The striding and gliding requires ski specific strength and endurance. It’s time for some ski imitation drills.
We all know the signs, the change of seasons is upon us. Sam Naney from Cascade Endurance has some ski imitation pointers. Get ready to ski walk and moosehoof.
The sport of skiing and its varied disciplines – Nordic, alpine, backcountry, etc – delivers blessings and curses to participants. The former comes through the anticipation and then magical arrival of snow and a landscape completely transformed into a playground, with steep slides and long, sinuous uphill tracks leading to alpine environs. The curses? Same story. You’ve gotta wait months each year for the fun to begin again, and in the meantime, many of us spend our time thinking about how to better prepare for the eventual return of Ullr’s gifts and our favorite season to arrive. And while strength training and analogous endurance sports like running and cycling can build many aspects of your complete ski fitness package, they lack the specificity: that crucial component to any sport that can elevate your performance and allow you to apply that hard-earned fitness into well-crafted turns most effectively.
To get as close to ski-specific movements as we can in the dryland months (short of plane travel to opposing hemispheres), we can use two main tools: rollerskiing and ski imitation foot drills. Rollerskiing definitely has its place, most particularly for Nordic skiing and increasingly for skimo racers. Not for the faint of heart (they lack brakes), rollerskis give you the feel of gliding and the required balance and timed force application that skiing uses, enabling you to keep those motor pathways firing throughout the year. But even more accessible (and less hazardous for most) are ski-imitation drills, notably ski walking and…wait for it…moosehoofing.
We likely have Norway to thank for the origin of these on-foot techniques to practice ski technique, and they are truly valuable tools if you take some time to develop them. Think of ski walking as a more ski-specific form of uphill hiking and useful for low-intensity sessions, and moosehoofing (and its high-intensity cousin, ski bounding) as the more focused, moderate-to-high intensity version of running. In both cases, the techniques require you to time your footfall and forward leg drive the way you would drive and glide on a ski, whereas in walking and running, you’re concerned more with what happens under and behind the hips. In both Nordic skiing (classical technique) and skinning/skimo, we are seeking to drive the ski forward and then, in the same connected movement, pull our hips onto that forward gliding ski using hip extension (our powerful gluteus maximus and hamstring muscles, in particular). Ground contact time of the foot is a bit longer in the ski-imitation because when we think about using skins (or kick wax, in the case of Nordic), we must set that friction firmly down on the snow to power off of it and not get slipping which can lead to quicker fatigue if not skin failure. In contrast, with running, the friction/grip problem diminishes by the almost always consistent interface between sticky rubber and surface texture.
For more description and a visual guide to these ski imitation drills, take a look at the video below.
Thanks for this, Sam! You inspired me to get out for my first ski walking workout since my nordic racing days
Thanks Gavin – I hope it brought back some fond memories of cold New England mornings, moosehoofing with the team while waiting for the snow to fly! Cheers.