Training Tip by Mike Mandli
The leaves are turning colour, the evenings are getting a bit cooler, and the time has come to focus on some sport specific exercise after a summer of doing more general aerobic activities. Our canoeing, kayaking, swimming, running, biking, and hiking have created a good base upon which to build more sport specific movement and muscle memory. We want to get our minds and bodies ready for the demands of cross country skiing, and we want to start training with a little more focus and structure.
If not on a glacier or on the snows of New Zealand or Australia, the most serious athletes have been roller skiing this month and have built their workout cycles around speed, anaerobic intervals, aerobic intervals, over distance, power/strength endurance, and rest. Yes, rest! One of the best training tips is to schedule rest into whatever program you choose to reach your goals. Our bodies need to recover from hard or long efforts and blocks of training.
While we have all had coaches of one kind or another, and there are about as many different training programs as are there are needles on a pine tree, the basic benefit of rest is often ignored in our driven pursuits. One of my coaches, Juerg Feldmann, said, “We need coaches not so much to prescribe training, but to prescribe rest. Athletes will always over dose themselves on exercise if given the chance, and they would perform better if they were told when not to take a training.” Prescribed rest will allow the athlete to reach their full potential, and part of that is listening to the body and taking note of what it is telling you about the fatigue or strength of your systems.
In the absence of a coach who will monitor and prescribe rest for you, scheduling rest in your training program, even if you don’t feel like you need it, is one way to allow the body to build on previous training sessions and to make the next training session better.
A typical weekly training cycle using strategically scheduled rest might look like this:
Monday REST
Tuesday AM Easy run (L1) with general strength training
PM 1.5 hrs 15 to 20 second technique specific over speeds (L5)
Wednesday AM 1 to 1.75 hrs easy over distance (L1)
PM REST
Thursday AM Easy run (L1)with general strength training
PM 1.5 hrs 4 x 5 minute race pace (L4) with warm up and warm down
Friday REST
Saturday AM Specific Strength on roller skis
PM 3 X 10 minute below race pace intervals (L3) with full recovery
Sunday AM 2 to 3 hrs over distance recovery (L1)
PM REST
The weekly load (time and number of intervals) and Intensity (level of effort = L), would be adjusted up or down depending on the level of the athlete, the time of the year, and the measured physiological responses of the athlete. The best programs appear to have scheduled weeks of lower load, lower intensity, and more rest to allow the body to compensate for the stress of a prescribed exercise. In fact, sometimes a good coach will schedule complete rest after an extremely demanding block of training to allow for an effect called super-compensation, but that is another topic for discussion.
The reason rest is important for all of us whom might attend an altitude camp is that we need to allow the body systems to absorb and to compensate for the stressors that come from the high load and the intensity of altitude. Bottom line: Without a period of rest after an altitude camp, we do not improve as much as we could. In fact, we often get worse.
After an altitude camp last year, my friend Maggie left me with a valuable quote that I keep above my wax bench as a reminder.
“What is without periods of rest will not endure” - Ovid
Ski ya soon. Mike Mandli
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