As ski racers, we only get about* 10 hours (at most!) of actual training in a course before the season starts.
*It takes approximately 40-60 seconds to complete a training run. On a good day, I can take up to 10 runs in a session, and in the past I have had approximately 60-70 days in the prep period which is an average of 700 runs x 50 seconds = 35,000 seconds = 583 minutes = 9 hours and 43 minutes. And this is a generous estimation, and assumes that all those runs are in good conditions, which they are certainly not!
This is not a lot of time to master a craft! Which is why the training we do off the hill is so important to both, prepare us for taking advantage of the time on the hill, and to train our bodies as best as possible to be as fast as possible when we do get in the start gate.
I wanted to share a bit more about what my training (workouts, nutrition, supplements, and overall wellness) looks like off the hill and explain my methodology for staying as healthy and fit as possible. I absolutely love talking about all of this stuff and trying to learn as much as possible about it, because, to me, the off-the-hill gains are 100% in my control, very straight forward, quantifiable, and impactful. Of course, there is a sense of perpetual grind towards overall wellness as one can always be doing more, but rather than feeling daunted by this ambiguous finish line, I quite enjoy the never-ending quest towards the most powerful and healthy version of myself, while also realizing that life should be lived and enjoyed along the way :)
The Workouts
The US Ski Team is headquartered in a building called the Center of Excellence (COE) in Park City, Utah. The entire bottom floor is dedicated to the gym, PT center, strength and performance offices, testing equipment, and athlete meal/hangout room - pretty much everything an athlete needs to stay healthy and get stronger. Many alpine athletes live full time in Utah in the off season to take advantage of all the resources at the COE, especially younger athletes who have just made the team and want to have more supervision and guidance during their workout sessions.
As I mentioned, I love nerding out on all elements of strength and conditioning, how the body works, and how to maximize all of our systems. So I have really enjoyed doing the research and putting together my own conditioning programs the past couple years as an Independent Athlete. But I was never able to replicate the testing that the Ski Team can do at the COE (in previous years my testing was pretty rudimentary - measuring muscle girth with a measuring tape, taking a Peloton FTP test, and various other physical testing measurements). So, it was extremely fun to go back to the COE this spring and summer and have super detailed data on my lactate zones, force, power, single leg tests, etc. and to know all summer long that I would be tested again and able to see the (hopefully big) improvements in my numbers. It’s pretty similar to why people like wearing health tracking monitors like Whoop, or Fitbits, or Apple watches - it is very motivational to have quantifiable data and numbers to tell you if you did a good job or not.
One of my biggest learnings from my testing was that I have many more fast twitch (type II) muscle fibers than slow twitch (type I)(which isn’t super surprising given my background in soccer and affinity for more athletic and agile activities).
Fast-twitch fibers are good for rapid movements like jumping or sprinting that require fast muscle contractions over short durations, and they rely on anaerobic respiration (glycolysis alone). These muscles are super important because ski racing is primarily eccentrically biased muscle work. Whereas, the slow-twitch muscle fibers are more efficient at using oxygen to generate more ATP molecules as fuel for continuous, extended muscle contractions over a long time. They fire more slowly than fast-twitch fibers and can go for a long time before they fatigue.
Ski racing is a super unique sport because there are so many different elements we are trying to optimize on, including our neurological system that coordinates balance and motor firing, our muscle endurance and the ability to produce high quality work for a longer period of time, our overall strength and power output, and so much more.
I find that (like many things in life), deciding what areas to focus and optimize for is a balance. Whenever I find myself questioning how to manage this balance, I think back on what Steve Nyman told me many years ago - to be aware of and work on your weaknesses, but never loose sight of or focus on your strengths and what differentiates you as an athlete. This has been my guiding MO for the past couple years as I work to increase my overall strength while maintaining my agility and power and fitness so I can take as many high, full power runs as possible when we do get to be on snow.
One of my biggest weakness from my spring testing was my weighted continuous counter-movement jumps (you have a 45 lb barbell on your back and do 20 squat jumps in a row). Ideally, you can get to the same height for all 20, but I dropped off towards the end indicating that my strength endurance needed some work. This was a big focus for me this spring/summer in addition to increasing my amount of zone 2 aerobic training to build more slow twitch muscles (turns out this is really good for overall health and longevity as well AND zone 2 workouts are super chill compared to everything else I’m doing so I happily added a lot of extra zone 2 training to my weeks.) When I tested for the second time in July before we went to Argentina I saw a huge improvement in all my numbers, especially my weighted counter-movement jumps and bike test (picture below the difference between May and July).
Now we’re focused on strength and muscle endurance and increasing our ability to perform at high levels of acidosis (lactate acid presence). Lactate levels are super high for ski racing, so we first work to increase our lactate threshold, and now we are working on increasing our bodies ability to perform when lactate is present.
I think the most important thing to remember with workouts is to be intentional with why you’re training. Everyone will have a different reason to train whether that’s a sport, for longevity, for a big race, or simply to look better! Once there’s an intentional purpose, I find it’s much easer to motivate around that reason versus just feeling kind of lost and unstructured with what to do when you go to the gym and not knowing or caring why you’re doing it. For me, right now, the focus is obviously ski racing (I do have to remind myself of this often when I’m around my family who are all a lot more focused on optimizing around endurance activities and not as much power and strength :), but I am also conscious of overall heath and fitness and add in things for mental health and wellbeing too.
I couple years ago I made this google sheet for younger athletes who are training for skiing, and I recently updated it with new exercises and recommendations. Feel free to share with whomever you think would benefit!
Also, if anyone is looking for an awesome book/guide on how to stay healthy and fit for as long as possible I would 100% recommend Peter Attea’s book Outlive (I have mentioned it before) - It covers all areas of longevity and mental and physical wellbeing.
https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/
Next week I will dive into things I have learned (and implemented) recently around nutrition, supplements, sleep and general wellbeing.
Photos
Here are a couple older photos from the COE
Here are some more recent photos from the past week in Muskoka with my family.