3 Simple tips to optimize your summer training

The most basic way that skiers track their training progress is through training hours, and while this is a really good benchmark, it doesn’t tell the whole story of what it means to train effectively in pursuit of your goals. There is a huge range of effective training volume, even among pros, and the amount and type of training that supports high performance is largely dependent on your indiviual physiology and your racing goals.

This got me thinking about what it means to optimize your summer training in order to meet your goals. I am using the term “optimize” generally here, because, while there are dozens of more specific optimizations (diet, technique, strength, equipment, recovery, and so on), for the majority of people, consistent, straightforward training day in and day out is the key to improving performance. So here are a few tips for how to make your training work for you this summer.

Consider your base. Undeniably, one way to improve your performance is to improve your overall fitness and endurance. Adding more training hours into your season is a great way to increase your fitness, but be careful not to make too much of a jump. People respond VERY differently to increasing training volume, and training too much can have a negative effect on performance if you go into the season exhausted or overtrained. Consider first how you can make the training you are already doing more effective and focus on quality over quantity. You will be surprised how much of a difference this can make. If you want to increase your volume, do it incrementally, maybe 50 hours or so per year, so that you are able to absorb and benefit from what you have added.

Consider your winter race goals. Another way to optimize your training is to think ahead to your race goals for the winter, because this will influence how you train. For example, if you are training for marathons, aerobic threshold and muscular endurance are two things to focus on more than anything else. You need to be able to maintain a threshold heart rate and maximize muscular efficiency and endurance for 3-4+ hours; therefore you have to train that capacity over the summer in a way that somebody focusing on shorter races or sprints does not. We race like we train, so train like you want to race.

Train your strengths. This last one may seem counterintuitive and it is admittedly a new way of thinking for me. We often focus on training our weaknesses and it is very important to do so, because we can often make big gains in our technique and our fitness by committing to improving what doesn’t come as naturally to us. BUT if we are already good at something, why not double down on that? You are far more likely to win a race (or succeed in general) because of your strengths, and let’s face it is it a lot more fun to do things you are good at. I think of how hard I have had to work year after year to improve my power application in sprinting, and while I saw performance gains, they were very small compared to the effort I had put into it. Similar energy and effort put into my strengths yielded much bigger improvement and I enjoyed it quite a bit more. Again, not to say you shouldn’t work on your training weaknesses (you definitely should!) but don’t forget to honor your biggest strengths either.

Training doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to work for you. Once you understand how your body responds to different volumes and types of training and you have a clear idea of what your goals and strengths are, you can tailor your training to that end. From there, you can add in more ‘optimizations’ but having a good foundation of personalized training principles is a strong start.