This Page About Cross-country Skiing

Cross-country Skiing

Top-level cross-country skiers and their coaches tend to embrace a high-volume, low-intensity training paradigm. Training programmes unveiled at international cross-country skiing coaches' seminars reveal that zlite and very good skiers usually spend less than 20% - and sometimes as little as 10% - of training time at an intensity below lactate threshold during a year of training and competition. Training volumes tend to be fairly high, with some zlite-level skiers averaging some 725 hours of workouts per year (about 14 per week). Of those 725 hours, it is not uncommon for 90% to be spent below lactate-threshold intensity(1).

Is that the right way to do it? Exercise science research is not very supportive of the high-volume paradigm, but the answer given to this question by zlite-level cross-country ski coaches is usually 'yes'. The coaches often support their contention by pointing out that Olympic and World Championship medallists tend to use this high-volume, low-intensity approach to training.

Note, though, that since high-volume, low-quality training is almost universally accepted in the cross-country skiing world (as with many other endurance sports), high-volume athletes usually end up competing against other high-volume athletes at major events like the Olympics and World Championships. Thus it's no surprise that the winners' circles are primarily reserved for high-volume athletes, since they make up the vast majority of competitors. The most naturally gifted athletes also tend to gravitate toward high-volume training, since they usually link up with successful coaches who have traditionally favoured low-intensity approaches.

There is certainly no reliable scientific evidence to support the value of high-volume, low-intensity training: in fact recent research suggests the opposite. For example, in a study carried out with top-quality American cross-country skiers, athletes who dramatically increased their quantity of high-quality training achieved impressive improvements in performance, while those who stepped up their volume of training in a traditional way failed to improve at all (ibid).

In this study, 14 cross-country skiers (eight women and six men of comparable ability) were followed carefully over a two-year period. During the first year, all the athletes trained in a similar way, using the currently popular high-volume, low-intensity programme. Over the course of the year, they averaged 660 hours of training (about 12.7 hours per week), of which a paltry 16% were spent at lactate-threshold intensity or higher. (Regular readers of PP will recall that our recommended goal is at least 25%). The average age of the skiers was 23; the women had been training seriously for eight years, boasted 16% body fat and an average VO2max of 60, while the men had been working for 11 years, had 6% fat and VO2max of 70. All used the same strength-training schedules, and the overall periodisation of training was very similar.

In fact, this periodisation plan was simple and traditional. For 23 weeks, from May through October, they worked on developing an 'aerobic base'. During this 'basic endurance period' they completed about 17 hours of training per week, with just 4-5% of total work classified as 'quality' - ie above lactate threshold. In other words, almost half the year was taken up with lots of low-quality skiing.

Maintaining volume and boosting intensity in pre-competition period

The basic endurance period led on to the 10-week 'pre-competition period', which lasted from November to mid-January. This period included the early season preliminary competitions, and the overall training philosophy involved a maintenance of high volume (17 hours per week) with an increased quantity of intense work. There was an emphasis on intervals carried out at about lactate-threshold intensity, as well as some racing simulations. Training at about lactate threshold or above added up to around 4.5 hours - about 25% of the total training load.

The final 'competition period' also lasted 10 weeks, from mid-January through March. Volume was cut considerably to 10-11 hours per week (a 35-40% reduction) but the amount of quality work - 4-4.7 hours - stayed roughly the same as during the pre-competition period. Since volume was trimmed so drastically, however, the relative amount of quality training rose to 35-48% of the total. When the competition period ended, there was a nine-week break before the start of a new training macrocycle.

By the end of the competition period, things had become extremely interesting. By this time, seven of the athletes had met three important improvement criteria: increasing VO2max by at least 7%, boosting lactate threshold by at least 10% and raising the number of points they received on the United States Ski Association (USSA) Points List by more than 10%. Since things had gone so well, these athletes were placed on the same training programme for the following year ('If it ain't broke why fix it?') except for the fact that their total training volume was increased by 6%.

Why athletes traditionally pile on the volume in training

Why 6% exactly? Once fairly high levels of VO2max and lactate threshold are attained, athletes have customarily piled on greater volumes of training in attempts to push these physiological variables even higher. Traditionally, annual increases of 5-10% have been perceived as optimal(2). This is true across the full range of endurance sports; swimmers, cyclists and rowers often attempt to increase training volume by such amounts from year to year in an effort to improve. Sometimes this is just because they don't know what else to do, but many athletes and coaches do believe that volume swings are a strong stimulus for improvement.

Meanwhile, though, the other seven cross-country skiers in the US study failed to satisfy the improvement criteria during the first year (we'll explore the reasons for that in a moment) and were placed on a quite different training plan for the following year, which emphasised higher-quality workouts. In fact, the amount of intense training they carried out roughly doubled during the following year, while volume held steady.

Thus, two different training schemes were evaluated: a classic step-up in volume versus a remarkable increase in training quality without any extra volume. It is important to understand that this research does not constitute a scientific comparison of volume v intensity: for that it would have been necessary to divide a group of roughly equivalent athletes into two sub-groups, one following a more-intense programme and the other a high-volume slogfest. The groups in this study could not be considered equivalent, since they had shown differing responses to the first year's high-volume work. Continue to learn more about skiing, please visit Peak Performance Online.

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