For Masters Skiers, More Recovery Is Not the Answer

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There are two common problems I see in the masters athletes I consult with or coach. The first is the same problem we see with athletes of all ages: they tend to train “half hard” every day. Half hard, Zone 1 quickly drifts into Zone 2 or 3. The second is more specific to masters athletes. They try to follow a training plan that is basically a dumbed-down version of an elite athlete’s program.

The first problem is relatively straightforward to address. Determine appropriate training zones and control the intensity of training more accurately.

The second is more complicated. We need to determine the volume of training an athlete can recover from, adapt to and maintain consistently. Then we need to organize that training around the physiological capacities that are most likely to decline as we age.

There is truth behind the conventional advice given to masters athletes. Recovery does change with age. Simply repeating the training we did at 25 or 30, or copying the program of an elite athlete, is never the best approach at 50, 60 or 70.

But there is a problem with how we sometimes respond to that reality. Many of the training components we tend to remove as athletes age are exactly the components that address the physiological capacities declining most rapidly.

The challenge of training as a masters skier isn’t simply figuring out how to recover better. It is figuring out how to provide enough training stimulus to maintain and improve the capacities that are naturally declining with age while still recovering sufficiently to adapt to the volume of training.

What Actually Changes with Age?

We know endurance performance declines with age, but the individual components of performance do not decline at the same rate.

One of the largest physiological changes is generally VO2max. Maximum heart rate declines. Muscle mass and maximal strength decline, both of which are important to maintaining aerobic capacity and skiing performance. Type II muscle fibers and explosive power become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Meanwhile, exercise economy and the ability to sustain a relatively high percentage of VO2max can be reasonably well maintained in highly trained older athletes. That should tell us something about training.

If these capacities decline at different rates, it doesn’t make much sense to treat them equally in training.

There is a temptation as we age to gravitate toward the training we tolerate best. The problem is that the capacities we tolerate best may also be the capacities we are already preserving reasonably well.

Training should not simply reflect what aging makes easiest to do. It must continue to address what aging is taking away. If VO2max, strength and power are among the capacities most vulnerable to aging, eliminating high-intensity and strength training in the name of increasing recovery may solve one problem while creating another.

Maintain the Aerobic Volume

There has been considerable emphasis in endurance training recently on large volumes of low-intensity training combined with substantial amounts of threshold and sub-threshold work.

There are good reasons for that approach, particularly among highly trained elite athletes. But simply transferring that model to masters athletes can overlook the capacities most threatened by aging, particularly VO2max, strength and power.

So how much Zone 1? How much threshold? How much VO2max?

Those are important questions, but they can obscure something more fundamental.

Consistently accumulated training volume remains one of the primary drivers of endurance adaptation. Masters athletes sometimes respond to aging by progressively reducing volume and attempting to compensate with intensity. There are limits to that strategy.

Mitochondrial development, capillarization, fat oxidation, durability and the ability to maintain performance over long races are built largely through accumulated aerobic work. A two-hour easy ski is not interchangeable with a hard interval workout simply because the interval session produces more acute physiological stress.

For a masters skier who has trained for decades, maintaining as much sustainable aerobic volume as possible may therefore be one of the most important defenses against declining endurance capacity.

The key words are sustainable and consistent training.

The volume has to be performed at the right intensity. It has to be something we can recover from day after day and, most importantly, adapt to over weeks and months.

As we have written previously, occasional hero weeks followed by heavy fatigue and a subsequent reduction in training for recovery are less effective than weeks and months of consistent training at a sustainable level.

Don’t Abandon Intensity

The opposite mistake is maintaining plenty of volume while gradually eliminating the hard training. This is understandable, particularly for those who enjoy the “half hard” training.

When we stop performing high-intensity training consistently, we lose some of our adaptation to that capacity. Every subsequent interval workout or race is then harder than it used to be, and recovery takes longer, because we have eroded that capacity. That can reinforce the idea that high intensity itself is the problem.

But VO2max is also one of the physiological qualities most strongly affected by aging. So the training stimulus we may most need to maintain becomes increasingly difficult to perform and recover from. The answer isn’t necessarily more high-intensity training. It is maintaining the frequency of the stimulus while controlling the dose.

That may mean less high-intensity work in an individual session, but performing it consistently throughout the year. Fifteen to twenty productive minutes near VO2max may provide a better stimulus than turning every interval workout into a contest to see how much we can do. For many masters skiers, one or two genuinely hard aerobic sessions every seven to ten days may accomplish more than two or three mediocre high-intensity sessions every week.

The appropriate frequency depends on training history, age, fitness and recovery ability, not on a predetermined seven-day formula.

Threshold Has a Different Job

Threshold training shouldn’t simply become the safer substitute for VO2max training. It is not. In fact, the metabolic and neuromuscular cost of a typical threshold session may be greater than that of a typical controlled VO2max session.

VO2max training provides a powerful stimulus to central aerobic capacity, cardiac output and the ability to deliver and utilize large amounts of oxygen. Threshold and sub-threshold training allow considerably more work to be accumulated at a high aerobic rate while developing the ability to sustain that rate economically.

One of the important considerations in deciding how much emphasis to place on each is fractional utilization: the percentage of VO2max an athlete can sustain for a prolonged period. An athlete with a relatively low VO2max but already high fractional utilization may gain relatively little by continually emphasizing the quality that is already strong while allowing the aerobic ceiling above it to decline.

Conversely, an athlete with a large aerobic capacity but relatively poor ability to sustain a high percentage of it may have considerably more to gain from threshold and sub-threshold training.

This becomes particularly important in highly trained skiers. The speeds elite skiers can maintain at threshold or just below it can be quite close to actual race velocities. That speed and the muscular demands associated with sustaining it are part of what makes the training effective.

For cross-country skiers, both qualities matter.

A skier may have an excellent VO2max but lack the muscular endurance to translate that capacity into sustained double poling or climbing. Another skier may have excellent threshold durability but gradually lose the aerobic ceiling above it.

The question isn’t whether threshold or VO2max training is better. The question is which physiological limitation we are trying to change.

Strength Becomes More Important, Not Less

Perhaps the clearest change in training priorities with age should be strength.

Cross-country skiing has become increasingly dependent on upper-body force, whole-body strength and power. At the same time, aging progressively reduces muscle mass, maximal strength and particularly fast-twitch muscle function.

Research in cross-country skiers has shown that maximal-strength training can improve double-poling performance and economy. One likely explanation is relatively simple. If every pole stroke represents a smaller percentage of your maximum force, repeatedly producing that force becomes less metabolically costly.

For masters skiers, developing and preserving maximal strength is particularly valuable because it provides reserve capacity. The goal is maintaining the ability to produce force.

That generally suggests relatively heavy resistance, good technique, low-to-moderate repetition ranges and sufficient recovery, rather than endless circuits of light weights.

Power Is the Forgotten Quality

Strength and power are not identical. Strength is how much force we can produce. Power is how fast we can produce it. Power tends to decline particularly rapidly with age.

Acceleration over the top of a hill, changing gears on a climb, responding to an attack, generating force quickly through the poles and maintaining technique at race speed all depend on the ability to produce force quickly.

Masters athletes therefore shouldn’t eliminate every fast movement from training. Short hill accelerations, controlled bounding, short ski sprints and explosive strength exercises can provide a neuromuscular stimulus without requiring a large amount of metabolic stress.

The dosage doesn’t need to be large. What matters is the peak stimulus.

But, as with nearly every aspect of training, consistency matters.

Recovery Serves Adaptation

This brings us back to recovery. Recovery is essential because adaptation occurs between workouts. But maximizing recovery is not the goal of an athlete.

Maximizing adaptation is.

The masters athlete must solve a more complicated equation:

Stimulus + Recovery = Adaptation

Too much stimulus accumulated over days and weeks and we fail to recover sufficiently. Without recovery, we fail to adapt. The common theme in underperformance and overtraining is accumulating fatigue and a failure to adapt.

Sometimes the better solution is reorganizing the training. Instead of a pattern of hard, hard, easy, hard, easy, hard, exhausted, rest over seven days, a masters skier might organize training so the important sessions are separated sufficiently to perform them well and adapt to them.

The objective isn’t necessarily fewer quality sessions over the course of a month. It is enough recovery between those sessions to allow the athlete to absorb them.

Consistency Beats Heroic Training

For masters athletes, we need to adjust our perspective. Fitness is not created by individual workouts. It is created by the consistent implementation of easy endurance work, high-intensity aerobic training, strength, power and appropriate recovery.

One big interval session does relatively little. One big training week does relatively little. Forty or fifty good weeks stacked together can produce remarkable fitness.

That changes the definition of a successful workout.

The question is no longer: How much training can I survive today?

It becomes: What training can I absorb today that allows me to continue training tomorrow, next week and next month?

That doesn’t mean avoiding hard work. It means implementing both easy and hard training in a way that provides adequate space for recovery and adaptation.

The Masters Training Equation

Training, of necessity, must be individualized for athletes of every age. A highly trained 60-year-old with forty years of endurance training may tolerate workloads that would overwhelm a recreational 45-year-old who started skiing five years ago.

Chronological age alone doesn’t tell us enough. Training history, injury history, available time, sleep, nutrition, life stress and individual recovery all matter. But the physiological objectives remain surprisingly familiar.

• Maintain aerobic volume.
• Maintain VO2max.
• Develop threshold and muscular endurance.
• Preserve maximal strength.
• Preserve power.
• Maintain ski-specific technique and economy.

Then organize recovery around accomplishing those objectives. That is fundamentally different from starting with recovery and removing training until the athlete can tolerate what remains.

Masters athletes don’t need a watered-down version of elite training. Nor do they simply need more recovery. They need training organized around the physiological capacities most threatened by aging, with enough stimulus to preserve and improve those capacities and enough recovery to adapt to that stimulus.

Aging changes how we assemble the training. It doesn’t change what makes an endurance athlete fast.

The great opportunity of masters sport is discovering how much performance we can preserve, and in many cases still improve, by continuing to give the body both the stimulus and the time and space it needs to adapt.

 

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