Personal Coaching

Central Cross Country Skiing (CXC) offers several training options to support your preparation for the Nordic ski season. In May, at the beginning of the training year, we get questions about what the right training plan choice is. The answer varies greatly based on athletes and their needs. However, there is one advice we can give to every athlete competing in Masters category. Look at your established life; the needs of your family; the needs of your job; your health and its possible constraints, and then choose a plan that supports all of it. Are you already twisting your head and saying that your life cannot fit around any online mass training plan ever developed for Master skiers? We agree. That is why, next to our three levels of CXC Academy online training plans, we also offer Personal Coaching.

Personal Coaching for master skiers allows participants to live more and train more, as the training plan is fitted week by week by a personal ski coach. Your coach builds your training plan around your needs, and even then you still have the availability to move scheduled workouts around if you desire to. Or you just contact your coach to adjust it for you! CXC Personal Coaching utilizes Training Peaks online platform that allows you to see the workouts planned by your coach; keep the log of the work you did, by hand or by transfer straight from your heart rate monitor; oversee your progress, fatigue and peaking towards an event, but mostly it allows your personal coach to instantly see any changes that need to be made towards your progress in sport or well being. To improve your ski technique, your CXC personal coach will ask you to send in a weekly video of you skiing, which will be evaluated in your weekly call. This is a great way to save time and gain valuable ski knowledge.

 

“I have been using the personal coaching program for almost a year, and it has been a great success. I have made significant improvements, and the training has been much more enjoyable since I started working with a personal coach. The program is customized for my needs, and I always have access to my coach when I need to make any adjustments. I was training for the 70 km Marcialonga in Italy and 90 km long Vasaloppet in Sweden as well as for local races in Iceland, and the excellent preparation helped me achieve and surpass the goals that we set for the winter. This is a highly recommended program with enthusiastic and highly knowledgeable coaches that are certainly worth using.”

– Einar Kristjansson, a master skier from Iceland

 

Do you have to be a race machine to fit this plan? Of course not! Although if you are, that is ok with us. With our personalized coaching, we can accommodate desires and support goals of any level of a cross country skier. Nordic skiing is a great way how to stay healthy. If you have a busy work schedule and love skiing, but struggle to fit some meaningful workout session that would support your well being, in your day, maybe personalized coaching would be a great option for you.

Nordic skiing can also support us in breaking our limits and going farther than ever. If you did the sport your whole life, however now you suffer some physical limitations, but still wish to fulfill your dream of skiing the Birkie or Vasa while making sure you enjoy it, instead of getting hurt or suffering through the experience, CXC’s Personal Coaching could be a great way how to adjust your training to your health. If your body still runs like a perfect machine, and you just didn’t have the opportunity to do a high-level racing as a junior or senior, or you wish to touch the sky in Masters category, however, have social constraints, the program can build you a professional skier plan that will fit your job as well as your family vacation.

CXC currently has four spots remaining in the program. If you are interested in Personal Coaching, send us a note (info@cxcskiing.org) to schedule a call, and let’s talk.

Your obstacles in training are our riddles to solve.

Experiencing HALO Neuroscience Through a Coach’s Eye

By Eliska Albrigtsen, CXC Team Head Coach (former World Cup competitor and 2011 NCAA champion)

When I joined the CXC Skiing coaches’ team this spring, I was very excited about all the different exercise tools the Center of Excellence in Madison has to offer to athletes and their coaches. Having a background in human physiology and biomechanics, most of these “toys” were well known to me, however, there was one exception that attracted me, HALO Sport.

 

Eliska Albrigtsen (CXC Center of Excellence)

HALO Sport is a headphones like device that improves your performance by enhancing neuroplasticity of your brain via transcranial stimulation. Uh, what a heavy sentence! Although it sounds very complicated, the setup is actually quite simple. Do you remember the time, when you were much younger and learning was so easy? That was thanks to your neuroplasticity. Neurons – the strings running through your body, sending information back and forth between your brain and body parts – were somewhat fresher and therefore more plastic, more moldable to support your body and brain in mastering new skills. As our movement patterns solidify with age, our brains tend to become solid, less plastic, as well. This is the point where HALO Sport comes into action with its gentle electrical stimulus to our heads. As I mentioned above, HALO looks like headphones, not earbuds, but a nice big pair of headphones with a big arch going from one ear to the other. When I also tell you that that is where the motor cortex, the center of the brain that processes movement, is located, it should begin to make sense.

HALO uses the arch to plant three 1.5 by 2 inches plates containing 24 soft spikes each that stimulate your motor cortex by sending very gentle electrical vibrations through your cranium, the part of the skull that encloses your brain. This stimulation amplifies the natural amount of electrical impulses in the motor cortex and therefore enhances the plasticity of the brain.

 

Nichole Bathe (2017 U23 World Championships Team members) training with Halo at the CXC Center of Excellence.

 

When I learned about this process, my next step as a curious coach was obvious. I had to try this! At that moment, I was working with British National Ski Team athlete Nichole Bathe, who, due to her tendency for straight leg positioning, which is common in women athletes, developed a negative habit of skiing with “stiff legs.” This habit hindered her ability to lean forward to bring her hips over her toes, in all ski techniques. My decision was brisk and we scheduled Nichole’s HALO Sport sessions over the next two weeks.

HALO Sport is powered through their app that runs for 20 minutes and allows you to increase and decrease the electrical stimulus according to your comfort. The twenty minute period is the only time required to wear the headphones to obtain the stimulation, and it is also the most sensitive period for motor changes. However, the brain is powered by these twenty minutes for another hour after you take the headphones off. Therefore, I planned Nichole’s workout to start with 20 minutes of technique skills, in a controlled environment, with mirrors for a feedback, followed by her classic or skate rollerskiing session, to support her effort to improve her technique with freshly acquired skills from the twenty minutes of drills. We started with simple balancing exercises, such as a one legged stand in classic and skate style, and in just two days I could see and Nichole could feel the progress. Instead of a shaky quadriceps being in a new uncomfortable position, there was a confident calm muscle knowing exactly where to be placed. Nichole herself had to admit that it suddenly became quite effortless. We did not waste any time and added a new challenge into Nichole’s routine, a quick body mass transfer into a gliding position onto one leg. Soon enough, three days later, the task was simple to accomplish. I went on and challenged her to perform the drills on an uneven surface by standing on a half-cylinder that rocks side to side, similarly as Nordic skis do. In the next three days, Nichole mastered that challenge as well.

I have to admit that it was a great mental satisfaction for her as an athlete. Being able to accomplish a task that your coach keeps repeating throughout your whole ski career in just a couple of days feels pretty amazing. Towards the end of our fourteen day HALO Sport period, we really went for it and made Nichole perform all the balancing exercises also standing on rollerskis. Those of you who have tried to stand on the less comfortable sisters of Nordic skis, can maybe imagine how challenging it is to stand on one leg only, in perfect gliding position, while motionless. It does require pristine style that is accomplished only through supreme balance, muscle memory, and strength. While following these drills with an hour of rollerskiing, Nichole was able to increase her explosiveness as well, leaving her with a year’s worth of work accomplished in just two weeks.

 

Jed Downs (Birkie skier and CXC Masters Team members) working on technique before rollerski workout.

 

No athlete is perfect and we all need to keep improving every minute of our lives. But does it have to take that long to master a single skill? If you count yourself among one of those athletes who keeps hearing the same thing from your coach over and over, get your hands on a pair of HALO Sport. As a coach, I was pleased with saving my efforts as well as impressed with my athlete’s progress. I want to wish Nichole good luck with her season and thank her for being a subject in my trial with HALO Sport.

I hope this got you interested, if not in trying HALO, then at least in always trying to improve yourself or support others to do the same. Repetition and hard training do bring the fruit. The variable that remains is your time.

To train with CXC contact us at info@cxcskiing.org or for more information about clinic and camps visit www.cxcskiing.org.

CXC’s Center of Excellence Seeks to ‘Study Latest Innovations in the Sport’

By Gabby Naranja

A glance into any one of the glass windows lining the east side of Central Cross Country (CXC) Academy’s Center of Excellence building might give the impression of the average athlete gym. But if you step across the front threshold or take a peek at the academy’s 360-degree virtual online tour and sport science page, you’ll find much more than treadmills, stationary bikes and medicine balls.

Located in Madison (WI) the CXC Center of Excellence also houses a 10-by-12-foot rollerski treadmill, SkiErgs, and an in-house-made, power-pole machine. For many, though, equipment is not the most powerful tool in the center. Rather, it’s the center’s capacity to evaluate and educate its members and non-members alike about Nordic skiing.

Currently, the Center of Excellence offers performance evaluations, as well as fitness testing for lactate and VO2max using the oversized treadmill. Recorded and individualized technique coaching sessions on the rollerski treadmill are also available for those willing to pay $150 dollars per hour. To help athletes gain a better understanding of their body within sport, the center is also presently working on developing a biomechanical analysis software.

The rollerski treadmill at the CXC Academy Center of Excellence

And CXC recently hired a sport development and education director, Egor Akimov, CXC head coach Andy Keller explained on the phone.

“He’s got a bachelor’s and PhD from the Russian State University in physical education and sport, majored in human physiology, and competed over in Russia, and then he served on the Moscow Center of advanced sports technology as the head of the science department,” Keller said. “He’s done a lot of research over in Russia on the biomechanics and things of that nature. He’s leading our center [in Madison], doing a lot of the sessions down there and the technique work.”

According to the CXC Executive and Athletic Director Yuriy Gusev, the Center of Excellence is approximately 90 percent complete. Anyone from CXC club members, to donors, to CXC team members, and the general public, can access the center at no cost. Rollerski treadmill evaluations cost CXC clubs $250 per day, $150 per hour for all others.

“We are finalizing a few more partnerships on the sports science program and equipment but will start performing studies in cross country skiing this coming fall,” Gusev wrote in an email. “Our goal is to have top sports science facility to study latest innovations in the sport, potential application in cross country skiing to improve training, recovery and performance.”

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Source: fasterskier.com

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