FasterSkier · January 3, 2004
“You’re always in the danger zone”, says Sweden’s Cross-Country ski-ace, Mathias Fredriksson about the possible reason for the recently observed cases of over-training among the World Cup elite skiers.
Two of the Swedish National Team skiers and last year’s World Championship medallists, Per Elofsson and Jorgen Brink, have both been absent from racing this year, due to over-training and fatigue.
“If you want to be fighting for the World Cup medals, you must train at the “borderline” of over-training all the time, and take the risk of stepping over. All training basically breaks your body down, and the challenge and “art” is to know how to recover in a correct and sufficient way. But sometimes it may all go wrong”.
– How do you then deal with the case of having stepped over, and trained too much?
“This depends on how much over-training we’re talking about. If it is all too much and long, a whole season may be wasted. If it is less, perhaps a few easy weeks may do the trick of recovery. Judging by feel, the difference between over-training and being simply “out of shape” is quite small, so it is at the same time difficult to know when to pull the brake on training volume”, says Mathias.
There is of course no patented solution regarding how to recover from over-training. Each case is individual. “This is a difficult balance. Even though you have to rest to recover, you also need to be active to stimulate the body properly. You can’t just lay flat on the couch and believe recovery will happen automatically”.
In his own case, Mathias says that experience is also important.
“You’re always in the “danger zone”. But I feel I have good control, and have taught myself to differentiate between the good and the “false” signals the body sends me. At the same time, years of hard work makes an experienced skier tougher and able to handle large doses of training”.
“I feel that correct training when you’re younger is very important. It is important to train carefully, with yearly progression and proper volume. Accept that you won’t reach your peak until you’re older”, says the 2003 overall World Cup Champion.
