How (and if) to log downhill skiing | Uphill Athlete

How (and if) to log downhill skiing

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  • #4172
    JeremyG
    Participant

    My primary mode of aerobic activity in the winter is ski touring. I also hit the resort a half dozen times a season. I have not been counting time spent skiing downhill, or my time on resort ski runs against my weekly total. However, I realized that my heart rate is elevated while skiing and my legs also get a workout. After a day of resort skiing I find I need a day for my kegs to recover. Am I right to stop the watch for my downhill runs and ignore resort days or does this count as training? And if so, how do I count it? As strength? Aerobic? ME? Thanks for de-confusing me!

  • Inactive
    Anonymous on #4173

    Jeremy:

    If you are feeling like your legs need an easy day after your resort downhill skiing then it is definitely having a training effect. This could be for a couple of reasons that I’ll get to in a minute. But first: Even though your HR is elevated, that fact that you get specific muscular fatigue indicates that this is mainly having a strength training effect. It’s an ME workout that is exceeding the endurance limits of the FT fibers. I would for sure include these down hill skiing days in the training volume. How much to log? Just be consistent so you count the volume the same each time you do this type of workout. I’m sure that you can ski easily and your legs don’t get tired and more aggressively and make them burn and beg for a rest. That intensity factor is going to be mainly subjective as to how you log it.

    It may be that you need to do more of this downhill skiing regularly to increase your ME for this sort of thing. YOU might find it benefits your touring by making you better (technical) and fitter (specific ME) on the downhills in the back country. Six days a year of this type of workout is too infrequent to have much of a positive training stimulus.

    I hope this helps
    Scott

    Participant
    JeremyG on #4204

    Thanks for the info Scott. I think the take home for me will be to take it easy on the legs for a day or two after a resort day. I basically discounted resort skiing as not being “work” and then ended up over working my legs in subsequent days.

    Inactive
    Anonymous on #4282

    Hi Jeremy,

    Depending on how type-A you wanna be, you could wear an HRM/GPS on one of these days and then cut out the time spent on the lift. That’ll give you a rough formula to use on how to account for the skiing time.

    Scott S.

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