[xcskier]

If my understanding of muscular endurance training is correct,
it’s designed such that you mainly work and stress very localized
muscle groups (say legs) while heart rate, breathing rate
are not impacted as severely (ie, HR is relatively low).

However, if one uses uphill (or some sort of resisted) double-poling,
legs contribute a significant amount. The steeper the hill the larger the
percentage of leg usage (can be over 50%). So, in this case, you may be
working on upper body muscular endurance, but legs are also stressed (but not
necessarily in the way we want).

There’s no question here, just thinking aloud…

Topic

[Anonymous]

Anonymous on October 13, 2018 at 1:28 pm #13957

We use ME workouts for Xc skiers a lot. But we try to isolate the double pole or single pole muscle groups to achieve the localized effect we seek. With high level skiers I have used everything for 30 seconds to 5 min uphill double pole ME work and while the legs do come into play the arms/back/shoulder complex tends to be the limiter.

I was at a USST training camp where we used knee braces locked out on the men sprinters to isolate the upper body and reduce/virtually eliminate the leg input for just this reason. We used it for some of the top sprinters and it seems to be effective.

Scott