ONTARIO SKI TEAM WOMEN'S HEAD COACH JEFF LACKIE: I’ve been asked to write a short update about the Ontario Ski Team dryland training.  Although I’m passionate about strength and conditioning, I’ll leave the specifics to our, Fitness Director, Dr. Thomas Lam, who’s responsible for the outstanding progress our athletes have made in the last 6 weeks.  With another 7 weeks of training until our first on snow camp, you'd wonder what more can be done with these already fit athletes.  The quick answer is increased rate of force development (RFD) qualities while maintaining present work capacity.

Skiing is not a purely physiological sport; however, when you're trying to pattern a new skill on the ski hill you need a lot of repetition which naturally requires an increased volume of training.  Therefore, the past 6 weeks Dr. Lam has implemented a program consisting of sled pulls, sprints between core exercises and spinning, all in an effort to improve our athletes work capacity and alter anthropometric profiles.  Now that our athletes have achieved a satisfactory level of conditioning we need to shift our focus towards increasing strength and RFD qualities.  
 
A few weekends ago I went to York Track and Field to watch Ontario Ski Team Member, Emily Goad compete in triple jump.  As I was standing there watching the competition, I started talking with her coaches about different techniques they use to help Emily achieve maximum distance.  As it turns out there are a lot of similarities between alpine skiing and triple jump.  Both sports require precision, coordinated movement, mobility and stiffness.  Let me explain.

The jumper needs to approach their marker with maximum velocity and initiate a jump at just the right point, a centimeter too late and they could be disqualified, too early and they’ll fail achieve to maximum distance.  Skiers like jumpers are always in search of the perfect place to initiate their turn, too low and they’ll scrub speed, too high and they’ll travel further than necessary.  To complicate matters, even if the athlete does find the exact right location to initiate weight transfer they’ll unintentionally forfeit the opportunity unless their movement is coordinated.  For example, if the athlete approaches the jump with her hips too far behind the jumping foot she'll be unable to generate maximum force and velocity.  Skiing in the “back seat” , the equivalent in skiing, causes a similar negative effect to performance.  To generate the biggest jump or fastest change in direction the jumper or skier must coordinate their joints to generate maximum rate of force development.  

So what about mobility and stiffness?  They sound like contradicting attributes at first but when you stop and think about it skiers need to be supple on the bumps and then ridged at the apex of the turn to deflect opposing forces.  The same applies to triple jump; the World Record in triple jump is 18.29m (male) and 15.50m (female).  Athletes achieve these incomprehensible distances with the same fundamental attributes.  Mobility provides the athlete with maximum reach while stiffness enables her to land and take off with as little deformation as possible. 

Watching the track meet only reinforced in my mind the need to continue to implement sprint mechanics in our conditioning program. Jumping is such a pure expression of rate of force development and it requires no fancy equipment.  I believe athletes who possess mobility and understand how to coordinate movement in a precise way will be able to achieve stiffness when required and hopefully go fast and have fun in the process.