As this week's post comes to print you'll have to admit I'm getting better at cranking them out. I feel good about it. This post on training certainly raises the bar for length and probably could be divided into three different pieces. But it was written in a multi-day stream of consciousness that I will keep together. Hope it works for you...
Okay, enough ranting and excuse making. Time to spend a post talking training! And not just any type of training, either. This is some of my favorite type. The kind spent in the weight room getting stronger. Because, let's face it, endurance athletes are some of the weakest people on the planet when compared to athletes who spend at least part of their training time pushing iron around. Greg Glassman and his cronies at CrossFit love to point out the fact that endurance types are pathetically weak. When Outside Magazine comes out with a cover story on the "Fittest Man on Earth", it's invariably a long distance athlete of some sort. Glassman just scoffs at the notion.
Single Dimension Fitness
Well, he rightfully loathes the idea that some skinny "lungs with legs" type is fit, at least by his standards. To him, fitness is more than the ability to ride or run a long way. It involves picking heavy shit off the ground and, sometimes, pushing it overhead. It requires balance, speed, power, agility AND endurance. Most endurance activities do not require many of the attributes Glassman favors to be successful. Further, I contend that the pursuit of these other qualities may actually hinder one's performance in a single discipline. If we had a pull-up contest at the finish of the Tour de France, most of us would turn away in embarrassment as the "world's fittest cyclists" struggle like the fat kid in fourth grade P.E. class to get their chins over the bar. But who cares? These guys don't need to be able to pull up or do any of the other things that CrossFit teaches is important. Being able to do so would just develop a bunch of lean tissue that would pull them downhill when the goal is to break competitors' legs going UPHILL.
One of the most amazing contentions of CrossFit is that being able to do pull-ups and developing other seemingly disparate abilities and strengths will make you a better cyclist or runner or whatever. Glassman is getting rich selling this notion to his followers. Are you kidding? No, he's dead serious and he points to the performances of many of his athletes to back him up. When you look at these folks, you find tremendously fit, well-rounded athletes who perform reasonably well at many things. But what you don't find are strict CrossFit advocates finishing at the front of elite-level competitions for ANYTHING except their own CrossFit Games, which, of course, they dominate.
Okay, I apologize. That sounded like a rant and, I guess it was. But it is also a lead-in to today's topic and that is weight training for downhill ski performance. My point is that I don't think that endurance athletes should focus too much on developing tremendous upper body strength. We need to be light. If we have tissue that does not help propel us during our chosen sport, it should be shrunk down as much as possible. Does this make us pathetically weak in some ways as Glassman contends? Yes. But if our goal is to perform at our best at one thing then we need to be willing to give up other aspects of our fitness.
Bark Like a Seal!
Luckily, that does NOT mean we need to stay out of the weight room (thank god!). We can get stronger and improve certain aspects of our power endurance without ever setting foot in our competitive arena. The weight room is a great place to do this.
A few years ago, I was doing my usual grunting under the squat rack, trembling under the load, my head looking like it might pop off my neck in a blood-spewing explosion at any moment. In between sets I watched a good friend of mine do some floor-based exercises involving a BOSU ball (don't get me started!) and some pink dumbbells. After watching a couple of sets I just could not help myself any longer. I asked her what she was doing with these exercises and she explained. She said that, pointing to her significantly developed quadriceps, she had the "big muscles" covered and that she needed to train the small ones. Apparently, standing on an unstable surface while performing like a circus seal will develop the "small" ones. Hmmm. I walked away pondering the idea.
Since then, this topic has come up numerous times in my reading. Training relatively light loads on unstable surfaces like BOSU balls and Swiss balls has a role in rehabilitation when balance and proprioception need to be cultivated. But as a means to get healthy athletes strong it is severely deficient. There has been plenty of research done that indicates that maximal force production is inhibited by unstable surface training. Additionally, most of our competitive situations are ground-based and thus stable. In the true essence of sport specificity we should train on the stable surfaces upon which we compete. One might be able to make a case for surfing and deep powder skiing as unstable mediums but brute strength is not a necessary quality in a high skill sport like surfing. Bottom line is that if you want to get strong you have to use heavy weights and train with your feet on solid ground. Power endurance, what I discuss later, is trained using lighter weights but still significantly heavier than those managed on unstable mediums.
Although I have no data to support this contention, the whole idea that somehow the "small" muscles check out when the weight gets heavy is absurd. Who came up with that? I'm going to guess it's those trainer dudes that seek to come up with something clever or novel for their clients. Exercises that involve standing on Swiss balls and the like are certainly hard. I'm sure there is a sense of accomplishment as an athlete masters some of these tricks. But a trick is mostly what they are. If you find them intriguing and have the time to work on them then, by all means, knock yourself (and perhaps the furniture) out. Just don't make them central to your strength program. You will still be weak. It is well known that the heavier the load, the greater the number of motor units recruited for the job. I think it is safe to say that the same holds true for the smaller stabilizing muscles which support heavy free weight movements.
Swiss Ball training? I never said it was easy...
By the way, when I say to train on a solid surface that means as close to the ground as you can get. In other words, ditch those cushy cross trainers and either train bare foot or use thin soled shoes like Converse Chuck Taylors or wrestling shoes. Who am I to argue with the freakishly strong mutants at Westside Barbell Club? Chucks for all of them!
Fast forward to the finish line at this year's Targhee skimo event. That same small muscle-oriented woman was lamenting how flamed her quads were on the descent. I immediately flashed on our conversation a few years ago. Clearly, ignoring the big muscles led to a serious detriment in performance that could have easily been prevented with the right weight training protocol. I, on the other hand, heavily trained in such a fashion, found myself ripping on the tails of one of the best downhill skiers on the circuit, something I could not have conceived of doing previously.
The demands of the downhill legs of skimo races are unique in recreational skiing. The combination of challenging terrain, minimal gear and race intensity make for an incredibly painful few minutes if you keep the pressure on. For me, it is always a battle between continuing on, ignoring the searing pain in my thighs or stopping briefly in an effort to mitigate the time-sucking, fatigue-inspired egg-beater fall that looms over every downhill in these races. It is hard to replicate this skiing intensity in training. The idea of being that close to the edge with nothing at stake is hard to swallow. As a result, we need to find another way to subject sport-specific musculature to demands similar to race conditions.
The degree to which we can replicate the motor patterns of aggressive downhill skiing in the gym is limited by our budget and creativity. You can surf YouTube and find lots of vids showing U.S. Ski Team members doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I love some of the side to side jumping they do on angled mini trampolines. Even those funny indoor ski trainer machines have a place in this kind of preparation. But who owns this kind of equipment? Not many of us so we are left with the weight room and our own creativity. Really, the basics are simply about working both eccentrically and concentrically hip and knee flexion and extension. No mystery here. These represent the foundation of the majority of athletic movement.
Okay, so there are a zillion variations on this stuff. We only have so much time and energy. I'll tell you a few that I think are effective. I'm sure you can come up with your own.
Leg Blasters
The simplest and one of the most brutally effective comes to us via Rob Shaul at Mountain Athlete. It's called the Leg Blaster and Mini Leg Blaster. He nearly cripples his ski fitness classes with this routine over the course of 6 grueling weeks. He mercifully starts with the "mini" version which consists of 10 air squats, 10 alternating lunges, 10 alternating jumping lunges, and 5 jump squats. Rest 30-60 seconds and go again...and again...and again! Once he has his athletes doing 6-8 rounds of these with 30 seconds rest, he graduates them to the full Monty Leg Blaster and ramps up the rounds and drops the rest progressively. One round of the full leg blaster looks like this:
Not riveting viewing, I know. It's my first attempt at video editing. But you get the idea. If you did nothing else in the pre season besides working up to doing 6 rounds of these with 30 seconds rest in between, you would be a serious bad-ass and well-prepared for the rigors of the early season. I kid you not. Go ahead and do one set and tell me your chest is not heaving at the end!
30 Repetition Squat Sets
The second exercise I favor for this kind of training is the 30 repetition squat set. Link three sets of these in a workout with 60 seconds rest in between and you will be crawling out of the gym. The most important aspect of these is weight selection. For maximal effect, you want to do all 30 reps without stopping. As you experiment with finding the right weight you might have to stop during the set if you overshoot the load. You will notice that stopping makes the set way easier even with the heavier load. The other thing you will notice is that the last 10 reps are where the money is. You may feel like a bad-ass up to rep 20 but might end up crying after 30! This is the goal.
The other consideration is range of motion (ROM). With the back squat, which I think is the best movement for this type of workout, lifters with shorter femurs and longer torsos will tolerate a deeper squat than taller folks. A deeper squat is definitely harder but, for tall lifters, becomes more back dominant coming out of the hole. For a skiing-specific ROM we can definitely go shallower and still get the desired training effect. I'm a huge fan of using a box to squat on as a target for each rep. Starting a little high and then lowering the box as you get more familiar with the movement is a reasonable approach. Same holds true for the weight. In terms of load, remember to continue to add weight as your fitness increases to maintain the stimulus. You can also drop the rest interval to further augment the training effect.
It's important to keep the ego in check with this workout. Surfing YouTube you can find tons of videos of guys doing similar sets with huge weight. These guys are massively strong, for sure. However, you will notice that on most of the vids, they are doing what are known as "breathing squats" which allow for stopping the movement every few reps, take a few breaths and then continuing. Now, I'm not implying that doing breathing squats with over 400lbs is easy but that the training goal and outcome is different. In a race, we want to avoid stopping and should train accordingly. Pushing through the 30th or even 40th rep continuously is definitely a different stimulus. Stop if you have to but work on doing them straight through. You will have to dig deep for this at your maximum load.
Final Considerations
The above are just two in an unlimited number of choices for training power endurance. Walking lunges with a barbell or dumbbells is an obvious choice. Just lunge until you drop! Thirty to fifty steps, depending upon the weight will be plenty. Hell, just lunge the length of a football field with body weight and you may cramp up and fall over before you get to the goal line. The common theme with any of these is time under tension. With aggressive downhill skiing, you will notice that it is very hard to relax the quads unless you are on a mellow groomer. The rest of the time, the quads are firing and our training should reflect this fact.
Depending upon your goals, doing these workouts once or twice a week is plenty when added to the rest of your training. I like alternating with a pure strength/plyo day with 3 days in between. Doing them on hard interval days will still allow for adequate recovery. - Brian