“I would be tearing my hair out” – Rival team DS warns Visma weather-hit altitude camp could affect Wout van Aert and co

Altitude camps are designed to bring control and structure to a rider’s build-up. Instead, Wout van Aert and his teammates have been forced into constant adaptation as winter weather repeatedly disrupted Team Visma | Lease a Bike’s Sierra Nevada training camp.

Heavy snowfall, freezing temperatures and unstable conditions at altitude have pushed Visma indoors for significant stretches, with rollers and indoor sessions replacing much of the long outdoor volume usually prioritised ahead of the spring classics.

That scenario prompted a blunt assessment from Loïc Segaert, performance coach at Bahrain – Victorious, who questioned how far indoor-heavy preparation can realistically go for riders targeting races that demand six hours or more of sustained load.

“I would be tearing my hair out if I were in the situation of Team Visma | Lease a Bike,” Segaert said, speaking to Het Nieuwsblad, pointing not only to physical limitations but also to the mental strain created by repeated indoor training blocks.

Altitude camps in the Sierra Nevada are nothing new for Visma, but this winter’s conditions have been particularly restrictive. Snow-covered roads and poor visibility have repeatedly ruled out long outdoor rides, forcing riders onto the rollers even on days originally planned for endurance volume.

Publicly available training data shows Van Aert completing multiple roller sessions on several days, sometimes splitting training into two or even three indoor rides across a single day. The approach is deliberate, but also reactive.

Segaert underlined that while teams can reshuffle sessions, there is a clear limit to how much compromise is sensible. “What I certainly would not do is complete your entire training week on the rollers as if you were riding outside for a week,” he said.

The concern is not that rollers are ineffective, but that they fundamentally change the type of stress placed on the body. Indoor sessions are shorter, more static, and less varied in muscular demand. Dehydration becomes harder to manage, saddle discomfort appears sooner, and the repetitive nature of the position increases the risk of overuse.

Weather disruption becomes even more significant when combined with altitude. In normal circumstances, riders descend to lower elevations to complete high-intensity interval work. When storms keep riders indoors at 2,000 metres or more, that option disappears.

“At altitude, you cannot do the same intervals because it is simply too hard,” Segaert explained. “You will inevitably have to reduce the intensity of your rides and keep the efforts shorter.”

That limitation matters in a classics build-up, where specificity is crucial. The ability to combine long endurance days with race-intensity blocks is difficult to replicate indoors, particularly when altitude already restricts intensity.

To compensate, teams look for alternative stimuli. Segaert pointed to repeated sprint training as one effective method at altitude, alongside heat adaptation work, both of which can add quality without relying on long outdoor sessions.

Visma’s response has not been to abandon the camp, but to adapt it. Multiple shorter sessions per day allow the team to manipulate carbohydrate availability and fatigue, provoking similar physiological responses with lower total volume.

Segaert noted that Visma have used this approach consistently in previous altitude camps, particularly during training blocks on Teide. By riding several times per day, riders can deliberately train with reduced energy stores, triggering specific metabolic adaptations even when conditions limit outdoor riding.

The question is not whether the approach works at all, but whether it can fully replace the demands of classics preparation.

“If you are preparing for races that last more than six hours, it is also simply useful to spend six hours on the bike in training,” Segaert said. “That neuromuscular fatigue is part of the preparation.”

Crucially for Van Aert and his team-mates, the camp has not been exclusively indoors. Weather windows have allowed outdoor rides in recent weeks, including longer sessions that begin to restore some of the missing endurance load.

Whether the disruption ultimately proves meaningful will only become clear once the classics begin. Segaert’s comments, however, underline a broader reality of modern preparation: altitude camps offer major benefits, but when weather intervenes, even the most carefully planned programme can quickly become a compromise.

For Visma, the task now is ensuring that compromise does not carry over into the races that matter most.