Ski Machines

Two or three people within a week or two have mentioned on the sales floor that they are unfamiliar with skiing, but have used the Nordic Track indoor exercise machine. More than 30 years ago, American Olympic skier Bill Koch endorsed it as a great trainer for the preseason. The company itself no longer makes them at all. They make treadmills, ellipticals, exercise bikes, and rowers, but no cross-country ski simulator.

I still have one, folded up in the crawl space. Dutifully, I put in many hours on it to prepare each year for the coming of real ski conditions outdoors. Mind you, I never put in even an entire hour in one session, because the Nordic Track is without question the most tedious exercise simulator ever devised. I used to say that it was all of the work and none of the reward, which is true. Worse than that, though, the way it uses the muscles and shifts the effort from one side to the other is so different from actual skiing that the muscle memory will probably actually inhibit a beginning skier's progress if they really want to learn to stride on a medium to high performance ski.

One customer sounded like he was trying to teach himself, sliding around on his new skis, trying to make it feel like the Nordic Track. Note: if your skiing feels like the Nordic Track, you're doing it wrong. The machine is confined and constrained. Real skis in the real world are free, and sometimes unruly.

Cross-country skiing didn't start out as exercise, it started out as a way to get from place to place. Exercise was incidental. Skiers would put forth as much effort as necessary. If you're chasing game, or being chased by someone you pissed off, maybe you'd get the ol' heart rate up there in the red zone, but as a practical matter, skiers use terrain to their advantage as much as possible. What goes up gets to come down. On snowshoes, you'd be plodding either way. On skis you get to glide.

On the Nordic Track you do not get to glide. That crucial difference is the subtle impediment to actual skiing based on what your body memorized in your dutiful plod on the machine. You can set the resistance so that the flywheel spins, but then you aren't working as hard, burning calories and breaking down muscle so that it will rebuild itself stronger. If you design a program or even make the minor effort to mix things up, you might vary the resistance from one session to the next, or within the course of a single session. Even so, the glide phase of a low resistance session isn't anything like a real glide phase when you have to balance on a sliding ski.

A fully developed classical stride has distinct segments that occur in seamless succession. Dig around in the archives for more detail on getting the most out of your classical technique.