How Demi Vollering Trains (and Why She Halved Her Race Days)
The interesting thing about Demi Vollering's 2026 is not the results, spectacular as they are. It's what she changed to get them. Going into the season she cut her race programme from 29 days to 18, added an extra altitude camp, and rebuilt the calendar so that structured training blocks, not races, were the backbone of the year. Then she won Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, the Tour of Flanders, La Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Giro d'Italia Women overall, which completed her set of all three women's Grand Tours. The lesson is not a session. It's an allocation.
Fewer races, more training
In her own description of the change:
The big difference is that my summer is calmer, without a Spanish block and with one more altitude camp before the Giro. I've got more structured training blocks around the races.
Racing feels like the most productive thing an ambitious athlete can do, which is exactly why it's the easiest thing to overdo. A race day gives you an enormous, uncontrolled stimulus and then takes several days back in recovery, and you don't get to choose what it trains. A training block gives you a specific stimulus you designed, at a dose you picked. Both matter, but they compete for the same limited recovery budget, and most people, pro and amateur, spend too much of it on the uncontrolled one.
We saw the same principle in how Jonas Vingegaard trains, where the whole point of a thin race calendar is that the blocks survive intact. Vollering's version is a useful check for a normal rider: if your season is a rolling series of hard group rides and events, you're racing, not training, and your form is whatever falls out of that rather than something you built.
Long climbs don't lie
Her chosen ground is the sustained climb:
I love the long climbs because they don't lie. If you win there, you are the strongest.
That's an argument for training the thing the climb tests, which is sustainable power over 20 to 40 minutes rather than a sprint. To train it deliberately you need an anchor number, and you don't need a lab for one. Critical power is the cleanest amateur version, because it comes from two honest efforts rather than one dreaded 20-minute test:
Critical Power
229W
W′ (anaerobic work)
12.9kJ
12857 J
| Zone | Range | What it trains |
|---|---|---|
| Z2 | Endurance ≤ 183 W | Aerobic base below CP. Easy, RPE 3–4. |
| Z3 | Tempo 183–206 W | Sub-threshold steady work. Comfortably hard, RPE 5–6. |
| Z4 | Threshold (CP) 206–229 W | Right at critical power, maximal metabolic steady state. Hard, RPE 7–8. |
| Z5 | VO₂ / W′ tapping 229–274 W | Above CP, every second draws down your W′ battery. Very hard, RPE 9. |
| Z6 | Anaerobic ≥ 274 W | Heavy W′ depletion; short maximal efforts. Maximal, RPE 10. |
Z2 · Endurance. Aerobic base below CP. Easy, RPE 3–4.
Z3 · Tempo. Sub-threshold steady work. Comfortably hard, RPE 5–6.
Z4 · Threshold (CP). Right at critical power, maximal metabolic steady state. Hard, RPE 7–8.
Z5 · VO₂ / W′ tapping. Above CP, every second draws down your W′ battery. Very hard, RPE 9.
Z6 · Anaerobic. Heavy W′ depletion; short maximal efforts. Maximal, RPE 10.
- Critical Power is the asymptote of the power–duration curve: the highest power you can sustain (in theory) indefinitely. W′ is the fixed amount of work available above CP, your anaerobic 'battery'.
- Two-parameter CP needs two maximal efforts of clearly different durations (e.g. 3 min and 12 min). Efforts too close in length give an unstable estimate.
- CP usually lands within a few percent of FTP, but it adds W′, which models how long you can stay above threshold.
A PDF of your personalized results, with a QR code to reopen them anytime.
Do a short maximal effort and a longer one, feed both in, and you get an estimate of the intensity you can hold in a metabolic steady state, plus the size of your anaerobic reserve above it. Everything in threshold training hangs off that number, and the FTP calculator is the alternative route to the same anchor.
Raise the power, don't shrink the rider
Vollering has been unusually direct about the pressure on women's riders to get lighter, and about refusing it. After being pressed on her weight at the 2025 Tour de France Femmes, she said:
I make, and will continue to make, every decision in my career by putting my health first.
She has also pushed back on the idea that becoming the lightest rider in the peloton is her route to winning, and framed nutrition around the basics: eat properly before training, during training and after training, and focus on recovery rather than on being as light as possible.
This matters for amateurs more than it does for her, because the maths is seductive and wrong. Climbing is decided by watts per kilogram, and there are two ways to move that ratio. Raising the numerator is slow, reliable and makes you a better rider. Shrinking the denominator by under-eating is fast, feels productive, and tends to take your power, your recovery, your hormones and your bone density with it. The riders who win long climbs are not the ones who ate least. They're the ones with the biggest engine they could build while staying healthy.
If your instinct when you look at your W/kg is to eat less, that's the instinct to interrogate.
Training with a cycle, not against it
Vollering is one of the few riders at the top of the sport who talks openly about how her menstrual cycle interacts with training:
Just before my period comes I always feel a bit less motivated, a bit more insecure, my sleep is less good, my heart rate is a bit higher, my breathing is a bit more hard.
Read that as data, not as an excuse. She is describing measurable things: sleep quality, resting heart rate, perceived effort at a given intensity. If those shift predictably across your cycle, then a flat four-week training template that ignores it will misread perfectly normal fluctuation as bad form, or worse, as a reason to push harder.
The practical version for an amateur is unglamorous and free. Log where you are in your cycle next to your usual numbers for a few months and look for the pattern. The research base here is still thin, so nobody can hand you a validated protocol, but your own several months of data is enough to stop you panicking about a Tuesday that was always going to feel heavy.
What she's actually pointing at
She rides for FDJ United-Suez, has extended into 2028, and goes into the Tour de France Femmes on 1 August as the rider of the season and the stated favourite. It's her explicit goal for the year, and it's the one thing her palmarès is missing since 2023, having finished second in each of the last two editions. By the time you read this it may have been decided.
What holds up regardless of that result is the shape of the year: less racing, more deliberate work, fuelled properly, without trying to solve a power problem by getting smaller.
What you can actually steal from it
- Spend your recovery budget on purpose. Every event you enter is stimulus you didn't design. Fewer of them, and better blocks between them, is usually the higher-return trade.
- Anchor your training to a measured number. Critical power or FTP, tested on a schedule so you can see the trend rather than guess at it.
- Train the demand. If your goal is long climbs, the currency is sustainable 20 to 40 minute power, not sprints.
- Fix the fuelling before the physique. Eat around your training. Under-fuelling blunts the adaptation you did the session for, which is a strange way to get faster.
- Raise the numerator. Better W/kg by building power, not by shrinking yourself.
- Log your own patterns. For female athletes especially, a few months of personal data beats a generic template.
More in this series: Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar, Kilian Jornet, Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Eliud Kipchoge.
Sources
The 2026 schedule overhaul and Vollering's description of it are reported by IDL Procycling. The "long climbs don't lie" quote is from SRAM. Her health-first statement on rider weight is reported by Cyclingnews, and her comments on periods, fuelling and women's health by Cyclingnews and Cycling Up To Date. Her Giro d'Italia Women win and Grand Tour set are reported by Cyclingnews, and her contract extension by Cycling Weekly. No verified FTP, VO2max or weight figures for her are in the public record, so none are quoted here.
Cover photo by Kakoula10, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
