This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you would like to see more articles like this one, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. I’ve been using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) to guide endurance training for nearly 20 years. As with every innovation, we do research and test it extensively before we introduce the use with athletes. I was introduced to HRV by Tiina Hoffman the former skier and...
Over the past couple of decades coaching endurance athletes, I’ve noticed a consistent relationship between three key performance metrics. Whether this relationship is push-pull or more synergistic is still up for debate—but one thing is clear: when these three improve, so does overall performance. These metrics are: Power or velocity at aerobic threshold (AT) Average power during a 6-minute max effort Peak power during a 10-second sprint When we pair this external data with internal...
The U.S. Cross Country Junior National Championships—originally known as the Junior Nationals, then called the Junior Olympics for a stretch, and now again the Junior Nationals—were first held in 1965 in Bend, Oregon. Those early events included all ski disciplines: cross-country, alpine, ski jumping, and nordic combined. They were hosted at venues that could accommodate the full spectrum of competitive skiing. In digging into history, I found it surprisingly difficult to track down hard dates...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you want more coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. For much of the last 30 years, the late Dr Jim Stray-Gundersen and I have been studying how we quantify training load. In the mid-90s, we met Dr. Erik Bannister at the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) Conference in Orlando, Florida. Dr Bannister developed the Training Impulse...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you want more coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. In many endurance sports in the U.S.—including cross-country skiing—there seems to be a desire to identify standout U16 athletes as future stars. USSS, team programs, and coaches often respond by elevating their competition opportunities and increasing their training beyond what their physiological development can realistically support. In my early...