Period One of Training for Cross-Country Skiing

 

Welcome to the new 2024-2025 training year! 

As we start the new ski year, our focus is on preparing the body for hard work down the road and putting down a foundation for the future. We are not looking to get after it with heavy doses of intensity and ski specificity. Those are things for later in the summer and fall. Remember, skiers are made in the summer, and remember it is still spring. So, make sure the easy days are easy. Avoid junk training of medium-hard, not easy enough to be tolerated well, promoting recovery, and not hard enough to have the benefits of adequately stressing the body with true hard training.

Feel free to use your roller skis occasionally, but mainly leave them for another month. Instead, enjoy less ski-specific activities like biking and paddling at easy paces as we prepare for the future.

Starting the new year, evaluating your strengths and weaknesses and last year’s successes and struggles and adjusting based on your evaluation would be wise.

Best of luck with your training this year!

***

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!