Tag Archives: weights

Ski Strong This Season: Don’t Let the Holidays Slow You Down

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During the holidays, the priority should be to maintance training.

For alpine and nordic skiers, the holiday season arrives just as winter routines are taking shape—when consistency begins to matter more than ambition. With travel, packed schedules, and parties, structured training is often the first thing to disappear. It’s tempting to pause workouts and rely on skiing alone. Sports science suggests that approach comes at a cost.

Consistency, even at reduced volume, is one of the strongest predictors of in-season performance. Strength, power, and aerobic capacity begin to decline sooner than many athletes expect. Research shows minor dips in neuromuscular performance can occur within two weeks of reduced training. For alpine skiers, this can mean decreased force production, earlier fatigue, and increased injury risk. For nordic skiers, reductions in strength and aerobic efficiency can compromise technique and late-race performance. The solution isn’t training harder—it’s not skipping your routine.

During the holidays, the priority should be maintenance training. Studies consistently show that maintaining intensity while reducing volume—often to 30–40 percent of normal load—is sufficient to preserve strength and power. Two short strength sessions per week, focused on the lower body, trunk, and upper-body pulling, can support both disciplines. These sessions don’t need to be long or elaborate; they just need to happen.

Skiing provides an important sport-specific stimulus, but it doesn’t fully replace structured training. Alpine skiing places repeated eccentric stress on the quadriceps, which builds endurance but doesn’t fully preserve maximal strength.  Nordic skiing, while highly aerobic, often lacks the strength stimulus needed to preserve upper-body power and hip stability. Skipping off-snow training can leave athletes feeling strong early in the season but struggling as fatigue accumulates.

Consistency also supports movement quality. Staying  strong improves coordination, balance, and force transfer—key elements for edge control in alpine skiing and technique durability in nordic skiing. These qualities fade quickly when training becomes sporadic.

Recovery also matters. Active recovery exercises, like stretching, foam rolling, and easy spinning  help you recover with less soreness. Sleep and fueling play a role as well; poor sleep and under-fueling increase perceived effort and make workouts easier to skip. Regular meals, adequate carbohydrates, and hydration—especially in cold environments—support energy and training quality.

The holiday season is also a time for gratitude. Being able to train and ski through winter reflects robust bodies worth taking care of. You don’t need long workouts—just consistency. Aim for two short strength sessions each week. Keep intensity up and volume manageable. Fuel regularly, hydrate, and protect your sleep when you can. Do the basics well. Small, steady efforts now preserve performance and help you move through the rest of the season feeling strong and resilient on snow.

Connie Aronson is an Exercise Physiologist and Corrective Exercise Specialist ( TMMB-CES ) Visit her at the Y, www.conniearonson.com , and Instagram @Josie_the golden 

The magic of muscle and bone mass and brain health

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A woman is stretching on the floor with another person.
Lifting weights is key to retaining lean muscle mass and keeping your weight down.
Photo-Metro Creative Connection

Hands down, the biggest reason people hire a personal trainer is that they want to be stronger and healthier. To achieve that goal, throughout a lifetime, it is essential that we maintain a vigorous level of physical activity to not only age well and be healthy, but also to keep our bones strong.

Lifting weights, or resistance training, is the key to retaining lean muscle mass and keeping your weight down. Around the time you turn 30, you start to lose as much as 3% to 5% of muscle mass per decade. The rate of decline of an inactive 80-year-old could be as much as 30%.

In fact, the American College of Sports Medicine and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommend two or more days per week of moderate-to high-intensity resistance training, using all major muscle groups. Use it or lose is correct, as keeping your muscles strong and flexible after 30 prevents scarpenia, a condition characterized by loss of skeletal muscle mass and function. Scarpenia is a natural part of aging, but muscle loss is largely accelerated by inactivity. For many, as we get older, we tend to move less.

The ACSM’s Physical Activity & Bone Health position stand is a recommendation that adults maintain a relatively high level of weight-bearing physical activity, with no upper age limit. Activities like plyometrics—jumping jacks, for example—and high-intensity resistance training are beneficial ways to increase bone mass, as well as to preserve skeletal integrity and improving balance to prevent falls. Kids that are involved in gymnastics and sports that involve jumping, like soccer and basketball, have a great strength advantage in later life, as their bone mass is maintained into adulthood, the report notes.

The main concept of resistance training is to produce changes that result in various strength adaptations. The 80-year-old mentioned? One set of arm curls, to overload his or her biceps, can result in strength gains in the arm muscles lasting as long as a month! While my job as a trainer is to set up great programs for individuals, consider ways you can start to train, if you haven’t already, with a simple home setup, including weights, elastic bands, medicine balls, or a TRX.

Remember when?

There is good reason to stick with your routine. Physical activity is a powerful intervention to reduce anxiety and depression during a pandemic. Those of us who stayed or became active during pandemic lockdowns were less likely to experience subjective memory decline. A recent study in Preventative Medicine looked at the effect of physical activity on subjective memory decline before and during social distancing. One in three participants experienced feelings of memory decline when socially distanced, however the active participants did not.

Muscles knock back inflammation

Besides brain health, regular exercise promotes a healthy immune system. Muscles that you use doing squats, arm curls or running down a trail have an innate ability to reduce inflammation. Lately, scientists studied lab-grown engineered human muscles to examine the role of a pro-inflammatory molecule, interferon gamma, which breaks down muscle. Typically, chronic inflammatory diseases break down muscle. The lead author of the study, Zhaowei Chen, a postdoctoral researcher in biomedical engineering, found that when exercising, the muscle cells themselves are a powerful shield and can directly counter interferon gamma, the pro-inflammatory molecule, as well as protecting other tissues and cells.

https://www.mtexpress.com/wood_river_journal/features/fitness-guru/article_b2d26462-11af-11ec-b04a-23ef35ce0778.html