Research – FasterSkier.com

Join the National Coaches’ Ed. Symposium

Chris GroverOctober 21, 2022

Dear Cross Country Community, The staff from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Cross Country Team will host a 2022 Cross Country National Coaches’ Symposium this next week on October 28th and 29th. Please click on the previous link to register. The Symposium will take place via Zoom to keep costs low and facilitate greater participation by our community. Here is a link to the Presentation Schedule and Presenter Bios. The Symposium will count towards 8 Continuing Education Credits for...

News Research Resources Training

Rollerski Safety Best Practices

FasterSkierMay 25, 2021

Due to the start of the rollerski season, we are republishing this story to help promote best practices when rollerskiing on the open road. Making yourself visible while rollerskiing is a must. And with a recent reminder from U.S. Ski Team (USST) World Cup coach Matt Whitcomb, the time of year has come when many skiers are training on roads in lower angle sunlight as we tip away from the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere. Below...

Feature Health Research Resources Training

Training and the Menstrual Cycle: Anonymous Survey Results from Elite American XC Skiers and Biathletes

Rachel PerkinsMarch 25, 2021

This article is part of a series regarding female athlete specific physiology and nutrition. To get started, you can find a primer on the menstrual cycle here and listen to this podcast on Nordic Nation discussing female athlete specific nutrition with registered dietician and professional runner Maddie Alm. The survey analyzed here is an extension of the conversation with Guro Strøm Solli on her research on female athlete specific physiology and effects that the menstrual cycle has on training...

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Call for Survey Responses: Heart Rate and Age

Gavin KentchFebruary 19, 2021

Are you a well-trained endurance athlete? Do you know your resting heart rate, maximal heart rate, average weekly training hours, and – tough one here – age? If you’re reading this website, the answer to all four of those is probably “yes.” If you have a moment to spare, Stephen Seiler would like your help. Seiler is a longtime professor of sports science, currently at the University of Adger in Kristiansand, Norway. We’ve spoken with...

News Research

The Latest Glimpse from Marit Bjørgen’s Training Logs

FasterSkierMay 31, 2019

On May 29, the latest research paper to dive into Marit Bjørgen’s training logs from 2000-2017 was announced in Gemini, the research news publication from NTNU and SINTEF, two research institutions in Norway. The most recent paper titled “Block vs. Traditional Periodization of HIT: Two Different Paths to Success for the World’s Best Cross-Country Skier,” was published in Frontiers in Physiology on April 5th. The authors are described in Gemini as “Guro Strøm Solli of...

Doping Research

Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping (Part Five)

FasterSkierApril 10, 2019

This is part four of a multi-part series titled “Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping”. It comes to FasterSkier from Sammy Izdatyev. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here. Sammy Izdatyev is the pen name of a Finnish sports enthusiast and unaffiliated amateur historian, who has been interested in endurance sports since the turn of the millennium. He hopes that his pro bono – research can...

Doping Research

Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping (Part Four)

FasterSkierApril 8, 2019

This is part four of a multi-part series titled “Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping”. It comes to FasterSkier from Sammy Izdatyev. You can read part one here,part two here, and part three here. Sammy Izdatyev is the pen name of a Finnish sports enthusiast and unaffiliated amateur historian, who has been interested in endurance sports since the turn of the millennium. He hopes that his pro bono – research can provide more information...

Doping News Research

Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping (Part Three)

FasterSkierApril 5, 2019

This is part three of a multi-part series titled “Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping”. It comes to FasterSkier from Sammy Izdatyev. You can read part one here, and part two here. Sammy Izdatyev is the pen name of a Finnish sports enthusiast and unaffiliated amateur historian, who has been interested in endurance sports since the turn of the millennium. He hopes that his pro bono – research can provide more information into the body...

Doping Research

Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping (Part Two)

FasterSkierMarch 28, 2019

This is part two of a multi-part series titled “Limiting Factors – A Genesis of Blood Doping”. It comes to FasterSkier from Sammy Izdatyev. You can read part one here. Sammy Izdatyev is the pen name of a Finnish sports enthusiast and unaffiliated amateur historian, who has been interested in endurance sports since the turn of the millennium. He hopes that his pro bono – research can provide more information into the body of literature...

News Research Training Workouts

Wednesday Workout: Cold Weather Resource for Insiders and Outsiders

FasterSkierJanuary 30, 2019

If you find yourself this morning in a part of the world where it’s truly cold, we feel for you. If you get outside and ski today, say in the Midwest (we’re thinking of you Duluth), the snow might be sandpaper slow, but the upside, there will be no snow melt. The trail conditions will hold until the next banana belt puff of air blows through. Here at FasterSkier, we scanned the archives to bring...

General News Research

What Studying Twins Can Tell Us About Fostering Motivation for Exercise

Chelsea LittleDecember 6, 2017

One of the biggest public health challenges worldwide is physical inactivity. As the World Health Organization a study of American Birkebeiner participants which found that participating in group-based exercise provided an important extra bit of motivation even for people who were quite self-motivated to exercise or train. Another piece of the picture was examined in Finland. There, researchers had the opportunity to use a study of twins to disentangle the genetic and environmental contributions to...

General Health News Research Resources Training

What Weird Heart Rate Monitor Numbers Mean (or Don’t) About Arrhythmias

Chelsea LittleNovember 3, 2017

Athletes engaging in big volumes of endurance exercise are at some increased risk of heart problems – compared to those who do moderate exercise. The level of that risk is under debate. At the same time, recreational athletes using heart rate monitors during their training will sometimes see numbers go up as high as 220 or 225 beats per minute (bpm). Such racing heartbeats are called tachycardia, and some of the possible underlying causes can...

Biathlon General Interviews News Racing Research

How Do You Make a Top-10 Biathlete a Medalist? Find 12 Seconds, Somewhere

Chelsea LittleSeptember 28, 2017

Biathlon is a notoriously variable sport: besides skiing, there’s the shooting aspect which can ruin a race in a matter of seconds. Sometimes an athlete like Lowell Bailey wins a World Championship for the first time after 15 seasons competing; sometimes the most reliable guy in the sport, Martin Fourcade, finishes 46th. It’s a wild world. Norwegian PhD student Øyvind Skattebo set out to quantify just how variable the sport is, and what amount of improvement...

General News Nordic Combined Racing Research Resources Testing Training

What Predicts Nordic Combined Success? Study Finds Out

Chelsea LittleJuly 31, 2017

What are the physiological capacities of nordic-combined athletes and can laboratory tests predict performance capabilities on the World Cup? Those are the questions that a team of Norwegian researchers set out to answer by testing 12 competitors from eight different countries before a 2015 World Cup competition in Trondheim, Norway. The study, led by Vegard Rasdal of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the Norwegian Olympic Sports Center, was recently published in the...

Book Review General Health Lifestyle News Research Resources Training

We’re Not Invincible: More Heart Arrhythmias in Endurance Athletes (Book Review)

Chelsea LittleJuly 27, 2017

When I heard that there was a new book coming out about heart arrhythmias in endurance athletes, I was interested. Several years ago, I read some of the research papers that the book’s authors refer to. One was a cohort study on participants in the Vasaloppet, the 90-kilometer ski marathon in Sweden. Those researchers found that skiers who competed in more Vasaloppets had more heart arrhythmias – as did those who finished the race the...

General News Research

What Does the Climate Future Hold? Research Predicts Much Shorter Ski Seasons

Chelsea LittleJuly 24, 2017

“I think if you’re a nordic skier in New England, you should definitely be alarmed.” “That’s one of the main take-homes: skiing is not going to disappear completely, but it will generally be higher [in elevation].” So says Cameron Wobus, a Bowdoin ski team alumnus and a researcher at Abt Associates, a global research firm. Wobus and colleagues based in Boulder, Colo., and Washington, D.C., recently published a study in Global Environmental Change assessing the...