the turn of the century, starting at Sevilla. While he has a football background his main source of income during his early coaching career was rugby which he thought at the British college in Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital.

As he began to focus more and more on football he continued to turn to rugby for tips and tricks on how to keep footballers just as fit and tough as the rugby players he’d previously coached. “There are things from rugby that are transferrable, like knowing where it’s good to pressure and how to tackle and how to work in a team” he once explained in an interview with El País.

Putting his fitness regime under the microscope there are some orthodox elements to what Ortega does as well as some very unconventional ones. Perhaps foremost amongst them is his summer camps which players have described as a living hell.

In preseason Atletico always spend sometime on retreat, usually in Segovia, just outside of Madrid. There the Uruguayan puts the players through 14 hour days of running, running and more running with just a few breaks for meals in between.

The players are made to run up and down the hills of a local golf course, past the bushes which veterans point to as a secret spot for a quick exhaustion induced vomit and all of this under the gruelling summer sun.

Ortega doesn’t allow for any slackers and the newcomers are often shocked having never been put through anything quite like this before. Like most fitness coaches he leads by example and joins in significant chunks of these runs even at 60 he’s as fit as a fiddle.

Ortega’s tactical input is also valued with Simeone allowing the Uruguayan to design custom fitness sessions based on the tendencies of the upcoming opponent. He even makes sure training sessions are as game-like as possible with few stoppages between each drill.

When it comes to making substitutions Ortega’s input is valued too as he knows better than anyone else which players have, as the cliché goes, fresh legs. He’ll be on the sidelines with the players from the 46th minute onwards to put them through their stretches and make sure that whoever is selected to enter the fray is truly ready to do so. This is partly why Atletico’s players suffer so few muscle injuries. Nobody crosses that white line feeling stiff.

Ortega’s most important contribution though is in the general cardiovascular fitness of the squad. The hard miles put in running the golf course in preseason help but their ability to keep up this rhythm all season is unparalleled when compared to other elite European sides with a high number of games.

He is the reason that they had the energy to sustain a Barcelona siege on the final day of the triumphant 2013/14 season. He is the reason that they were able to compete on all fronts in the 57 matches of the 2015/16 season. And he is the reason that they were able to thwart Arsenal players in the first leg of the 2017/18 Europa League semi-finals even though they’d played 80 minutes with ten men.

Óscar Ortega is the reason for Atletico Madrid’s third lung.