Welcome to training Period 9.
These 4 weeks serve as our transition into the racing season. Early races are meant to prepare for more important races later in the year. Doing some shorter races to help gain comfort skiing at a faster pace and high effort is helpful.
As always, think about your best practices regarding recovery: stretching immediately after training and competitions, eating and drinking immediately after skiing, but even more importantly, immediately after your intensity work – both the races and intensity intervals.
Plan on taking fluid, protein and carbohydrate, bananas, electrolytes, sports drinks, and peanut butter sandwiches. Whatever it may be, get some food in you immediately after, and then within 2 to 2.5 hours after your training, make sure you’re getting in a full meal.
Consider personalizing your training. You have to ask yourself, “What are the most important competitions of the season?” Maybe these most important season competitions are right now, or perhaps they will be in the following two periods. That makes a big difference in how you address and target your training.
Enjoy the holidays and get fired up for winter!!!
STRENGTH
We continue to “stabilize” strength. At last, the ski season is here, and with it, the hoping mother nature will support us with consistently good snow. Again, the strength-training sessions for this phase are meant to be short; the goal is to continue building strength and maintaining a comfortable, healthy range of motion. These two elements are key to maximizing your performance potential while minimizing your injury risk.
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Each period, we will end with this advice since it is so important:
As you plan your weeks and evaluate your training, consider how you use the training plan. It is written to be a blueprint and a guide for your training and is not written knowing in advance what conflicts you may have with training in any given week. Therefore, many weeks can be done as scheduled. However, if you have to swap days or weeks out on account of your non-training life, with good planning, it can be done with great success, provided you are giving thought to the swapping.
When it comes time to plan your training week, sometimes it’s helpful to know which workouts take precedence over others. This is particularly useful if a skier has other obligations outside of skiing (work, personal life, etc.) that may interfere with the amount of training one can devote during the week. Thus, adjustments must be made.
For example, let’s say you have a week at work where you will have heavy time demands and stress, and the schedule says it is the third week of the period, which is our big week. So it may be best to hold off on the third week and swap it with Week 4 – our easy week to recover, and then maybe make a slight adjustment in Week 1 of the following period.
You can also swap out days on account of life outside of your training plan. Just remember, as you do that, it is ideal to follow a hard followed by an easy pattern of days.
To make adjustments to the plan that won’t dilute the integrity of the training program, we have a few pointers for planning a training week.
Read the advisory on scheduling workouts, swapping out ski-specific activities for alternative exercise modes, etc., here: bit.ly/workout-substitution.
– Cheers, see you next month
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