Deep Thoughts for 2014-15

2014 was a great year for Bowdoin Nordic – we really raised the bar for this program.  With four of our top skiers graduating, it’ll be tough to live up to this standard, but we’re all fired up to give it a shot.  One way we’ll do this is to figure out how we can keep getting better.  Right now I have lots of ideas rattling around in my head – here are three of them:

Technique work:  We made good use of our IPad and did a lot of good trailside/roadside technique work this year – this was very effective, but also limited.  With video review, the athletes are analyzing and thinking a lot, which is a useful piece of the puzzle, but I’d rather have them thinking less and doing more – just moving on skis and playing with different ways to make themselves go faster with less effort.  I’d like to incorporate more drills into our day-to-day training – free-flowing stuff like running, skipping, etc, as well as lots of balance drills.  I’m thinking that a short routine that the skiers can do independently at the start of each session might be a good way to accomplish this.

Elasticity:  Good technique requires light, springy movements and quick force application (minimal ground contact time, for lack of a better term).  As I mentioned above, we try to focus on this in general technique work, as well as speed training.  But - you can’t be light on your skis if you’re not light on your feet, so we also do a short elasticity routine – skips, hops, jump rope – now and then.  Can this be done more frequently without adding too much stress to the overall training load?  I could see elasticity work as part of a warmup for any on-foot workout, or maybe even incorporated into an easy run.  For many of our skiers, more elasticity work could be an important tool for improving technique.

Poling power training:  Am I obsessed with poling power?  Yes.  We did a lot of upper body training this year – lots of erging and poles-only rollerskiing – and our skiers were pretty solid in the poling department.  So that was good.  But I think we can do better.  The arms can be heavily trained as a means of propulsion, as shown by paddlers, sit-skiers, and wheelchair athletes.   Fast skiers need to have great upper body power - we’ve known this forever, yet most skiers are nowhere near these upper body dominant athletes when it comes to generating power with the arms.  There’s a ton of room to improve here.  Weights, pullups, rollerboards – good stuff, but not even close to enough.  A few uphill double pole repeats once a week?  A good start, but only a start.  Even the sustained poles-only workouts that we do throughout the fall only add up to a small fraction of our overall training time.  I’m positive that we can continue to increase the amount of time we spend on upper body training without neglecting other areas – more double poling and more erging, and just a touch less of our other training methods.