Summer is hot, which means your social media feeds are filled with photos of skiers in shorts and athletic tops on roller skis or cross-country skiing. Nothing human is alien to us – this is our equivalent of a bikini shot against the backdrop of waves.
If you are an attentive consumer of such content, then you have noticed that every year our body becomes more powerful and muscular. I’m not going to get into a debate about whether it’s attractive or not. I will try to explain why with each new season we need more biceps, triceps and abductors (abductors) and why nothing betrays a professional skier like pronounced lateral thigh muscles.
Our sport has changed radically since the turn of the century. It is true that ski technology has not advanced much in twenty years and certain particularly high-performance pairs of skis can last several generations. I myself ran on such “dinosaurs” at CR-2021, my trainer Dmitry Vladimirovich Borodin somewhere “rented” them. He ran unsuccessfully, by the way.
What has changed are the venues for the competitions. Previously, cross-country ski trails were more like the natural terrain of central Russia or Scandinavia: long, gentle climbs and the same descents, if the running distance was, say, 10 km, then a circle of 10 km was running. Frankly, I did not find that, I know more from the stories.
Now everything is different. Television, as the main customer of competitions at the World Cup level, does not adapt in any way to the 10 km laps. The lap should be 2.5 to 3 kilometers, maximum 5. Then a relatively small number of live cameras on the course can cover the whole race. Then, as a viewer, you won’t miss the main thing – how Petya overtook Vasya, and even better, how Vasya couldn’t stand it and cracked Petya in the back with a stick.
Let’s not pretend – television asks for ratings, ratings give shows, and shows are something dramatic that will then be repeated in all editions of sports news. Hence another change on the slopes: instead of long, gentle slopes, which apparently make the average spectator yawn, they offer more and more steep, twisty and spectacular ones every year.
When I arrived at the 2021 World Cup in Oberstdorf, I was impressed by two things: an absolutely horse-drawn climb of about eight hundred meters – then immediately a descent with turns so steep and steep that my first thought was, “The whole thing is, someone here has fallen dramatically straight into the camera!” “At the World Cup a few years ago, in the men’s race, everything was like this – falls, blockages, live drama.
At the World Championships, no one seems to have fallen – and all because we train now, including those very direct lateral thigh muscles. Twenty years ago they weren’t so involved, only getting in the way on long, smooth trails. By the way, the tracks in Beijing were old-fashioned, calm and smooth, I was even surprised. But this is a big exception, but Oberstdorf is the norm.
It is clear that the local slopes, even in my native Kamchatka, are not so radical, and television does not dictate the profile of the slopes to us – but the fashion for skiing goes, as it should, from top to bottom. To perform well in the World Cup, our tracks are becoming more and more difficult. Ask any skier who ran a race in Tyumen how she managed to climb the famous descent with the popular name “Toilet” without falling. The same Dmitry Vladimirovich Borodin, thanks to him again, spent hours working out the technique of the descents and, accordingly, “pumping up” the muscles that ensure the confident passage of the descents. I was not yet 15, but we were already thinking about the World Cup.
In general, the changing profile of the slopes has led to an evolution in the understanding of what the ideal body of a skier should look like. All this has prompted coaches and analysts to develop completely different exercises.
I write these lines to the so-called interassembly. This means that I train according to the plan sent by coach Egor Vladimirovich Sorin, but alone. As a last resort – say, driving school exams – I can change aerobic training or even (horror!) skip it. But strength, physical training and stabilization – all these different types of muscle development – should absolutely not be missed. It doesn’t work during the day – you go to the gym at night, early in the morning – but you go there for sure.
I started building muscle at the age of 14. More specifically, I thought I was swinging. When I entered the junior team three years ago and saw Natasha Mekryukova doing push-ups on the uneven bars with an additional 25 kg weight, I was shocked. Now I’m doing the same exercise with a lot more weight – and I’m far from the team record holder.
Strength and coordination training in the main team is not even a step, it is a leap forward, including for the world champion among juniors. Aerobic loads increase gradually, and I did not notice any fundamental difference. But the strength exercises increased so much that after the OFP I got to the point where my hands were shaking to the point that I couldn’t bring a spoon to my mouth.
In addition to being difficult in itself, working with weights close to the mass of one’s own body is also very difficult. At a young age, you conditionally do push-ups, rep after rep. In the national team, you have to do push-ups, then jump sharply, circle around your axis in the air and land in a split. Relax. This is not a verbatim description of our exercises, it is an illustration of the complexity. Your whole body is already torn, and you still have to do everything without mixing and as technically as possible.
Of course, every kilogram of muscle is a dilemma, it can become a problem in racing. The question is posed as follows: do I need this kilogram or is it more correct to drive it out before a precise departure? Teresa Johaug didn’t have a single extra gram, I can imagine roughly what fat percentage she has with such a body – most male athletes would envy her. And Jonna Sundling or Slovenian Eva Urevts are very powerful girls, the muscles play just under the skin. Eva, by the way, does a free handstand without taking off her skis in order to entertain people at the World Cup.
It seems to me that now coaches and athletes themselves all over the world are looking for a balance.
Moreover, depending on the specific boot. At altitude, for example, any excess weight interferes – before the Beijing Olympics, at an altitude of 1700 meters, under the guidance and supervision of Yegor Vladimirovich and team doctors, I lost weight – I myself did not believe the figures on the scale before departure. At the same time, she ate everything, did not deny herself anything – workouts were built in such a way that the weight disappeared. As a result, in Beijing in two “my” races (sprint and relay) I ran relatively easily, in the sprint semifinals I did not have enough experience, but certainly not “fizuh”.
However, Beijing is an exception. 1700 m is practically the maximum height at which one runs. Therefore, the general trend is towards the pursuit of muscle building. You are much more likely to come across a skier in the gym than directly on the piste.
Source : MatchTV
I am Sandra Jackson, a journalist and content creator with extensive experience in the news industry. I have been working in the news media for over five years. During this time, I have worked as an author and editor at various outlets producing high-quality content that attracts readers from different demographics.
