What are the physiological capacities of nordic-combined athletes and can laboratory tests predict performance capabilities on the World Cup? Those are the questions that a team of Norwegian researchers set out to answer by testing 12 competitors from eight different countries before a 2015 World Cup competition in Trondheim, Norway. The study, led by Vegard Rasdal of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Norwegian Olympic Sports Center, was recently published in the...
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...
All right, so the top Norwegian women are training more than 900 hours per year. What does that mean for everyone else? We chatted with Jodi Hawley, an exercise physiologist who formerly worked with the Canadian National Team for cross-country skiing.
Want to know everything about the training and physiology of the top Norwegian women? A new paper tells all, using training diaries and test data from Marit Bjørgen, Therese Johaug, Heidi Weng, Ingvild Flugstad Østberg, Ragnhild Haga, and Maiken Caspersen Falla.
New research shows that in long ski races, an athlete's speed slows slightly lap by lap, but heart rate and other physiological indicators increase as the effort takes its toll. This typical pacing strategy appears superior to starting slow and drastically increasing speed later in the race. We tested a case study using data from 2015 World Championships.
Research published last fall found that using testosterone, even briefly, had long-lasting effects on muscle in mice - and extrapolated that in humans, these effects could last decades. The mechanism for this cell memory opens the door to similarly long-lasting effects of HGH or other performance-enhancing drugs.
You know that moment after the transition in a skiathlon, when your skis seem to be sliding all over the place and your arms and legs say, "what!?" A team of researchers, including former Gustavus Adolphus skier Sarah Willis, investigated what's going on physiologically.
Arm muscles aren't as good at leg muscles at extracting oxygen from the bloodstream - and they are actually worse in double-poling than in striding. That might limit the effectiveness of your upper body, but research suggests that modern double-poling technique actually maximizes what's possible for these arm muscles, while enabling faster skiing.
With the 2012 Paralympics starting in London in roughly a month, adaptive athletes who compete in summer sports are putting the finishing touches on their trainings. And winter athletes, too, are hard at work, training just as intensely as their able-bodied counterparts, if a little bit differently. This spring in Bend, Oregon, FasterSkier chatted with Sean Halsted, a veteran member of the U.S. national team who finished seventh, ninth, and tenth in the sit-ski races...