Try Something New - Cross Country Skiing
Interview Date: February 26, 2016
Frisco, CO
Rich:
Jim Galanes is a three time
Olympian competing in cross country skiing events in each 1976 (Innsbruck),
1980 (Lake Placid), and 1984 (Sarajevo) Olympics. Jim, welcome to the show. Would you tell the audience about your
athletic career?
Jim:
I've been a coach and an athlete
all my life. I started out as a Nordic
skier in southern Vermont. I made the US
Nationals team when I was fifteen or sixteen years
old. I spent the next 15 years of my
life competing at the international level for the US Olympic Team in the Cross
Country event. After retiring from
competition, I went into the coaching field and spent the next 25 years of my
life coaching and developing high level athletes.
Alongside coaching high level
athletes, we did a lot of work over the years with masters athletes, age group
athletes and juniors athletes. As we
were working with these groups, we learned a lot about training monitoring and
monitoring response to dosing of training.
We learned that you can take what you do in terms of training with elite
skiers and apply it to a masters athlete or a juniors athlete. In a nutshell, my life has been training and
coaching since I was 16 years old.
Rich:
What a fun career. It would be great to hear a special story
from your time as an Olympic competitor.
Can you tell us more about that?
Jim:
It's really hard to synthesize twelve
years down to a couple of great stories.
I competed at the international level from the mid-70s to the
mid-80s. I grew up in Brattleboro,
VT. Within that community there were 3
or 4 of us that were competing at the international level. During that time, we brought the performance
of the men's and women's cross country teams to a very high level. To a point where Bill Koch, who was
a peer of mine, won the world cup twice.
With a season-long series of international ski races. As a team we won international relays. We had 2-3 women and 3-4 men who were
consistently in the top 10 of the world cup races.
I think the hallmark of what we
did was really elevate the quality of the training at a time that there wasn’t
a lot of sophistication about training.
We learned a lot from research and really by trial and error. We had some creative coaches that were not
satisfied with the status quo and looked for ways to improve our performance. I think we had a remarkable level of success
despite the lack of technology, and lack of understanding physiology, and then
relating that physiology back to the effect of training. I've really carried that over to my
coaching. While I don’t have a bachelors
or a master's degree in exercise physiology, I feel my knowledge base is
comparable to that of a master's degree in exercise physiology because of the
work I've done in laboratory settings, working with well-established medical
professionals and conducting a lot of research.
I think that's key to us creating our current coaching paradigms. The last decade or so specifically, the
training science has made huge advances, yet the training of athletes is stuck
in old paradigms.
Rich:
As an age grouper, I feel like
I'm guessing a lot about my training and recovery. I, as many of my listeners, am probably
familiar with terms like chronic training load and acute training load. I'm curious to learn more about how you've
taken the learning you've done as a coach and applied it to your software
platform that you and your company are developing. Maybe you can tell us more and perhaps
introduce some new ideas for folks.
Jim:
Our company, EPT (EPOC Performance Training), distributes Firstbeat in the
United States. We have a very close
relationship, and personal friendships, with the people who develop it in
Finland. One of the big advantages that
this software is going to bring to endurance athletes is, it's going to change
how you look at training. When you talk
about acute training loads, usually that’s
referencing hours of training or miles of training, but there's usually no
reference to what the actual training load is.
I can do an hour of training at a certain intensity and have X load, or
I can do another hour of training at a much higher intensity and that load
could be double or triple, and therefore the stress on the body is double or
triple. There's no way to quantify that
with heart rate alone, with time, with mileage, pace, wattage, or whatever you
are trying to do.
We need to separate out pace and
watts output measurements in the discussion - they don't measure the
physiological stress of that output. I
know runners and cyclists don't like it when I say this, but those are outcomes
of performance, they are not measures of load or stress on the body. For example, if you are pedaling at 200 watts
for an endurance ride. One day that
could be a very low physiological load.
The next day it could be a substantially higher physiological load
because our body is always in flux, depending on the load we have applied over
the previous days and weeks and how we've adapted to that load. The body is an ever changing organism, and
it's always changing based on where we are in that moment in time, what we've
done and how we've adapted to it. So,
just going out and prescribing training loads and these training zones for
periods of time is not terribly precise.
Rich:
So the way I'm interpreting this
is that training to pace and power, while they may be good measurements of
work, they are only one dimension of the work and they don't take into account
all of the load on the body or the body's response.
Jim:
They are great measures of what
you did. There are a lot of people that
I respect who have used those same measures of pace and power to derive
training zones. With Firstbeat software,
we are better able to get people to the correct training loads on a daily basis
rather than just using watts or pace to assign training zones. Using those measures (watts and pace) to
assign training zones is variable from day to day.
Rich:
What advice would you give to the
age grouper to re-examine what they are doing?
Jim:
The number one thing I feel when
someone has shifted to being an athlete with a professional career and family
is, look at the recovery and adaptation of training. There's probably a range of time periods,
you ought to be able to measure and see improvements in performance potential
on a regular basis. For some athletes
that will be every 5-10 days, for others that will be every two to three
weeks. I don't think you can go for a
very long time, if your training is working, and not see measurable performance
improvement.
Rich:
That is fantastic advice and
certainly is a new paradigm. I'm going
to shift gears on you and switch to a segment of the show I call "Try
Something New.” Every month I introduce
activities and sports that enhance training as a triathlete and make training
interesting and fun. The objective is to
prepare them to try something new just as they did years ago when they first
jumped into a pool or strapped on running shoes. This might be the first time our listeners
try cross country skiing. Would you help
me unpack what cross country skiing is and the varieties?
Jim:
There are basically two
disciplines of cross country skiing. There's skating and what we call classic
skiing. The technical challenges of both
are very stimulating for people. Once a
level of proficiency is reached in either of those techniques, they become good
cross training for just about any endurance sport because they are whole body
movements and the physiological load of cross country skiing is perhaps the
largest of any endurance sport. It's
pretty well documented that cross country skiers have the highest max VO2s in
the world, with athletes regularly recording mid to upper 80 mils/kg of oxygen
consumption at the world class level.
There were certainly even higher values than that during the doping era,
which hopefully we are beyond now. I
think a lot of those readings that we saw in the upper 80s and lower 90s of the
kg range were doping aided and not real genetic potential. The physiological demands and the potential
to increase your oxygen delivery in other sports would be enhanced through
either skate or classic cross country skiing.
To kind of step back in time a
bit: In the early 80s when I was
emerging as a world class cross country skier, I also did a lot of bike racing
and I was quite good at it. At some
point I was forced to make a choice to pursue one or the other. The capacities and strength I developed in
cycling carried over into skiing, as did a lot of the running and running races
that I did. Cross country skiers come
from a background of it being really hard to ski year round. Certainly these days more and more skiers can
travel to the southern hemisphere during the summer or ski glaciers, but the
reality is that cross country skiers need to train year round. The same goes for swimmers, bikers and
runners. Having an element of cross
training throughout the year is not only mentally refreshing, but also serves
to develop certain strengths and other physiological capacities.
Rich:
I can tell you from my experience
that not only do I get the cardiovascular stress benefit from cross country
skiing, but I also feel like there is a benefit from a proprioception
perspective as well. Form and body
alignment being key to efficiency as a swimmer, cyclist or runner is key. It seems that the same applies here for cross
country skiing.
Jim:
In any endurance sport, the key
is producing power efficiently. I like
the physics formula of power, which is force applied over time divided by the
distance covered. In endurance sport, we
don't want to be at the force end of the spectrum. We want to be at the time or the quickness end. We need to apply that force very quickly to
have a net increase in power and that is where efficiency is found. You can see it in cyclists, runners and
skiers, in particular the skiers that are using a lot of muscular force. They feel strong and they are making strong
and aggressive movements, but that is neither efficient nor powerful, so the
speed is always limited. Whether I coach
runners, cyclists or skiers, learning the techniques and learning to produce
power efficiently is the goal. Developing
adequate strength in the muscles to produce power efficiently is on an equal
footing with the physiological aspects of training, because they both go hand
in hand. If we are not training in an
environment where we produce power efficiently, we're never going to be able to
do it in a race. What people
misunderstand about training is that the heart and lungs don't create the
load. The heart and lungs are responding
to the load we are putting on the muscles.
The muscles are triggering our physiology to respond. If we get them to respond in the right way by
producing higher levels of power more efficiently, we're going to get a better
physiological response than if we're just out there producing a lot of force.
Rich:
That's probably a good reminder
all around, regardless of the sport. We
had talked about maintaining momentum or a higher pace with lighter
effort. We had used the example of a fly
wheel and the approach for keeping that flywheel going being different when it
is at speed versus spinning up. Can you
talk a little more about that?
Jim:
I wish I could claim credit for
this analogy, but it came from an old coach who I have a lot of respect
for. He did a lot of research into the
biomechanics of movement in running and skiing in particular. We all as kids turned the bike upside down
and started spinning the wheels. You can
imagine getting that wheel up to 20 mph with a couple of hard pushes. Once it's going 20 mph, all we have to do is
flick that wheel to maintain speed. In
any endurance sport, whether it's skiing, running or cycling, we have a speed
over the ground that we have to work with to maintain or enhance that
speed. If we're on the force end of the
spectrum, you can imagine having that wheel turning at 20 mph and trying to
speed it up by grabbing it and we actually stop or slow it. And that's what happens to a lot of runners
and cyclists and endurance athletes.
During every stride or cycle they are slowing down too much during
contact time. If you can visualize a
good runner, they look like they are hardly touching the ground. They're just floating. Their ground contact time is very, very
short. They are very light and
quick. These are analogies I use in
skiing, cycling and running. It's a bit
esoteric to describe it in cycling, but I believe if you look at muscular EMG data and read some of the
research - even in cycling someone could be cycling at 80 or 90 rpms and feel
they are in the right zone, but the muscles aren't relaxed and during the
period of force application, they are pushing too slowly. The muscles are contracting too slowly
because they're either too tense, not relaxed, or not loose or not fluid enough
in the movements. Making small changes
in that area I think has a great impact on the economy of the movements and the
ability to produce power.
Rich:
Certainly with running you can
see where having a high cadence and not over-striding is going to minimize your
ground contact time, which can help keep that cadence going and the effort as a
light touch. With cycling, I've always
been taught to imagine my pedal stroke as big circles to get that power. I have to admit that after our conversation
last week, I was on my bike trainer this past week and trying to visualize the
light touch at points in my stroke instead of the big power push all the way
around the stroke. The combination of
focusing on a light touch applied in one part of my stroke and then rotating
that spot in the cycle where I applied the short effort, seemed to allow my big
leg muscles to relax somewhat.
Jim:
It's hard to translate. Like I say, I cycle a lot and it's my second
love next to skiing. People are going to
say, I'm spinning at 90 rpms, so the muscle contraction time has got to be
right. I can pedal at 80 or 90 rpms and
be forceful through the whole movement or I can pedal at 90 rpms and be light
on the pedals and still have good power development. I call it almost faking it. I can keep my cadence up and be rolling in a
big gear, but not put a lot of pressure on the pedals. Again, it's working with that speed we
already have to keep things flowing and moving.
When you relate it to running it's not just about increasing
cadence. There's a certain cadence in
everyone that is economical for them.
The research says it's 180 steps per minute, or 90 rpms, and very
similar to cycling. It's not just about
making quicker and shorter stride length, or artificially increasing the
cadence. It's how quickly we move
through the cycle. It's not necessarily
about shortening or lengthening the cycle - it could be. But most often it's ground contact time and
the shorter the ground contact time the more time you are floating. It probably seems a little vague to your
listeners, but I think when we practice these things in the field and in training
we can start to see differences in efficiency and how we produce power. I think things like wattage and some of the
watt meters coming out for runners are going to be useful tools, not so much to
measure training zones or training goals, but to measure improvements in
efficiency in producing power.
Rich:
There will be listeners who will
want to learn more about either the training philosophy you are describing, see
more about the product you are producing, or learn more about you. Where would you direct folks to go?
Jim:
They can go to our website EPOCPerformance Training and we have some information there. Our parent company, Firstbeat in Finland, has
a lot of great physiological whitepapers on their website about our software
and how we apply it to training and recovery.
I've read a lot of great books and one book that I like in particular is
Cycling Past Fifty by Joe Friel. The philosophy in that book is very closely
correlated to my training philosophy that I've developed over the past twenty
years of my coaching career. I was
really pleased to read what he had to say in that it fit with what I've learned
in a practical way, and it fits with what the research says. There are couple of points that I disagree
with, but they are very few. The philosophy that Joe Friel espouses is, to
maintain maximal strength we've got to maintain aerobic capacity that only
comes with training above 90% of max VO2.
Those two things, for age group athletes, whether you’re a triathlete or
a skier or runner or cyclist. The
strength training, in those older age groups, is equal in importance to the
endurance training that we all like to do.
There is a lot of great science
around capacity training. I'm not
minimizing the need or requirement to do long, slow, distance training. What we once thought about the development of
peripheral structure of the muscle, the capillary density, the mitochondrial
density, and the aerobic enzymes in the muscles, were the physiological
attributes of long, slow, distance training.
What the science is now showing is that those peripheral functions of
the muscle are better developed through high intensity training. It doesn't mean you need to go overboard in
the quantity or dose of the high intensity training, but it needs to be
there. To have that training be
effective, it means we need to know the endurance training (long, slow,
distance) is being done at the correct physiological workloads for two
reasons. One, so we develop a fatigue
resistance in the muscle so we can go long enough, recover from it, and adapt
fast enough, so the high intensity sessions can be done at the right high
intensity. With our software we can
accurately measure whether the person is actually getting to their workout objective,
which up until this point it has not been possible to get those measurements
outside of the laboratory setting. That,
in a nutshell, is my training philosophy.
Whether we're talking about an elite international caliber athlete or an
age group athlete, those are the capacities that we focus on.
Rich:
I certainly hope to learn more
about Firstbeat software and we what it uncovers for me as an athlete. Maybe we'll get a chance to try it out and
talk about it more on the show. This
segment of the show is called "Try Something New.” I'd like to give the listeners a few tips for
how to get stared in cross country skiing.
Jim:
A couple of things if you are new
to skiing. Most people benefit by
learning the classic technique first.
It's not that it's an easier technique to learn, but I think it lays the
foundation for skating more effectively.
If you are really hooked on skating, find a good coach or instructor and
get a lesson early on. Get some good
direction to get started because it can be a little frustrating starting
out. If you are doing it a lot, monitoring
what you are doing is important.
Especially during the learning phase of skiing, because the
physiological load or stress from an hour will be a lot greater than an hour of
running or cycling.
Rich:
This is great. I really encourage those who are considering
cross country skiing to get that professional lesson when you try it. Once you get the technique down, it really is
a rewarding activity and sport.
I am really am excited that I was
able to catch up with you and the listeners will certainly benefit. I am geeking out at how cool it is to have a
coach of your caliber on the show.
Jim:
I'm happy to do it. When we got into the Firstbeat business,
after my friends made it available to me, the more I used it the more it
shifted my theory of training and concept of what we want to do with endurance
athletes. It gives us an accurate
measure of what we're doing and how we're doing it. We really got into the business with the
objective of doing three things for the athlete, particularly the older
athlete. Keeping the athlete healthy and
maintaining long term health - it doesn't do us any good to train every day if
we end up with a major disease. We think
that if we just train, we get a high level of protection from age related
diseases, and that's not true in the absence of recovery. Our real goal is to help people train better,
perform better and be healthy in the long run.
For masters athletes in particular, performing in the short term and
losing the long term health is not an attractive option in our minds.
Rich:
We as age groupers too often make
the mistake of not taking recovery seriously enough. Having you come on to the show and
demystifying recovery for us has been extremely valuable. I look forward to having you on the show in
the future.
Rich Soares
As you heard in the
interview with Bob, race nutrition and GI distress is not limited to the
consumption of 
