Rethinking Ski Prep

Tue, Oct 27, 2009

Photo credit: Jeff Harris

To ski better (and stay on the hill longer) this winter, take a cue from the U.S. Ski Team and start cycling.

By John Bradley

Six years ago, Neal Henderson, director of sports science at Colorado’s Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, visited the training facilities of Austria’s national ski team. There, he watched as ski-racing legend Hermann Maier rode for hours on a stationary bike while trainers repeatedly pricked his fingers to test his blood for lactic acid. They wanted to make sure their marquee athlete wasn’t working too hard. For anyone versed in conventional ski-training wisdom, with its decades-old focus on weights and explosive-movement workouts, Maier’s low-impact aerobic spin might have seemed odd. But to Henderson, whose clients are mostly pro and elite cyclists, triathletes, and runners, it all made perfect sense.

“American sporting ideology has kind of been, ‘You have to go hard and be tough, and if a little of that is good, we’re going to do a lot more,’ ” says Henderson. “But there are ways of developing more successful athletes that don’t involve that.”

What the Austrians knew — and what the U.S. Ski Team has come to accept — is that basic low-level aerobic conditioning pays huge dividends in power and sprint sports like alpine skiing and snowboarding. It’s not that the squats and box jumps you’ve been taught to do as autumn approaches are wrong — strength and anaerobic power are key for the short, intense bursts a downhill run requires — but what of the next run? Or the one after that?

“We want to improve the quality and quantity of the work our athletes can do,” says Per Lundstam, head trainer of the U.S. Ski Team. “We’ve switched away from trying to mimic the loads of skiing in the gym and replaced it with training that will allow our athletes to burden those loads for a much longer period of time. Now we do a lot of low-intensity aerobic work, so that when we put them on the snow, they can do five or six quality runs instead of three or four.”

In other words, since the best way to become a better skier is to ski more, it follows that anything that enables you to stay on the mountain longer would, in turn, make you a better skier. That’s supportive training: low-impact aerobic work off the slopes that lays a foundation for more and better runs once you’re on them. For the rest of us, that means more of those runs when the mind and body are fresh enough to ski any line and fewer of those wobbly afternoon survival runs when all we can think about is beer and hot tubs.

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Recover Faster

The primary benefit of adding more aerobic work to any training program is faster recovery. Low-impact aerobic exercise spurs the growth of new capillaries, which carry blood to, and flush lactic acid from, muscle tissue. Such workouts also improve the density of oxygen-carrying myoglobin and cellular mitochondria, which fuel muscle contractions and burn excess lactic acid. Taken together, these increases make it possible to do more work before muscles start to ache and also enable the body to clear lactic acid more quickly, paving the way for the next hard effort. “For the first couple of years that you train like this, you get more efficient in the cardiorespiratory system,” Lundstam explains. “After that you start to get these capillary and mitochondrial changes. Our older athletes who have reached this structural change can sustain a higher level of performance even better, and they come back faster after the off-season.”

During June and July, Marco Sullivan, a 10-year veteran of the U.S. Ski Team, bikes near his home in Truckee, California, six days a week. “Some guys questioned it a little bit at first,” says Sullivan, “since what we do is basically a two-minute sprint. But with the results we’ve seen, everyone’s coming around.”

Indeed, since Lundstam began prescribing more aerobic conditioning in 2003, U.S. skiers have won two Olympic golds, 18 World Championship medals, eight individual World Cup discipline titles, and three overall World Cup crowns (not counting Bode Miller’s past two seasons, during which he’s been training on his own). Over the previous six-year period, the numbers were one, two, zero, and zero, respectively.

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Go Easy to Go Harder

While it might strike you, as it did Lundstam’s skiers, as counterintuitive, supportive training is not complicated in practice. As winter approaches, you should try for one or two easy runs, swims, or bike rides per week — 60 to 90 minutes each at a conversational pace. Limit intense resistance and plyometric workouts (see the next page) to just one or two times per week. But use your aerobic gains to push much harder during those sessions than you ever have — heavier weight, more reps, less rest between intervals. “A lot of times people say, ‘You’re telling me to go easy,’ ” says Henderson. “Well, yes. But because of that I also ask you to go harder at some points, because you have better recovery now. In the end I’m probably asking you to train more overall. There’s no free lunch.”

No. But at least you’ll be able to ski past it.

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Your New Weekly Program

Repeat this three-week plan as many times as possible before ski season.

Week One

Monday: Threshold training: Bike 10 minutes at threshold (talking becomes difficult), 10 minutes very slow. Repeat once.

Tuesday: Circuit (see next page) one time. Thursday: Bike at threshold three minutes, easy three minutes. Repeat three times, rest, then repeat four times.

Friday: Run, bike, or swim 45 minutes.

Week Two

Monday: Circuit one time.

Tuesday: Threshold training

Thursday: Bike three minutes at 60 rpm, easy for three minutes. Repeat six times.

Friday: Bike at threshold three minutes, easy three minutes. Repeat three times, rest, then repeat four times.

Saturday: Run, bike, or swim 60 minutes.

Week Three

Monday: Circuit two times.

Tuesday: Run, bike, or swim 90 minutes.

Wednesday: Bike at threshold three minutes, easy three minutes. Repeat three times, rest, then repeat four times.

Thursday: Run, bike, or swim 120 minutes.