With strong legs on fast flat snow, you have to be good at poling in order
for it to make you go faster. On downhill sections with fast snow, even the
best ski racers stop poling and skate with only their legs (or just tuck
it).

Mark Frost asked
How can I keep my speed up (or better yet, increase it)
when I use my poles!

The key limitation of poling is that the tip of the pole has to be _stopped_
on the ground-snow surface while forward-push force is being applied. The
faster you are going, the shorter the time before that spot of ground your
pole tip is stopped on disappears behind you. Therefore the faster you go,
the lower the amount of effective force you can apply per pole-push -- so
the less able you are to maintain that faster speed.

Unless you can somehow apply a very quick intense force thru the poles
(think "explosive"). Or unless you can apply many more pole-pushes per
minute (think "amazingly quick and coordinated recovery motions").

The shortcut to the first "unless" is to use more muscle groups and clever
aids (like abdominals and chest crunch and body weight -- not just direct
arm-push). But getting all those other means to work _together_ is going to
first require some practice time to work out the special _neural_control_
coordination just among themselves. And more neural coordination practice
time for to them work efficiently with your leg motions. And more practice
to work out the new balancing strategy.

Next, some of those new muscles haven't had much training in their new
motions, so they're going to get tired after like a minute of their new work
contribution, and painful after another minute. So it might take a few more
days (weeks?) of appropriate training stress and rest cycles to develop
those muscles to where they can make a big enough _sustained_ contribution
to make a substantial improvement in your five-minute time trial
measurement. Or it might come sooner.

The surest way to make it take less days to get faster with poling:
Take some lessons.

Ken