After the ugliest team split in women's cycling, Vollering rebuilt at FDJ-Suez and won stages nobody expected. Four choices, all made between November and February, did the heavy lifting.
Demi Vollering's 2024 was a mess. A tailbone fracture. A public falling-out with SD Worx. A move to FDJ-Suez that half the paddock thought was a mistake.
Then she came back and won.
Not because she found a new interval. Because she rewrote her winter.
Her 2025 spring form has been quietly better than her 2023 spring form, the year she won everything.
And when you look at the choices she made from November 2024 to February 2025, four of them keep coming up.
None of them are secret. All of them are boring. That's the point.
Winter Habit 1: Long, Slow, Boring, and Almost Twice the Volume
Vollering's team of the last few years leaned polarized, meaning 80% of ride time below the first lactate threshold and 20% above the second.
Her FDJ-Suez block flipped closer to pyramidal, with a bigger middle band and a genuinely brutal aerobic base.
Think seven-hour rides. In January. In the Sierra Nevada.
The endurance base isn't glamorous, but the physiology is unforgiving.
Your mitochondrial density and fat-oxidation ceiling get built almost entirely at low intensity, and both take months of accumulated hours to move.
Why the Zone 2 Purists Miss the Point
Zone 2 works. But pure Zone 2 isn't what these riders do.
Vollering's winter blocks include what her coach has called "controlled tempo," which is closer to sweet-spot for most amateurs.
Roughly 83 to 88% of max heart rate. Sustained. For hours.
That's not what you'll read on most training blogs.
Winter Habit 2: Sleep Was Treated as a Performance Input, Not a Recovery Tool
Vollering's team environment at FDJ-Suez was rebuilt around one thing she said publicly kept breaking at SD Worx: rest.
Not stretching. Not massage. Actual, protected, uninterrupted sleep.
She reportedly moved to a 9-hour minimum sleep floor during heavy training blocks, with a 30-minute post-lunch nap on any day over 4 hours in the saddle.
What the Physiology Says
Cycling data mirrors it.
You don't out-train under-sleep. Nobody does. Not even her.
Winter Habit 3: She Skipped Races. On Purpose. Loudly.
This one made headlines.
Vollering pulled out of two early-season races in 2025 that her old team would have almost certainly forced her to start.
Her Stage 1 time gain at her next block proved the call.
The logic isn't complicated.
Racing is training you can't control. Your zones get dictated by the pack, recovery gets compressed, and taper-race-recover costs 10 to 14 days you could have spent building.
For a rider whose engine is already the biggest in the peloton, that math is a bad trade.
Winter Habit 4: A Strength Block, Then Nothing
Vollering hits the gym hard from October to early December. Squats, deadlifts, single-leg step-ups, hip thrusts, core.
Then she basically stops.
By January, the gym drops to a maintenance session, sometimes just once every 10 days.
The bike takes over completely.
This front-loaded model beats the year-round "twice a week forever" approach for one reason: neuromuscular gains transfer, hypertrophy interferes.
Adding leg mass in racing season is a slow way to lose watts per kilo. Building it in October and holding it in April is how you show up with real force production and race weight at the same time.
Most amateurs get this backwards.
They lift lightest in winter ("I need the miles") and heaviest in summer ("I finally have time in the gym"). Both instincts are wrong.
Where This Falls Short for Amateurs
Vollering rides 25 to 32 hours a week in a heavy winter block.
You don't. You probably have 8 to 12 hours, tops, and a job, and a kid, and a house that needs a boiler serviced.
You can't literally copy her plan. But the ratios transfer, and so does the mindset.
The base-first, strength-fronted, sleep-protected winter works at 8 hours a week too.
It just looks like 5 hours of endurance, 1.5 hours of tempo or sweet-spot, and 1 gym session, with the same 9-hour sleep floor and the same willingness to skip races that would blow it up.
Pure Zone 2 with no tempo or sweet-spot leaves the middle of your fitness pyramid hollow.
Vollering's winter fixes that.
Yours can too.
How to Actually Steal This
Pick one to install this month. Not four.
Sleep is the free one. It costs zero watts and zero hours, and if you're currently sleeping 7 hours, an extra 60 minutes will move your FTP more than a new $400 chain lube ever will.
If sleep is already handled, add the tempo band.
Take your Zone 2 hour-and-a-half and, once a week, ride 40 minutes of it at 85% of max heart rate.
Boring. Effective. That's the whole prescription.
If tempo is handled, front-load the gym.
Two heavy strength sessions a week from now until early December. Then taper it out.
Race skipping comes last, because it's the hardest culturally.
But if you're an amateur and you're doing more than one A-priority event per training block, you're doing what SD Worx used to do to Vollering. It didn't work for her either.
The Statement Vollering's Winter Actually Made
She didn't win in 2025 because she found a new training zone.
She won because she treated the boring months like they mattered.
Long rides. Real sleep. Fewer races. A gym block with a shelf life.
The best in the world win on the same fundamentals your coach has been telling you about for a decade. The only difference is she actually did them.
That's not nothing.
