One more week until I’m back on snow training in Chile, which means that my main summer dry-land conditioning block is coming to an end. Although skiing is a winter sport and the majority of my races are from November to March, training continues almost year round. I’ve spent a lot of thought and time trying to make my body as strong as possible, so I wanted to share what my dry-land training looks like year-round, what the goal of each block is, some things I’ve learned over the years and my best workout/health tips, including some of my favorite workouts :)
April: Post Season Break
Goal: Rest and Recovery
Our biggest block of time off usually comes right after our race season ends. For me this was April 16th. I took two weeks off, where I didn’t have any scheduled work outs or training. Just enjoyed not thinking about skiing and did whatever exercise I wanted. Very fun and free time :)
April - June: Spring Training
Goal: Aerobic Base, Strength Maintenance + Building
The next month and a half is a little mix of everything as I jump between on snow camps and dry-land weeks. This is the time I focus the most on my cardio, so I get to do lots of running, biking, hiking and playing outside.
During this time I try to make sure my body is feeling recovered as much as possible. Spring training can feel like a bit of a grind mentally and physically, especially since I only had two weeks off and was doing a lot of travel back and forth. I started doing yoga more regularly this season and it’s helped so much with my mobility and injury prevention (especially for my hips!). I use the peloton app that has yoga classes ranging from 5 - 90 minutes (I usually do 20 or 30 minute ones or a quick 10 minute before skiing).
I also continue to lift during the spring around one or two times a week. The intensity of these lifts vary a ton based on access to equipment, how much I’m skiing, and how my body is feeling. I try to start doing a bit more intense, full body lifts during this time to get a little head start on my summer dry-land block, but nothing too crazy or focused. I do a fair amount of dumbbell HIIT type circuits during this time as well to combine anaerobic and aerobic gains.
June - August: Main Dry-land Block
Goal: Increase Strength, Power, Threshold Endurance
After the last day of spring training, I turn the focus entirely to dry-land conditioning! This time is super intense and very tiring, but also extremely rewarding because I know the hard work I put in the gym will directly correlate to how fast I can be on the mountain.
My focus for this block is to improve movement quality, muscle power, and cardiorespiratory fitness while maintaining a base level of aerobic capacity (to be able to train harder, longer), mobility (to prevent injury) and agility (to make sure I can still be as dynamic as possible in my skiing). Focusing primarily on speed events (DH and SG) means that maximum strength is even more important for me now than it was as a tech skier. I work a lot on power (training explosive muscle contraction through a variety of force/velocity exercises) and strength (strengthening the primary movement patterns of the human body—squat, lunge, single-leg stance, hip hinge, knee flexion, and upper body pushing/pulling.)
I break these two months into hard, medium and easy weeks and plan the workouts accordingly. I usually stick to three weeks hard in a row, follower by one week easy, and have some flexibility with a medium week depending on how my body is feeling. This is what the easy, medium, hard week plans look like:
Specific Workout Goals:
Cardio/ Aerobic workouts focus on longer distance, slower paced aerobic training that improves the body’s ability to supply blood and oxygen to the working muscles, which will help with training volume. Aerobic intensity is divided up into two categories: aerobic 1 (A1) and aerobic 2 (A2).
Power zone endurance/ intervals and threshold work moderate intensity aerobic training at or near the lactate-threshold increasing the aerobic contribution to skiing which results in less fatigue for a given power output.
High-Intensity (HIIT / Interval) are short-duration, all-out effort intervals challenge the aerobic capabilities of the fast-twitch muscle fibers resulting in improved strength endurance and allowing for sustained maximal ski effort.
August: Summer Training
Goal: Maintain Strength and Fitness
During our summer on-snow training camp (this year in Chile!), the focus for my dry-land sessions will be mostly to maintain the work I’ve been putting in all summer and to push the overall fitness depending on training volume (which depends on conditions). We’ll do some lifts before a day off, daily core and mobility, and a couple endurance and cardio sessions.
September - October: Short Conditioning Blocks
Goal: Maximize Gym Time for Final Conditioning Gains
We usually have one final dry-land push in the fall in between our summer and fall training blocks. This is the last window we’ll have to improve our fitness before the season starts, so I try to maximize gym time as much as possible. Hopefully I am feeling pretty strong at this point, so the focus is usually strength endurance and power work. This is a good time to make sure the fast twitch muscles are firing and I can be as quick as possible with my gained strength.
November - April: In Season Conditioning
Goal: Maintenance and Injury Prevention
Once we get back on snow for our final fall training blocks before the race season begin, the focus turns to strength maintenance which means making sure we’re working out and activating our muscles as much as possible to ensure that we are not losing any of the strength and fitness we worked so hard on all summer. I also spend a lot of our dry-land time during the season on recovery and injury prevention. So I will usually lift once a week, do a lot of mobility, good warm ups, core, activation exercises, and recovery cardio. This is also when I do daily yoga which is great for mind and body 🙂