How Jonas Vingegaard Trains (and Why He Rode the Giro First in 2026)

If Tadej Pogačar wins races with sudden violence, Jonas Vingegaard wins them by holding a brutally high steady output for forty minutes and waiting for everyone else to crack. The two ride in the same era, at roughly the same level, with almost opposite temperaments, and their training reflects that. Pogačar's story is a mountain of Zone 2 with explosive work on top. Vingegaard's story is narrower and more clinical: find the exact intensity that matters for the climbs he wants to win on, measure it properly, and defend the conditions that let him train it week after week. In 2026 he changed the recipe in a big way, and it worked right up until it didn't.

Train the strength, not the weakness

The most useful thing anyone at Visma has said publicly about Vingegaard's training is also the least intuitive. Mathieu Heijboer, the team's head of performance, explained that they deliberately built on what Vingegaard was already good at rather than patching what he wasn't: "If you train a lot for explosivity you lose length in your duration, and the other way around."

That's a real physiological trade-off, not a slogan. The adaptations that make you able to produce a huge one-minute effort are not the adaptations that let you sit at threshold for forty minutes, and past a certain point chasing both means getting neither. So Vingegaard's team pointed his training at long, high, steady efforts, the exact demand of a 30 to 45 minute mountain pass, instead of trying to teach him to counter-attack like Pogačar.

For you, the question is the same one in a smaller form: what does your goal event actually demand? A hilly gran fondo, a flat 40k time trial and a criterium reward different engines. Pick the demand, then train it specifically rather than doing a bit of everything.

The number that runs the whole plan

The intensity Vingegaard's training is organised around is threshold: the highest effort you can hold in a metabolic steady state. Visma is a famously testing-led team, and the point of testing is that thresholds are measured, not guessed from how a ride felt. Every zone below and above is then anchored to that measured number.

This is the part that transfers cleanly, because you can do a version of it this weekend. Your FTP is the amateur's version of that anchor, and once you have it, every zone in your week follows from it:

If you'd rather derive it from two hard efforts than from one dreaded 20-minute test, the critical power model does the same job from a different angle, and on the running or heart-rate side the equivalent anchor is your lactate threshold heart rate. What matters is not which protocol you pick but that the number comes from a test you repeat, so you can see it move. A lab test is more precise, though a well-run field test is close enough for everyone reading this.

Once the anchor is real, the threshold work that sits on top of it stops being guesswork. Long intervals held at a genuinely correct intensity are the single most Vingegaard-shaped session in cycling.

Availability is the actual training plan

Heijboer's other stated priority was blunt: "We wanted to make sure he was always healthy and fit." Vingegaard races strikingly little compared to his rivals, and the thin race calendar exists so the training blocks can happen intact.

This gets dismissed as a pro-only luxury, which is exactly backwards. You have less recovery capacity than a professional, not more, and your training is far more likely to be wrecked by a stacked weekend of hard group rides than by a lack of intensity. Consistency compounds; heroics don't. Keeping an eye on your training load is the least glamorous and most reliable upgrade available to an amateur.

Altitude, heat, and the things you can't copy

Then there's the pro-only layer. Vingegaard spends long blocks at altitude, in Sierra Nevada and Tignes, to push red-cell production, and Visma is among the many WorldTour teams now using structured heat training, which produces a similar plasma-volume adaptation without a mountain. Before the 2026 Tour, he and the team spent two weeks in Tignes and then tapered, without racing again between the Giro and the Grand Départ.

You can't replicate a two-week camp at 2,000m. What you can copy is the logic underneath it: a hard block, then a taper, then the event. Not a permanent simmer.

The 2026 change: burnout, and the Giro

Here's the shift worth understanding. For four of the previous five seasons, Vingegaard's spring was identical: altitude camp, Dauphiné, altitude camp, Tour. In 2026 he broke it. He has spoken about how close he came to walking away from the sport, saying he "really needed the change," and the team restructured his season around a first Giro d'Italia rather than another rehearsal of the same eight weeks.

Physiologically it looked like a gamble, since a three-week Grand Tour in May is an enormous cost to carry into July. It did not look like one in May. He won the Giro outright by 5:22 over Felix Gall with five stage wins, becoming the eighth man to win all three Grand Tours. Then he went to Tignes, and then to Barcelona.

It ended badly. Vingegaard crashed out of the 2026 Tour on stage 15 with a fractured collarbone, which is the part of the sport no training plan controls. That doesn't retroactively make the plan wrong. The interesting claim survives: a motivated athlete on a slightly imperfect programme beats a flat one executing a perfect programme, and monotony is a real cost that shows up in your legs eventually. If your training has become something you endure, changing the shape of the year is a legitimate intervention, not an indulgence.

The unglamorous secret: eight years with one coach

Vingegaard worked with the Dutch coach Tim Heemskerk from the start of his WorldTour career, roughly eight years, and has called him one of the best coaches out there. Heemskerk's own framing is the one to sit with: the magic starts after three years. Not after three weeks of a new plan, and not after one winter.

That relationship ended in 2026, with Heemskerk leaving Visma and later joining Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe, where he now works with Remco Evenepoel. Which is its own quiet lesson about how much of a top athlete's performance sits in continuity rather than in any single session.

Almost nobody reading this is under-trained because they picked the wrong interval. They're under-trained because they've never run the same sensible plan for three uninterrupted years.

What you can actually steal from it

• Anchor everything to a measured number. Test, don't estimate. Set your bands from your FTP, critical power or threshold heart rate, then re-test on a schedule so you can see the trend.
• Train the demand of your event. Long steady climbs and short sharp attacks need different work. Choose, and accept the trade-off. Threshold training is the highest-return choice for most endurance events.
• Protect the block. Fewer wrecked weeks beats more heroic days. Race and hard-group-ride less than you want to if that's what keeps the training intact.
• Periodise, don't simmer. Build, taper, target, recover. Holding form all year is how you hold no form at all.
• Stay in it for years. The compounding beats the optimisation. A boring plan you actually repeat outperforms a perfect plan you abandon in November.

The honest summary of Vingegaard's method is that it's not exotic. Measure the intensity that matters, train it specifically, keep the athlete healthy enough to keep doing it, and let time do the rest. The exotic part is the patience.

Sources

Mathieu Heijboer's comments on training strengths over weaknesses and on prioritising health and availability are reported by Velo. Vingegaard's "I really needed the change" comments and the reasoning behind the 2026 Giro-Tour approach are reported by Cyclingnews, along with the pre-Tour Tignes camp. The 2026 Giro result and Grand Tour set are reported by ESPN, and his stage 15 abandon at the 2026 Tour by The National. Tim Heemskerk's long partnership with Vingegaard and his move to Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe are reported by Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. Quotes are attributed to those reports.

Cover photo by Hugo LUC, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.