FIGURE 2: Classic technique double pole upper body impulse movement, left image, equals skate V2 upper body impulse movement, right image. Once you hear the pole tips click the ground, the upper body downward impulse is finished. Immediately begin to return your thumbs to eyeball height. Alternatively, if you continue to push your hands behind the hips, you will experience:
1) continued diminishing returns on forward glide regardless of how good your glide wax is, and 2) exert twice the amount of energy to return hands to eyeball level with a stretched out arm. Notice that both classic and skate downward pole impulses click the ground between the front wheel and front of toe binding due to an upright body position that recruits core muscles.
photos are courtesy of Jon Oestreich.
FIGURE 3: Any body weight on your rear foot (50/50; 60/40; 90/10) causes reliance on your classic roller ski's ratchet wheel. The roller ski rear wheel will be on the ground when behind the hips that reinforces a late kick on classic snow skis. Reinforcement of a late kick is contrary to what we are attempting to accomplish with the use of classic roller skis.
photos are courtesy of Jon Oestreich.
FIGURE 4: Subtle precise weight transfer onto the lead foot as the feet pass enables gentle and silent rear-wheel touchdown. Visually, the arrow on the track calls attention to the subtle yet concise rear-wheel-touchdown body movement coordination and timing. For me, this is a really hard movement and takes a lot of concentration that is totally worth it. You will be able to hear no sound and feel the smoothness when done properly.
photos are courtesy of Jon Oestreich.
FIGURE 5: Upper left quadrant: V2 left foot push onto right foot at 2 o’clock. Upper Right Quadrant: V2 right foot push onto left foot at 11 o’clock. Stay stacked over joints (ankle, knee, and hips) while not allowing your hands to pass beyond the hips on follow-through. Do not extend your arms. Your shoulders, humerus, and radius/ulna remain locked and loaded throughout each motion as you would carry a tray of food in the cafeteria. Leg follow-though ought to occur at 3 o’clock to prevent your hips from rotating. Hips are now aligned with upper and lower body, always pointing directly forward in the direction of travel. Lower Left Quadrant: V2 left foot push onto right foot at 3 o’clock. Lower Right Quadrant: V2 left foot push with right foot follow through at 4:30. The skate push at 3 o’clock leads in a 4:30 or later leg follow through. Consequently, the body kinetic chain breaks to cause unnecessary body twists and rotation. More body movement is now required to return to an aligned neutral athletic body position that results in muscle and tendon soreness and strains.
V2 & Classic Suggestion: Upper body locked-and-loaded impulse downward pole movement derives from core muscles not the triceps. Lower and upper body and the ski are aligned.
photos are courtesy of Jon Oestreich.
By Jon Oestreich
Editor’s Note: Go to this issue’s Front Page to check out Jon Oestreich‘s bio. You will not be disappointed!
The 2024 season provided Nordic skiing enthusiasts opportunities to see World Cup-level athletes at two different events on American snow in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Watching these skiers loop by on a combination of social laps, warm-up laps, race laps, and cool-down laps allowed us to see decades of ski form evolution in classic and skate technique. 2024 YouTube searches of World Cup-level races confirm this continuous evolution of skiing form transition to modern concise efficient body movements.
This raises the ever-important question: How can World Cup-level ski body movements be replicated with less force to enable middle-aged, less flexible and weaker skiers to avoid inner thigh, hamstring, shoulder, triceps, and back muscle pulls and strains? After all, I just want to have fun and not be sore after skiing.
Yes! Embrace the Roller Ski!
Roller skiing transitioning into late summer and autumn presents the ideal time to unlearn old habits and safely reinforce modern, efficient, and concise body ski movements. It also presents the ideal time to adjust personal body coordination, timing, and lack-of-force application to gain more body-soreness-free ski days. For a safe, easy environment to begin your ski form transition:
• Find a 400-meter blacktopped track. This removes the impact of hills on your technique training. And if you’re with a group, the track will help keep people together enough to stay within contact. Stay off of rubberized tracks with roller skis and poles.
• Use your mobile phone to find a free online metronome. Carry the mobile phone metronome with you in a waistbelt or phone arm holder. Set the metronome beat to your normal winter classic and skate cadence, and then ski a few laps.
• Next comes the challenge: After a few laps, change the metronome number on your phone so that the metronome beats a bit quicker, but not a lot quicker. Match the classic stride/skate push/pole plant impulse transition to the quicker metronome beat.
Prime Purpose of the Madness!
When I first did this, it felt extremely awkward, uncomfortable, and difficult. Essentially, I was unlearning decades of self-reinforced body coordination and timing ski movements. I also learned that fatigue set in immediately.
However, it quickly dawned on me that the quicker metronome beat did not mean more muscle force. Rather, the quicker metronome beat should be matched with less muscle force. Reduction in muscle force ought to be applied to classic stride and skate stroke, as well as any accompanying pole stroke whether double pole, V2, V1, V2-Alternate, or classic. The challenge now is: Can my body movement coordination and timing be more concise with less arm and leg limb follow-through? Can I synchronize body movements to the changing metronome beat — a few more laps at this quicker metronome beat?
Think of force applied in ski movements to bike watts applied in the pedal stroke. On a bike, the pedal stroke radius never changes due to the length of the crank. However, your pedal stroke power, or watts, continuously changes. When reducing your body’s ski movements on roller skis, the upright concise leg and arm ski movements should mirror your pedal stroke by not changing. Only your force or watts change.
The rationale for this strategy is twofold. First, working on coordination and timing is really hard and takes effort. Second, in the end, one can always lengthen concise body movement strides on different terrain and skier levels of energy. However, I believe it is nearly impossible to go from always using a long, drawn-out stride and then transitioning into a short concise body movement stride. The subtle coordination of weight transfer timing with minimal force is difficult.
Making it Work for You
To match the quicker metronome beat with less force, I learned to place my body in a more upright position while still maintaining an athletic body position. To review, an athletic body looks like a tennis player in position to receive a serve. The athletic body position from the ground up has the ankle, knee, and hip joints engaged. The longer and more spread out the arm and leg follow-through, the more body movement to recover back to the athletic body position.
This additional body movement to swing the arms forward could be wasted energy. (See Figure 1.)
In classic skiing, the more one leans forward results in forward downward pressure on the ski midway between the toe and tip of the ski. This translates into extending the kick wax zone, causing a reduction in the glide wax zone. A more upright body position on a classic ski, paired with a slightly softer ski flex, enables more direct downward pressure under the midfoot to compress the ski directly in the kick zone.
In other words, the length of the classic ski kick wax zone can be reduced and replaced with glide wax.
This means I really need to work on my weight transfer body coordination and timing to compress the ski, meaning a few more laps on the classic roller skis. The metronome is again set a bit quicker.
Addressing Bad Habits
I am learning a few things as the metronome beats quicken. On classic roller skis, the first thing I learned is that I can get complacent and rely solely on the classic roller ski ratchet. In turn, this results in my hips going backward, behind the heels of my feet. To keep my hips forward of my heels directly over the ball of my foot and not fall victim to the roller ski ratchet late kick, a few things became evident while in an athletic position:
• Be more upright, which causes the hands to be between neck and eyeball height at each pole downward impulse transition.
• Reduce the stride length, which causes a reduction in hand/arm/leg follow-through.
With each arm cycle, I try to return my hands (thumbs) to eyeball height before my hands then reach my hips. This modern, efficient concise classic ski body movement now feels shorter and punchier. I am also surprised that my classic roller ski speed increases when reduced upper body downward force is applied paired with the shorter 80 to 100 percent weight transfer stride, albeit the cadence transition increases forward (classic) or to the side (skate).
As I unlearn decades of ski habits and relearn modern, efficient body movement, my coordination and body timing improve while my inner thighs, hamstrings, shoulders, triceps, and back muscles are no longer strained or sore. To keep from getting lazy by relying on the classic roller ski ratchet, it is time to quicken the metronome beat a bit more to challenge myself in body coordination, weight transfer, timing, balance, and less force.
During these final laps, I will do some classic roller skiing with no poles and classic roller skiing with one pole.
Quickening the metronome beat to match the new roller ski stride challenges ski movements. After 30 to 45 minutes, I feel my body start to rely on the ratchet. I recognize that it is now time to declare victory in my roller ski form modification session and, more importantly, to stop the classic roller skiing session right then to prevent reinforcement of bad ski form made possible with a ratchet roller ski late kick. I will continue to practice this new classic technique next week when my body is not fatigued.
Body Movements Detailed
The upright double-pole body position movement from the waist beltline upward through the shoulders is identical for classic as it is for skate. Breakthrough No. 1: Classic technique double pole upper body (See Figure 2, left image) equals skate V2 upper body movement (See Figure 2, right image).
The difference is that the leg in classic is a short kick forward. Landing on the ball of the forward foot equals 100 percent weight transfer forward. The byproduct of 100 percent of your weight on the lead forward foot is the opposite roller ski rear wheel being in the air. Breakthrough No.2: I am not kicking backward, lifting the rear leg. Rather, the rear wheel of the roller ski is behind me off the ground because 100 percent of my body weight is on the new forward lead ski.
As I practice weight transfer to the new lead foot, the rear wheel in the air should not slide back on the ground until my feet are at least beside each other. If my balance and weight transfer timing are not good, the rear wheel of the roller ski will make a thud noise as the rear roller ski wheel slams down on the ground before my feet are together. (
See Figure 3) This is a sign of body weight transfer that is more akin to 60 to 40 percent or 50/50 percent.
When my body coordination and timing are good, the rear roller ski wheel will silently connect to the ground when my feet are together or even after the feet have passed each other. This is such a subtle, gentle, and precise body movement that should allow you to ski faster and for longer periods of time with less force. In the 3 frame-by-frame images (
See Figure 4) you can see how the byproduct of 100% body weight on the forward foot enables rear-wheel touch-down when feet are together on the arrow.
Skate Skiing’s V2 Value
Out of curiosity for a middle-aged skier, this raised the question: If a classic double-pole is used in marathon-distance skiing when tired, can the skate V2 be used for marathon-distance skate skiing when tired?
After much experimentation and many trials, the answer is yes.
V2 technique is most often associated with skate technique’s high-end efforts and sprints. Yet, to the contrary and thinking more thoughtfully, if the application of force in the V2 upper body is greatly reduced while maintaining V2 body coordination and timing, V2 is a more natural, concise, and aligned body movement than the V1.
On skate roller skis and poles, I need to mirror the newly acquired classic ski position for skate roller skiing. Switching to the lower body skate technique, the application of force with each skate side movement is reduced. The reduction of lower and upper body force saves energy over time.
To maintain side-push timing cadence with the quicker metronome beat, I found myself pushing my leg to the side at 2 o’clock versus 3 o’clock. As I pushed to the side at 3 o’clock, my body timing became late and I could not maintain the quicker metronome beat. Pushing my leg to the side at 2 o’clock and ending at 3 o’clock fixed my body timing to match the quicker metronome beat.
Skiing more upright with body alignment in both classic and skate techniques reduces muscle soreness because the skeletal structure is stacked over bones rather than the body being more spread out, which taxes muscles and tendons. For this aging body, a stacked body position translates into a reduction in muscle soreness after a ski.
Breakthrough No. 3: The V2 skate technique allows me to ski longer with less forceful effort and, more importantly, without experiencing soreness the next day. The issue now circles back to body coordination, timing, weight transfer, and that metronome once more.
If you imagine a circle clock around your feet when your feet are together ready for the next skate push, your skate push should start at 2 o’clock rather than 3 o’clock with a 4:30 follow-through. This results in the skate push follow-through ending at 3:30 rather than 4:30. This equals less lower body twisting and arm movement back to the athletic body position of thumbs to eye level for the next V2 double pole downward impulse paired with the next 11 o’clock skate push on the other foot. (
See Figure 5)
Progressively speed up the metronome beat from the long, graceful drawn-out strides of the 1970s and 1980s by Ingemar Stenmark and Gunde Svan. As beautiful as the strides of yesteryear look on posters and VHS videotapes, my middle-aged body just cannot gracefully absorb those movements, nor are today’s World Cup athletes mimicking those movements. Modern, efficient classic and skate techniques continue to evolve into a stacked body position with short, concise, and punchier movements from the arms and legs.
On the blacktop-covered track, I suggest one or two 30-minute sessions per week at a very low intensity to practice roller skiing. If you are on skate roller skis, pick a lane and do not let your front wheel cross over the track lane line as you match the progressively quick metronome beat. Focus on your body coordination, timing, and weight transfer as you vary each lap between V2, V2 with 1-pole (tuck your other pole under your arm), switch poles, free skate, and a (slow) paceline if you are with peers.
A paceline helps all involved to monitor the force applied by the legs to manipulate speed, especially on the lap without poles. If you’re on classic roller skis, use that progressively quicker metronome as you work on body position and concise body movements of a single-stick lap, double-pole lap, and one-pole lap, and then switch poles, and paceline if with peers.
Dryland roller skiing is ideal for practicing the modern, efficient movement of upright concise stacked body position for cross-country skiing. Reduce the force applied by the legs in the classic and skate weight transfer as well as the upper body to focus on body coordination, timing, and weight transfer. Hopefully, the end result of practicing this evolved classic and skate technique on roller skis is more enjoyment. Ski on!
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