HOW TO GET READY FOR NATIONALS
by WINA STURGEON
It's finals time. Whether you're a Masters, NASTAR, club or college racer, it's winding down to the Nationals, the playoffs of ski racing.
Most racers think about training hard, getting ready to be as strong as possible for the middle and end of March, when most Nationals are held. But that's a very bad idea, according to skicross star and former U. S. ski team downhiller Casey Puckett.
"When I was on the ski team, the most important thing to do in-season was to maintain the strength you built up in the prep period, before the season. It's all maintenance. Between now and the middle of March, you're not going to make any big gains in your strength or power or anything else," Puckett says.
Unlike the popular wisdom, he says the best workout is skiing. "The number one way to stay in shape and increase your strength is through skiing. But you have to do it right, which means you have to recover, because skiing is hard on your muscles," Puckett explains.
The big problem for racers who want to do well in their Nationals, is lactic acid. Without controlling lactic acid, the dreaded overtraining syndrome can result, weakening muscles and dropping performance. Making sure you recover from each session of activity is essential for good results. Overtraining syndrome can happen in less than three days of hard workouts, and it takes many days, sometimes weeks, of rest to get rid of it. At this time of the season, no racer has the time to deal with the effects of overtraining. The secret is to make sure your body is completely recovered before you work it hard again.
"Recovery means getting lactic acid out of your muscles and into the bloodstream and out of your system by sweating or urinating it out. If you don't get that out, it sits there and eats away at your muscles," he explains, adding that getting rid of lactic acid can be done in 15 minutes on a bike.
His lactic acid elimination workout starts with a five minute easy warmup. "Then you do five minutes of sprints and light spinning; sprint hard for six seconds, to push the lactic acid out of the muscles. After each sprint, you do 54 seconds of easy spinning, then another six-second sprint. Do five or six of those, then cool down with five minutes on the bike with light resistance."
Puckett warns that this should be done after every time you ski and work up lactic acid in your legs. But he knows that many athletes have a mindset for hard workouts before their Nationals.
"If you want to train hard, train on the slopes. Most of the big strength gains you are going to get only happen in the off-season. During the season, you want to train specifically, and that means skiing," he says.
Puckett, a four time Olympian who is now heading for the next winter Olympics in a totally different sport, says, "Tests that the U. S. ski team has done on athletes during the season shows that they are 10 percent stronger during the season just from skiing, as long as they recover."
And he warns, "If you don't recover, you will actually go downhill because of the lactic acid eating away at your muscles."
While ski racers want to go downhill, they want it to be on their skis, not their performance.