After a couple weeks of training in the Internet chasm of Jericho, Vermont, I’m now moved in at the training center in Lake Placid where I’ll be staying for the next month or so. The major event of late took place this past weekend in Jericho were about seventy biathletes from around the US and Canada took part in the North American Summer Biathlon Championships. This was a great turnout that provided some stiff competition. The races for me were a little less than satisfactory simply due to not feeling all that well physically, but my shooting was definitely reasonable.

Also, I received several comments on this blog while I was in Jericho. Thank you! Again, it’s a privilege to write here and if there is something I’m missing or should explain better let me know!

Based on a comment from the last post, intensitets trening, I’ve decided rearrange a bit and talk about “strength training” and what differences I noticed between college/high school skiing and my time in Norway. To do this I’m going to split up strength training into four categories:  general strength, ski specific strength, spensts or plyometrics, and max strength. Again, there are many different opinions out there—even in Norway—so I’m strictly going to stick with what I experienced this past year.

Strength training in Torsby, Sweden

When talking about general strength, I like to think about it as both stabilizing strength (i.e. planks or other static holds) and general strength (i.e. sit-ups, pull-ups, dips, etc.), which is done with no or very little added weight for many repetitions or a given amount of time. During my stay in Norway, I did much more stabilizing strength, but much less general strength, than in high school and college. From what I understand some Norwegians believe that stabilizing strength is almost all an athlete needs in addition to ski-specific strength. That is, stabilizing strength improves overall control while on skis, with ski-specific strength providing the complimentary power. In my opinion, there is much to gain from other types of strength exercises, but yes, stabilizing strength can improve the feeling of control on skis and make holding technique positions easier. An example of a stabilizing strength workout is a 30-45min warm-up run followed by 10-15min of general strength, then 4×5min stabilizing exercises.

Eirik during a strength session in Vik

Ski-specific strength is just about as Scandinavian as one can get and is very specific to skiing! This basically includes double-pole skiing and no-pole skiing usually on some sort of uphill. Ski-specific strength includes both long distance workouts (over an hour) and short bouts of explosive effort (10-15sec to 1 minute). In high school and college I did very little of this type of strength—especially double poling (I first mentioned this in an earlier post). During my time in Norway, ski-specific strength seemed much more important. At times, I did about two hours of ski-specific strength a week. A couple examples of a ski-specific workout I did in Norway are a 6×5min Level 3 uphill interval session double-poling and an hour long no-pole session (Level 1-2).

Spenst or plyometric strength training is focused on short explosive (8 reps or less) exercises, which I’m sure most of you know. This type of strength training was not really part of our team training and comprised a very small amount of my actual training in Norway (maybe once a month). However, in college and high school, spensts seem much more common, about once a week. The only idea I  picked up was the general understanding that a lot of recovery time is necessary after spenst training due to the intensity of the exercise and its high stress on muscles.

Contrary to what some may say max strength is another type of strength training that I didn’t do all that often, maybe once a month in Norway. To be honest, I didn’t see many other Norwegian skiers doing all that much max strength either. In college, however, max strength comprises a much greater amount of time, almost once a week. Again, the ideas that I picked up in Norway were that max strength is something focused on more during the spring and done as maintenance throughout the rest of the year.

Finally, I want to end with a couple other general ideas that I picked up about strength training. First off is the idea that making a gain in strength ability requires a period of 5-6 weeks of focused strength training, after which maintaining the strength requires just a few sessions a week. Secondly, improvements in strength training are usually done in the springtime when the volume of training isn’t all that high and allows for adequate recovery.

So as a recap, strength training this past year included a lot of stabilizing strength, general strength, and ski-specific strength. Max strength and spensts/plyometrics were included more along the line of maintaining my ability rather than on improvement, except during the springtime.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 11:54 am and is filed under Norway, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.