This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. I originally wrote the following article in 2004. Twenty-two years later, I believe it remains just as relevant. To me it illustrates that while we tend to assume training has changed a great deal, in many ways it has stayed much the same. I have rewritten it here to improve...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Most athletes view the warm-up as preparation for the hard part of the workout. The reality is that the warm-up is often one of the most important parts of the session, because it largely determines the physiological response that follows. The purpose of a warm-up is not simply to get...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. A new study landed in my feed last week, and I will admit the algorithm has my number. It steered me toward a question I have chewed on more than once here at FasterSkier: when it comes to low-intensity training, are you better off concentrating volume into one big week,...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. A Different Equation Masters’ athletes are often told to “train smarter, not harder,” or the current version: “Go easy on the endurance sessions so you can go hard on the intense sessions.” Those phrases get repeated so often they’ve lost context and meaning. But there is a real physiological reason...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Two older girls on the Edward Little ski team went looking for bodies. It was the mid-1980s, the boys’ Nordic program at the Auburn, Maine, high school was thin and not very good, and the girls’ team was strong. The two girls, Becky Flynn (SVSEF) and Sarah Pribram (NWVE), knew...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. A review of a recently published paper from Norway, “Long-term development culture for sustainable Olympic success: Lessons learned from Norwegian cross-country skiing” by Jacob Walther and Øyvind Sandbakk, is worth the time. Long-term development culture for sustainable Olympic success: Lessons learned from Norwegian cross-country skiing – ScienceDirect We’ve all heard...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. As this ski season wraps up, many of us coaches are doing similar work. Using spreadsheets or a popular training platform, we map out training for the year. We plan the yearly hours, monthly hours, and weekly hours, along with defining the training intensity distribution. We also plan how long...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. As the season winds down, it’s worth stepping back and asking a simple question: Does the way we develop young skiers in the United States reflect the philosophy we say we believe in? I know everyone is probably done with hearing about how the Norwegians do it, so let’s look...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. On Monday, a clear winter morning in northern Italy, Zak Ketterson skied intervals while his teammates enjoyed a point-to-point on an idyllic pre-Olympic winter day. The sun was out. The snow was good. He was working. “I did some hard intervals,” he said later. “So it was still nice...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. In my coaching and consulting work, I get a lot of questions about using heart rate variability (HRV) to guide training. This is a follow-up to a previous article, where I want to move from theory to practice and show how HRV has been one of the most valuable...
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. Over the past few years, I’ve been studying the work of Herman Pontzer, PhD, whose research in human energetics challenges long-held paradigms of how endurance athletes adapt to training. For decades, endurance training theory was based on the principle of cumulative energy expenditure: train more,...
Are you a well-trained endurance athlete? Do you know your resting heart rate, maximal heart rate, average weekly training hours, and – tough one here – age? If you’re reading this website, the answer to all four of those is probably “yes.” If you have a moment to spare, Stephen Seiler would like your help. Seiler is a longtime professor of sports science, currently at the University of Adger in Kristiansand, Norway. We’ve spoken with...
Endurance junkies can be data nerds. The market for smart watches and wearable fitness devices has boomed, trending toward a $29 billion dollar market with 243 million units sold by 2022 according to an industry analyst’s estimates. In the world of endurance sport, professional athletes and weekend warriors alike are recording their workouts and analyzing the results using platforms like Strava, Polar Global, or Garmin Connect in search of optimal training to achieve personal bests. ...
When retiring from NoCo this spring, FasterSkier reached out to the veteran for a tried-and-true workout. Fletcher’s response was simple. For him, nothing beats a “good-old-fashioned hill climb.” The experienced skier’s most savvy advice? Take the gondola back down. “Downhills can be pretty abusive on the knees and your back,” Fletcher explained on the phone. “[This workout] is super-easy way to get long hours in or a good intensity session in, without putting a huge...
On July 28, Masters World Cup in Minneapolis or other hallmark races like Sun Valley’s
80/20 Rule — the easy to hard intensity ratio when it comes to training sessions, has been well publicized. Seiler believes easy days should be truly easy, meaning walking the hills may be mandatory. If the easy days are easy, then the hard days are hard. He espouses a fidelity to training models with little, if any, in-between efforts; that means no middle-of-the-road intensity. And his observations come straight from Norway. “… They know what gets you...