Ask Jonas Vingegaard the secret to his success, and he’ll point to his eight years with Dutch coach Tim Heemskerk. “He’s one of the best coaches out there,” the two-time Tour de France champion said in March, shortly after Heemskerk departed Visma-Lease a Bike. “He was more than just my coach – he is a good friend… I had complete trust in him. Tim is hard to replace.”
In early May, Heemskerk was announced as the latest person to join the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe staff as the German team continue their bid to challenge UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Visma-Lease a Bike at the Tour.
To launch Cycling Weekly‘s new Masterminds of Performance series exploring the philosophies of the world’s best coaches, Heemskerk shares the wisdom gleaned from three decades in the sport. “I wouldn’t say coaching is an experiment,” he says. “It’s applied science and art, which you implement using your intuition.”
A former Dutch national mountain biker, Heemskerk’s coaching journey began at just 20 while studying human movement sciences at Maastricht University. After stints running his own coaching business in Canada, managing the Dutch national MTB squad through the 2016 Rio Olympics, and working with USA Cycling. He joined Jumbo-Visma in late 2018.
He arrived at the exact same time as a young, unpolished diamond named Jonas Vingegaard. Though Heemskerk would also go on to coach Giro d’Italia winner Simon Yates and American Matteo Jorgenson, it is his history-making partnership with the Dane that ultimately cemented his reputation.
Q: How would you describe your coaching philosophy?
(Image credit: Visma Lease a Bike)
● Age: 50
● Nationality: Dutch
● Notable riders coached: Jonas Vingegaard, Simon Yates, Matteo Jorgenson
● Favourite motto: “The magic starts after three years.”
● Best achievements as coach: 2x 1st, GC – Tour de France overall (with Vingegaard, 2022, 2023); 1st – Paris-Nice (with Jorgenson, 2024)
● Best achievements as rider: 1st – TransRockies MTB race (2007)
A: My coaching belief is that yearly progression and variation are key. When I started to work with Jonas, some coaches laughed at [the volume I had set] and said they were training more than Jonas, but that’s part of yearly progression.
You have to see where someone is coming from, and year by year you increase the load. Someone said to me when I started coaching that the magic starts after three years.
I was working with Jonas for three years before he got a big result. We had been preparing his body for riding GC – whether a week, 10 days or a Grand Tour – to make him strong enough to be able to recover properly and handle those loads.
That takes years, and you have to be patient to learn what does and doesn’t work. Progress is not so loud, and it doesn’t announce itself – it quietly stacks up day by day and then you see the results.
Vingegaard won two Tours with dominant climbing displays
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Q: What was Jonas Vingegaard like to coach?
A: It was very nice to work with him. If we decided to go for something together – and we always decided together – he completely went for it. He was always giving feedback, such as saying he felt good and could cope with more – and then we discussed with the team what it meant.
After working with someone for eight years, you become friends and get to know each other very well, and you both pick up the phone to each other. I am not a waiter with a golden plate who will give you what you want; I will give you what you need. We will discuss it, we will agree or disagree, and then we’ll find the right approach together. Jonas always understood that.
“I’m so proud of what we did together for eight years.”
Q: Why did you decide to step away from Visma?
A: I don’t need to discuss anymore why I made the decision I did. I said when I left that recently I had been struggling to apply my creativity and passion. People in the media and on podcasts said that I had an ego, and that hurt me because I’m a coach – I’m in the background. It’s never been about me, but what we did as a team. I continued working with Jonas until right before Paris-Nice, and of course, I’ve stayed in touch with him. I’m so proud of what we did together as a team for eight years.
Q: As a coach, how do you prepare a rider for an exceptionally demanding race?
A: If a race is raced very aggressively, you need to prepare for that, but there is no guarantee it will suit the rider’s physiology. For example, when working with climber-type GC riders who are very aerobically trained with a very high threshold power, getting into a very aggressive way of training and racing changes the rider’s physiology within weeks. So you’ve really got to work together, discover what works physiologically for the riders, and then discuss what races suit them and how to adapt.
Tim Heemskerk (l) worked with Vingegaard for eight years
(Image credit: Bram Berkien)
Q: How do you design the perfect training schedule?
A: I strive for maximum adaptation, which sounds easy but is actually complex. When I finish a weekly schedule, it’s like a painting; it’s personal. Maybe 80% is the same as another similar rider’s schedule, but there are little adjustments here or there, small finesses, and that personalisation that makes it a painting.
Then the daily monitoring starts and you need flexibility to adjust it on a daily basis. Every rider has a unique physiology and you can’t exactly predict the outcome of a training session. After training, the work starts to really monitor and reflect and talk to the athlete to see if what happened is what you expected. So you have the planning part, and then the monitoring and reflecting part which are just as important.
Q: How much do you involve your riders in the coaching plan?
A: You have to work together. You learn about each other over the years and learn how to get the best out of the athlete. To use Jonas as an example, after eight years working with me he can make his own training schedules, as he knows so much.
That’s a different way of working together – he can tell me what he needs. Obviously, the coach makes the schedule, but what the athlete actually does is decided by talking and together deciding what is needed at that moment.
Heemskerk has also helped Jorgenson to shine
(Image credit: Unknown)
Q: How often are you in contact with your riders?
A: Every day, because proper daily monitoring is essential. You can use all the metrics in the world, but the challenge and difficulty is to make it simple for yourself. That’s something that only comes with experience.
A young coach will look at everything – mountains of data, spreadsheets and research papers – and over the years you, with intuition, learn how to judge everything properly, filter out the less important information, and discuss it with your colleagues. It’s a matter of asking yourself: what did we learn today that will help us tomorrow?
Q: What’s a good recovery day?
Pro philosophy, amateur reality
We asked Tim Heemskerk for his top three tips for amateur riders.
1. Respect the slow burn: “Weekend warriors tend to push too hard. In most of my coaching, I always tell the athlete to go a bit slower. Easy endurance rides in Zone 1 should make up most of the training. I believe in the classic approach where you steadily increase hours and intensity.”
2. Scale the load, not the lifestyle: “A WorldTour rider will train 20-30 hours a week, but a well-trained amateur won’t do much more than 10-12 hours. They shouldn’t stress and try to fit in longer hours just because Tadej Pogačar does. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
3. Build your own backroom staff: “If someone can do something better than you to help you, let them. In my case, I don’t have all the knowledge myself: I need other coaches, nutritionists, aerodynamics experts and others around me to help me.”
A: This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently, as it’s very common now for heat training and strength training to be added to a rider’s schedule on their recovery day.
You need to ask yourself: is the rest day a proper recovery day? Or is this now a day that has increased in load over the years? I’m a strong believer that if you’ve done the work, you have to respect your recovery days and reduce the physical and cognitive load on a rider.
That also means not doing as many interviews on a rest day or reducing screentime, as that all increases the cognitive load. Athletes and coaches always want to become faster and want to do more and more, but it’s better to plan to do heat training or the gym session on training days.
Some riders like to ride their bike on a rest day, and you can allow them to do so for a little while, but really you shouldn’t be focusing on cycling when you’re meant to be recovering.
Q: How do you improve your coaching skills?
A: My background is in research and I’m curious all of the time, so I’m always reading research papers on sports science. And not just about cycling; some new developments in football, for example, can be applied to cycling.
You want to be asking questions and you want to be critical and disruptive because only then do you and others start thinking. If people call me a pain in the arse, I say to them: thank you, because that’s how you make progress. If I created a team, I wouldn’t want people to say yes to me. I need people to throw ideas in, to question what we’re doing.
“If people call me a pin in the arse, I say ‘thank you’. Because that’s how you make progress.”
Tim Heemskerk
Q: How do you envisage training evolving in the coming years?
A: I think we’ll see a reduction in hours, and instead more quality training. Maybe we’ll laugh about seven-hour sessions. I know there are races like the Monuments that are that long, but maybe better adaptations will come from having multiple sessions [per day]. Two three-hour sessions in one day could be better than one seven-hour ride without a break.
Athletes can now take on board more carbohydrates, so with this added jet fuel it could be possible to add in more quality work. I think we’ll also have better tools to monitor riders, such as wearables that allow you to see a rider’s lactate or oxygen saturation values. We could learn a lot from that, but nothing will replace speaking with a rider, asking them at breakfast how they feel.
Q: How do you think artificial intelligence (AI) will change coaching?
A: It will never replace daily monitoring and the feeling of what’s happening – the coach and athlete will always decide together what they’re going to do. But it can be useful. You can ask AI to process data faster and the results can promote and accelerate thinking, as well as highlighting trends which you otherwise might not have seen. It might even come up with out-of-the-box ideas.
Yet we have to remember that AI always uses data from the past to make a prediction and it never has the full context. It might review a test from January and say it was a bad result, but AI doesn’t know that the rider had a travel day or that when they woke up they were tired – other reasons why the test’s outcome was affected. I think it will – and it is – helping us make sense of data, but I also think human excellence will only become more valued.
