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Olympic speed skating champion reveals the secret to endurance training

Sweden's Niels van der Poel trained six hours each day in recovery heart rate zones

Sweden’s Niels van der Poel, who only started speed-skating competitively in 2019, recently dominated the 5,000m and 10,000m speed skating events at the Beijing Winter Games, winning two golds and breaking the 10,000m world record in the process. After winning the medals, van der Poel published a 62-page training document going over his training philosophy, training splits and intervals in the lead-up to the Olympic Games, and, speed skating being somewhat akin to running, we were curious.

What Van der Poel found was that all endurance sports require strength, core stability, a high VO2max and a strong aerobic engine. “When you put all of these pieces together, you will become an immaculate endurance athlete,” Van der Poel says.

Speed skating is very similar to running, in that your most important asset is your aerobic capacity. Van der Poel approached his training believing that his puzzle only had two pieces: competition speed and aerobic capacity.

The start of the women’s 10,000m at the Canadian championships in 2017.

Let’s use the 10K distance on the track and road for this example: it’s easy for the race to go wrong if you go out too hard, but everyone has to run the same distance. “First you need to build the capacity,” Van der Poel says. Three months before competing, the skater started building a base, which saw him training six hours a day in recovery HR zones. “I built up the aerobic capacity by running and on the bike to skate a lap at 30 km/hr, then structured a personalized recovery program so that I could skate a 30 as often as possible for extended periods.”

Van der Poel uses low heart rate training to build his aerobic base, so his body can learn to run farther and faster at a lower HR. This allows him to work aerobically longer before crossing into anaerobic activity, which means exercising longer and faster before getting tired. Runners can also do this.

Using the Olympic champion’s training regime as an example, he would often push his body to six hours of active run and bike recovery each day to build up his aerobic level. 

An example week from Van der Poel’s aerobic build:

Mon: Six hours biking at 220W – Tues: Six hours biking at 220W – Wed: Six hours biking at 220W – Thurs: Six hours biking at 220W – Fri: 10K run plus three hours of biking at 210W. Total hours = 28. Van der Poel would often take a rest day on Saturday and Sunday.

The longer the race, the more you rely on your aerobic system, so it makes sense that Van der Poel pushed HR training to the extreme. (Building a strong aerobic base is also useful for shorter races like the 800m, so you can rely on it more in the early stages of the race.) Low heart rate training to build aerobic capacity is found to be useful in any endurance sport.

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