Are you on track? How much training is enough?

[Pete Vordenberg]

The question of how much training is enough is obviously a flawed one. The specifics of training are every bit as important as the amount. What one does for training and how well plays a huge role – but it is still the case that the yearly volume of training and the progression of that volume through the development years is a very important component of training and I believe it is one that US is behind on. For now suffice it to say that training includes primarily skiing, rollerskiing, running, ski imitation, weights/circuit training in addition to some things like kayaking and cycling but does not include games like volleyball, stretching, yoga, dancing etc. So excluding the real question of what and how – lets simply look at how much ski training is enough to reach world class results…

According to Pete V:

By age 23 a skier must be training near or over 700 professional hours depending on the amount of intensity and training focus. Athlete must be working with a coach and competing at the appropriate domestic and international level. (note: it says by the age of 23).

By age 21 a skier must be training around or over 650 quality hours and be working with a coach and racing a full schedule of Super Tour, National and appropriate international events.

By age 19 a skier must be training over 600 quality hours and be working with a coach and racing at the appropriate national and international level including Super Tour, NCAA, JWC and some OPA level racing.

By age 17 a skier must be training over 500 quality hours and be working with a coach and racing at the appropriate national and international level including Super Tour, Jr. Qualifiers, NCAA, JWC or J1 trip in addition to some international level racing.

According to Vidar Loefshus:

I think most of the junior men put in between 500 and 650 hours a year when their at the age of 19 to 20. Most of the women maybe a little bit less.
We recommend that these hours contains of:
Level 1 70-80%
Level 2 10-20%
Level 3 8-12%
Level 4 3-5%
Level 5 2-3%

The older you get, the more intensity you put in.

According to Erik Røste (www.langrenn.com basic Norwegian training philosophy):

16 years old = 320 hours
19 years old = 520 hours
Between 17-18 years old = depends on level of maturity

One thing that is noted in this article is that this is a departure from “older” training methods, which were much more volume based. Meaning intensity plays a bigger role in these training systems.

According to the USSA Competency Document (www.ussa.org under sport, cross country):

Age 16 = 350hours or more
Age 17 = 400hours or more
Age 18 = 500hours or more
Age 19 = 600hours or more
Age 20 = 650hours or more


A note:

Most elite senior cross country skiers train around 750-850 hours. Some of them have been training these volumes since their last years as junior racers. A few train less and a some train more. The range I have heard for medal winning skiers is between 550 and 1200 hours – but this includes the absolute extremes and I am not sure what was and was not counted as training.
Most elite senior skiers train strength 2 to 3 times a week (either weights, circuit or specific strength), intensity 2 to 4 times a week and otherwise distance, speed and long distance. Again some do more, some less.

Junior skiers are in the “prepare to prepare” stage of development so their training is meant to prepare them for the training they do as senior skiers who are in the “prepare to compete or prepare to win” stage of athlete development.

What do you think?

How much do you train?

Are you on track to your goals?

[Jeff Reed]

I think this is a great outline/guideline. Younger skiers need to hear this and hear it often. I particularly like the fact that you mention cycling/kayaking as training methods but as secondary - perhaps tertiary in their role.

[jcork]

As a coach for Durango Nordic, I run about 400-425 training sessions a year. Eleven sessions/week in the summer; nine during the school year; and three to five in the six weeks after Junior Nationals. I'm attending all of these (except when at camps/events), but the racers aren't -- they miss sessions here and there for school, other sport commitments and the inevitable sickness.

That being said -- just keeping track for myself -- I'll end up with around 600 hours of training this year. There are a couple of kids (a J2F and J1M) who will probably have about that many hours (+/- 25). Most of the J1/J2s will clock in a fair amount less than that -- but still in the 400- to 450-hour range. I have a few J3s who "train" a lot -- lots of time mountain biking, kayaking and cruising around the woods. If you strapped heart-rate monitors on those fellas I'd guess they're getting close to 500-hours of time per year with heart-rates above 120.

I will let Tad tell you how many hours he's training, but I'd speculate that he might be in the 900-1000 hour range. A lot of that is on the bike, but four hours of skiing a day will certainly bump your hours up.

[Pete Vordenberg]

Thanks Jason - I would love to hear more like this from other clubs and high school teams out there... anyone?

[Matthew Rowe]

I ski for St. Olaf college in Northfield, MN. We are a DIII program and race against UWGB, MTU, CSS, UAF, and perennial ski power NMU. We get killed by them. Why?

The reason is a combination of talent, training, and school structure. Let's have a look at why NMU turns out such fast skiers. Sten, their coach, won't even look at you if you're coming to his school unless you've been to JOs-period. That seems to solidify that you have an engine or at least have enough talent to be counted among the best juniors in the nation. Most of all though, NMU skiers train harder than anyone else. They put in the big hours and the intensity all under the watchful eye of a coach who's skied an an extremely high level and coached 40+ athletes to NCAA and the olympics. All the Cook family (chris cook, bryan cook, etc) goes to NMU and I can remember skiing against Tim Cook in Wisconsin high school championships. We were close. Now at NMU he regularly beats me by 3min+. That 3min+ is training. And, in my opinion, that 3+ min is Sten. He doesn't pussy foot around, unlike other people like myself who think themselves super serious but in reality don't work hard enough. Structure is the last factor, and that's tied to training. At NMU the tuition is low enough that it's reasonable to take 6years to complete your bachelor's degree. That gives athletes that ski at NMU (some of the most talented genetically) a long time (up to 6 years) to train hard under a coach that knows exactly what it takes to ski fast (Sten) in a perfect skiing environment (good snow coverage, alpine hills for bounding, running trails, good rollerskiing). After 6 years in that optimal environment you'd have to try hard not to ski fast. If you're motivated and work, watch out, you just might end up on the US team.

Contrast that with the program 8hrs southwest at a DIII school. Most skiers coming in have limited high school credentials. Making JOs in high school is a bonus. Training is as follows: Our coach recommends a summer plan that begins in May gradually builds in the summer to about 15hours/week beginning in August. Excerpt:

Week Plan for August: [14-15 hours per week]

M: Skate 2 hours. [30 minute warm-up, no poles 1 hour, 30 minute cool-down.]
T: Rollerski strength on hill. (2 hours total)
W: 1 hour easy run with plyometric strength. (2 hours total)
Th: Easy distance double-pole (10x15 sec pickups) (2 hours easy)
Fr: Hill workout with strength. (2 hours total)
Sat: Run 3 hours or bike or rollerski 3.5 hours
Sun: Off

The training comes out to about 500 hours/year. That's not enough to be competitive in the central region. Our top male racer places among the top 20 at best, while we do have one female skier in the running for NCAAs. This isn't our coaches fault entirely. Most of the athletes on the team are just not committed to ski fast : not complete the above training in the summer, running cross country in the fall instead of ski train, missing practice, having too much of a social life. The facilities are there. The resources are there. The work ethic is not. We approach skiing too much like a club. Of all the excuses out there, it all comes down to training. You have to want it. Everyone thinks they're training hard but they're not. We lose races in the winter in the summer when we sit around coming up with excuses not to train. No one likes to work. But ski racing isn't always perfect summer training days. Most of the time it's 85 degrees and you've got an hour left in your 3.5hr OD and you could cut it short but you don't because you know that would be losing the workout. A few months later you're out in the cold October rain as it gets dark doing bounding intervals up a hill; you approach the top and you could relent but you don't because you know that pulling ups is cheating yourself. It's getting up before class at 6:00am to go lift or run. You have to like that. Not enough of us do.

[Dell Todd]

Great discussion. One of the clear cultural differences between the US & Nordic nations is that our youth have not realized the volume of training required to become world class competitive at the various levels along the way to the top (World Cup). This is great that Pete has been beating the drum and laying out the annual volume that would deliver a good ski racer to the age of 23 with 700 hours. Obviously, many skiers have crushed themselves trying to make a jump from <400 to over 500 annual hours, because they did not know, and tried to short circuit the process all at once with catastrophic results.

Yes Sten certainly does run a great NCAA ski program with years of results. It seems to be the model of the type.

I try to encourage the faster (more dedicated) junior skiers I speak with at weekend races, to train year round & have a discussion with them about what they are doing, to encourage them to keep it up, or train more and so forth.

[jcork]

Obviously ski racers need to develop to the point that they are able to train independently and train a lot. I think that the numbers Pete has above are fairly well-understood by most of our juniors. However, I don't think it's realistic to just tell a 14-year-old she needs to get 400-500 hours and assume it'll happen. I think this ignores the fact that for most of these kids, skiing is a social thing. Even at NMU (and APU/USST/SVSEF/CXC/etc.), working as a group helps everyone.

I made this point in a FasterSkier interview -- if you aren't working with a coach and training group year-round, the likelihood you're going to succeed goes down. It's easy to wake up and not go out the door; not so easy when you know somebody else got out of bed too and is waiting.

[Kurt]

Guys,

great discussion starter here...

Couple of Q's for the big time coaches here (Eli, Pete, etc)

How are you guys managing training "load", there is a lot of talk of hours and some large variations from Pete's OG post.

Are we just counting hours for the sake of counting hours here? Are our juniors too "hours" focused? What about the concept of "lift the left, then fill right" as the athlete ages?

Also, when we are talking about the high end of the volume range (as listed above), coach : athlete interaction has to be spot on I suspect. Athletes always want to blur the lines between VERY easy volume based work, and HARD interval type stuff.

So to my original question, are you guys using any sort of impulse based (trimps, tss) or velocity based means of tracking (maybe numerically) total training load?

K to the P

[Pete Vordenberg]

Hi Kurt.

We have worked with a number of ways to try to measure load. None of them were (in our experience) as good as simply logging the training really well and monitoring how training and recovery were going on a daily basis. We have used numbers systems to track health and recovery and we still do at many of our camps and comps (morning hr, lactate, glucose, hemoglobin and a range of “how do you feel” markers – seems the best system has been feel and coach/athlete observation.

Do you have a system you are really happy with?

Are our skiers too focused on hours? Hours for the sake of hours is generally not a good idea. Hours should represent the amount of time you spend doing the right sort of training balanced with the right sort of recovery from that training. My feeling, and the reason I made this post, is that as a whole we do not have enough skiers doing enough of the right kind of training. I wanted to leave it at that for now and not get into too many details on training. The question is out there…are enough of us doing enough of what needs to be done to be as good as we can be?

[Spencer Knickerbocker]

I am a second year J2 nordic combiner and this year I trained 425 qualiy hours. My most consistent year by far. Am I on track to be a great ski racer after high school?

[Pete Vordenberg]

Spencer - that is a question only you and your coach can answer. But from a purely hours-point-of-view (not knowing what you are doing or how jump training fits in) it seems that you are doing a good job putting in the time.

[Tad Elliott]

As Cork has speculated below, in training hours this year I will be in the 900 to 1000 hour range. About 65 percent of that is on a bike, counting it as full hours. Getting the other 30 percent is on skis in four months on snow. Intensity about twice a week, and racing close to two to three times out of the month, year round.