Tag: neuromuscular power

For Masters Skiers, More Recovery Is Not the Answer
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Tim Donahue racing at the 2020 Winter World Masters Games in Seefeld, Austria. Jim Galanes argues that the training masters skiers cut first is often the training that protects what aging takes away fastest. (Photo: Garrott Kuzzy / Lumi Experiences)

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.

A masters field on the climb at the 2014 Masters World Championship in Asiago, Italy. Endurance performance declines with age, but the individual components of performance do not decline at the same rate. (Courtesy photo)

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.

Ahvo Taipale during a Vakava training session. Consistently accumulated aerobic volume remains one of the primary drivers of endurance adaptation, and one of the best defenses a masters skier has. (Photo: Finn Sisu)

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.

UVM’s Fin Bailey drives up a climb on the Craftsbury Outdoor Center track. The answer to aging is not necessarily more high-intensity training, but keeping the frequency of the stimulus while controlling the dose. (Photo: Phillip Belena)

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.

Gunnar Knapp finishes the Engadin Skimarathon. Threshold and sub-threshold training allow considerably more work to be accumulated at a high aerobic rate. (Photo: Garrott Kuzzy / Lumi Experiences)

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.

Hailey Swirbul during a strength session at a U.S. Ski Team camp in Park City, Utah. Research in cross-country skiers has shown that maximal-strength training can improve double-poling performance and economy. (Photo: Reese Brown)

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.

Ian Torchia, right, leads bounding intervals up Stratton Mountain. Power tends to decline particularly rapidly with age, and short, fast work preserves it without requiring a large amount of metabolic stress. (Photo: Courtesy Stratton Mountain School)

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.

Fresh tracks on the Masters World Cup course in Alberta. Recovery is essential because adaptation occurs between workouts, but maximizing recovery is not the goal. (Photo: GibsonPictures)

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.

The coaches behind the masters performance group at Crested Butte Nordic in Colorado: from left, Rachel Bachman Perkins, Murray Banks, Cam Smith and Woody Martineau. Fitness is not created by individual workouts. (Courtesy photo)

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.

Murray Banks at the Alley Loop in Crested Butte, Colorado. Chronological age alone doesn’t tell us enough: training history, injury history, available time, sleep, nutrition and life stress all matter. (Photo: Xavier Fane / Crested Butte Nordic)

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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September 8, 2026
When a Falling Race Heart Rate Is a Warning, Not a Win
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This is a follow-up to my last article, Speed Creates the Load, Not Intensity. Before going further, it helps to define terms. Intensity is reflected in the heart rate response. Load is the physiological stress that drives adaptation. This piece takes a different angle, using high-intensity workouts and race heart rates to assess fitness and monitor for overtraining.

Over the last two decades, much of my coaching has involved working with athletes who are underperforming, overtrained, or struggling to regain fitness. When the data is available, one of the first things I examine is the relationship between training intensity and speed across the season. I am looking for improvements in efficiency, but I am also paying close attention to what happens during races and hard workouts.

Race data is almost always the most revealing.

I recently reviewed the training of a top domestic athlete whose sustainable race heart rate fell by roughly 10 to 15 beats per minute between November and March. Why? Given the time of year, that should immediately raise concerns. A substantial decline in sustainable race heart rate during the competitive season rarely points to improved fitness. More often, it is a warning sign that the athlete is carrying excessive fatigue, is no longer capable of producing the same muscular power, or has entered a state of overtraining.

An illustrative competitive season. Sustainable race heart rate slides 13 bpm from November to March. With no gain in speed to explain it, that slide reads as a fatigue signal, not a fitness one. (Chart: FasterSkier)

A reduced race heart rate means less cardiac output unless stroke volume increases enough to compensate. In well-trained athletes, that compensation is usually very small. The result is less oxygen delivered to the working muscles, reduced oxidative metabolism, slower lactate clearance, diminished phosphocreatine resynthesis between surges, and ultimately a reduced ability to sustain high race speeds. In simple terms, the athlete cannot create the same physiological demand because the muscles are no longer capable of producing the same amount of work.

When a Lower Race Heart Rate Reflects Improved Fitness

A declining race heart rate is often misunderstood. Some physiologists and coaches suggest it reflects improved cardiovascular function. That can be true, but only if performance has clearly improved.

The critical question is simple: is the athlete racing faster?

If an athlete is producing greater speed or power at a lower heart rate, several physiological adaptations have likely occurred:
- Greater stroke volume. The heart pumps more blood with each beat, allowing similar cardiac output with fewer beats.
- Improved movement economy. Better technique and neuromuscular coordination reduce the oxygen cost of movement.
- Greater peripheral adaptations. Increased mitochondrial density, capillary density, and oxidative enzyme activity improve oxygen extraction and utilization.
If these adaptations have occurred to a meaningful degree, performance should improve. The athlete should be racing faster while holding a similar physiological level, not racing at a lower heart rate.

In my experience, I have never seen an athlete race at a substantially lower heart rate because they became fitter or more economical. The improvement almost always shows up as increased speed or power, not as a dramatically reduced race heart rate. If race performance is unchanged, or worse, declining, a lower heart rate is unlikely to be explained by improved fitness.

This distinction matters because many coaches correctly recognize that heart rate decreases at submaximal workloads as fitness improves. That is exactly what we expect during aerobic training. Racing is different. At maximal or near-maximal effort, the goal is to maximize performance, and that rarely shows up as a lower heart rate.

Is Stroke Volume Really the Explanation?

Stroke volume is frequently cited as the reason trained athletes can race with lower heart rates. While that explanation sounds plausible, it probably accounts for only a negligible part of what we observe during maximal competition.

In trained endurance athletes:
- Stroke volume reaches near-maximal values at roughly 40 to 60 percent of VO2max.
- Beyond that intensity, further increases in cardiac output come primarily from increases in heart rate.
- Stroke volume changes relatively little in already well-trained athletes.
Stroke volume reaches near-maximal values at roughly 40 to 60 percent of VO2max. At race intensity, it has little room left to climb, so a falling race heart rate is unlikely to be explained by rising stroke volume. (Chart: FasterSkier)

So if an athlete’s sustainable race heart rate falls from 185 to 175, it is unlikely that stroke volume has increased enough to fully maintain cardiac output. The science does not support that explanation in most well-trained athletes. Something else is going on, and extended fatigue, maladaptive training, and long-term overload are the likely causes.

The Muscles Drive the Heart

One concept that is often overlooked in endurance physiology is that heart rate responds to muscular work. It does not create it. The muscles generate the metabolic demand and the cardiovascular system responds. If neuromuscular power production declines, metabolic demand falls. The heart no longer needs to pump as rapidly because the muscles are not asking for the same amount of oxygen. This aligns closely with a concept I first wrote about nearly twenty years ago and returned to in my previous article:

Speed creates the load, not intensity.

The muscles create the demand. The heart responds. When an athlete loses the ability to generate force, speed, and power, race heart rate falls as a consequence. The cardiovascular system may be functioning normally. It simply is not being driven to the same level because the neuromuscular system has become fatigued.

When a Lower Race Heart Rate Is a Warning Sign

A falling heart rate is one of the earliest objective signs that an athlete may be accumulating excessive fatigue. When athletes become excessively fatigued, they often lose the ability to recruit muscle fibers effectively and sustain race-specific power. Because muscular demand falls, heart rate falls with it.

Rather than interpreting the lower heart rate as improved efficiency, coaches should ask whether the athlete is still capable of producing the same speed or power.

Warning signs include:
- Sustainable race heart rate declines progressively over a few weeks to months. Monitoring heart rate helps catch this early, so training can be adjusted before it becomes a bigger problem.
- Race performance stagnates or deteriorates despite similar perceived effort.
- Legs feel flat and heavy, as if they never really warm up.
- The athlete cannot respond to the demands of uphills or changes in pace.
- Heart rate remains well below normal race values even during maximal effort.
- Recovery between hard sessions becomes progressively slower.
- Easy training may still feel normal while racing and high-intensity training become increasingly difficult.
This pattern is often described as parasympathetic overreaching, although terminology varies. Regardless of the label, suppression of maximal or sustainable race heart rate by 5 to 15 beats per minute over weeks should never be ignored. It frequently reflects excessive cumulative training load, inadequate recovery, or overtraining. Waiting until performance completely collapses is waiting too long. In many athletes, a declining race heart rate is one of the first objective indicators that recovery and adaptation to previous training were insufficient.

Coaches sometimes celebrate lower lactate values as improved aerobic fitness. During excessive fatigue, however, reduced lactate production often reflects reduced muscle recruitment rather than improved metabolic efficiency. The athlete cannot produce enough power to generate high lactate concentrations.

Chronically low glycogen availability, whether from excessive training or inadequate carbohydrate intake, can also suppress race heart rate and lactate. The athlete cannot generate the metabolic demand required to reach previous racing intensities.

The heart is reactive, not proactive. It responds to the metabolic demand created by the working muscles. When the muscles cannot produce force because of fatigue, the cardiovascular system has less work to do. A lower heart rate is therefore often the consequence of reduced performance, not the cause.

Why Elite Athletes Rarely Race at Maximal Heart Rate

Elite endurance athletes rarely spend an entire race at maximal heart rate. As performance improves, limitations increasingly shift away from the cardiovascular system and toward the muscles’ ability to generate force repeatedly while resisting fatigue.

Improvements in neuromuscular power, economy, and fatigue resistance allow athletes to sustain higher speeds without requiring proportionally higher heart rates.

As athletes become capable of producing greater speed and power, they generate a larger physiological stimulus. The cardiovascular system responds to that demand, but it is the neuromuscular system that ultimately determines how much work can be produced.

Practical Coaching Implications

Heart rate should never be interpreted in isolation. Always evaluate it alongside speed, power, performance, and perceived effort.

Reading race heart rate against performance. Green is adaptation, amber is a flag to investigate, red is accumulated fatigue until proven otherwise. (Chart: FasterSkier)
- Similar heart rate plus faster performance equals positive adaptation, improved economy, and greater efficiency.
- Lower heart rate plus unchanged performance equals the early stage of maladaptation to training loads.
- Lower heart rate plus slower performance equals a clear indication of accumulated fatigue, inadequate recovery, illness, low energy availability, or excessive training load.
- Normal heart rate plus declining performance equals a reason to consider environmental conditions, glycogen availability, illness, altitude, or reduced movement economy.
Over the course of a successful season, athletes should become capable of producing greater speed and power while maintaining similar race heart rates. When race heart rate falls substantially without a corresponding improvement in performance, assume fatigue before assuming fitness. That mindset will keep many coaches from overlooking one of the earliest objective signs of excessive training stress.

A lower heart rate should never be viewed as evidence of improved fitness on its own. If an athlete is racing faster, producing more power, and performing better, a modest reduction in heart rate may simply reflect positive adaptation. But when race heart rate falls while performance stagnates or declines, resist the temptation to credit what may actually be the earliest objective sign of excessive fatigue. The goal is to catch a falling heart rate during hard efforts early and adjust training as soon as possible. Weeks or months of inaction will greatly increase recovery time and cost additional effective training time.

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July 16, 2026
Speed Creates the Load, Not Intensity

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I originally wrote the following article in 2004. Twenty-two years later, I believe it remains just as relevant. To me it illustrates that while we tend to assume training has changed a great deal, in many ways it has stayed much the same. I have rewritten it here to improve clarity without changing the content.

UVM’s Fin Bailey drives up a climb on the Craftsbury Outdoor Center track last fall, generating speed through clean extension rather than grinding against the grade. (Photo: Phillip Belena)

The development of basic speed, neuromuscular power, and speed endurance is critical for high-level cross-country skiing performance. I would also argue that, once an athlete reaches a certain level of aerobic development, future improvements in aerobic capacity may become limited if the athlete cannot produce enough power to generate a sufficient training stimulus.

This article presents a concept that has influenced my coaching for many years: before continually increasing the external loads, volume, and intensity of training, athletes must first develop the ability to produce greater speed and power.

Training loads can be increased in two ways. The first is externally, by making the terrain more difficult or increasing resistance. The second is internally, by improving neuromuscular function so the athlete is capable of producing more power and therefore greater speed.

My experience has been that increasing external loads without first improving power production often yields little improvement in performance and, in some cases, little measurable gain in aerobic development. Athletes simply work harder while producing little additional external work.

We have all seen unfit or less-developed athletes walk up a steep hill while reaching near maximal heart rates. We have observed this repeatedly in junior skiers. Simply walking, skiing, or running uphill slowly can produce extremely high heart rates. Does this indicate inadequate aerobic capacity or inadequate power production? The answer is usually a combination of both.

However, in athletes whose performances have plateaued despite years of increasing training volume and intensity, this question deserves closer examination. Many continue to produce high heart rates while moving slowly. In these athletes, the limiting factor may not be the cardiovascular system itself, but rather an inability to produce enough power to create a greater demand on the aerobic capacity.

For this reason, I believe that early in an athlete’s development, and often early in each training year, speed, movement quality, efficiency, and neuromuscular power should receive significant emphasis. These qualities should not replace aerobic training, but they should develop alongside it. Improving an athlete’s ability to produce power increases the speed at which aerobic training can be performed and therefore increases the potential aerobic training stimulus.

Our observations over many years have consistently shown that athletes lacking sufficient power gradually slow during uphill skiing, running, or bounding intervals while heart rate continues to rise. The internal effort increases even as external work declines.

We have also observed athletes become overtrained despite carefully planned training programs. In many cases the common factors were excessive metabolic cost of endurance training, elevated lactate concentrations at relatively modest speeds, deteriorating movement quality, and inefficient power production.

Again, I believe the underlying issue is often inadequate neuromuscular function.

When athletes cannot produce power efficiently, every uphill carries a large metabolic cost. Heart rate and blood lactate increase rapidly even though speed remains relatively low. The athlete experiences considerable physiological stress without generating the external workload necessary to increase adaptation.

For one summer training period we emphasized extensive speed and neuromuscular training. Several athletes improved their maximal treadmill workload by as much as seven percent during a graded treadmill protocol. At the same time, blood lactate concentrations were lower at each workload stage.

Zak Ketterson doing work on the rollerski treadmill. (photo: courtesy Team Birkie)

These findings do not prove that VO₂max increased. However, they strongly suggest improvements in movement economy, neuromuscular power, and the athlete’s ability to express aerobic capacity. The athletes could sustain greater workloads at the same relative physiological cost.

Although the sample size was too small to draw firm scientific conclusions, the observations were both encouraging and consistent with our coaching experience.

One useful coaching tool has been estimating the oxygen demand of uphill terrain using the Balke or ACSM treadmill equations. While these equations were developed for walking and running, not roller skiing or ski-specific movements, they provide a reasonable estimate of the external workload required to climb terrain of a given grade and speed.

Using these estimates, I evaluated athletes on both a maximal 500-meter uphill test and a 3,000-meter uphill test conducted on the same hill. Our top male skiers consistently sustained estimated oxygen demands of approximately 70 to 72 ml·kg⁻¹·min⁻¹ during the 3,000-meter effort. During the 500-meter test, estimated oxygen demands ranged from approximately 83 to over 90 ml·kg⁻¹·min⁻¹. These values represent estimated metabolic demand rather than directly measured oxygen consumption.

The athletes who consistently produced the highest estimated workload during the 500-meter test were also our best performers. The shorter test reflected the athlete’s ability to produce high neuromuscular power. The longer test reflected how much of that capacity could be sustained aerobically.

During summer testing, the best athletes generally sustained only about 80 to 85 percent of their maximal estimated workload during the longer effort, leaving room for further improvement as fitness and skiing specificity increased during the competitive season.

Several practical conclusions emerged from these observations.

Ian Torchia, far right, leads bounding intervals up Stratton Mountain in summer 2021. Ski bounding remains one of the most direct ways to build the neuromuscular power Galanes describes, with the athlete loading and driving off each step. (photo: courtesy SMS)

Maximal power production establishes the athlete’s aerobic potential.

The estimated workload achieved during the 500-meter test reflects the athlete’s ability to produce power. If this value is too low, it becomes increasingly difficult to create a training stimulus large enough to maximize aerobic development, because the athlete cannot sustain sufficient speed.

Small differences between maximal and sustainable power may indicate a different limitation.

If the athlete’s maximal 500-meter workload is only slightly greater than the workload sustained over longer efforts, further improvements in aerobic capacity may be limited until maximal power production improves.

Lower-level athletes often need speed before more intensity or volume.

Many developing athletes have maximal power values only five to ten percent higher than their longer uphill performances. These athletes often benefit more from improving neuromuscular function, movement quality, and speed than from simply adding more difficult interval training.

Hard uphill intervals are not always the answer.

If athletes lack sufficient power to increase speed, making the terrain steeper or simply asking them to work harder often produces more fatigue than adaptation. Increasing the load without increasing movement quality seldom solves the underlying problem.

Sustainable aerobic power is not enough.

Athletes capable of sustaining a very high percentage of their aerobic capacity but possessing relatively low maximal power often plateau. They may already be performing close to their physiological ceiling and will likely require improvements in neuromuscular power before further performance gains occur.

Youth skiers during a Skinouk Roller Ski Race. Galanes argues these athletes often gain more from speed and movement quality than from steeper terrain or harder intervals.

Speed should create the load.

Uphill training remains essential in cross-country skiing. However, I believe the primary driver of training should be generated through efficient movement rather than terrain alone.

Whether athletes are performing distance training or intervals, movement should remain clean, crisp, coordinated, and quick. If technique deteriorates and speed slows simply because the terrain is harder, the athlete is no longer training optimal movement. They are merely increasing physiological stress.

Ultimately, endurance performance depends upon the interaction between physiology and movement. The aerobic system can only respond to the workload the neuromuscular system is capable of producing.

For that reason, coaches should devote as much attention to developing speed, power, and movement quality as they do to increasing training volume and intensity. In the long term, improving an athlete’s ability to generate external workload may be one of the most effective ways to unlock further aerobic development and higher performance.

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UVM’s Benon Brattebo rollerskiing on the Craftsbury Outdoor Center track last fall. Galanes argues that speed and neuromuscular power, not just harder terrain, should create the training load. (Photo: Phillip Belena)

July 10, 2026