This might be a boring and generally well-known topic for elite athletes, but it’s sometimes underestimated by amateur skiers who are preparing for races and aiming to perform well. Because they often fail—or refuse—to distinguish intensity levels, their performance gradually declines over time, and they frequently attribute this to aging. But how can you stop the clock and continue to improve and train well?

Get a Smartwatch

Nowadays, you can buy a watch in any sports store or electronics shop that displays your heart rate. Most models can even calculate your maximum heart rate and determine the basic zones you should follow in your training. If you want precise values, you need to undergo a stress test on an ergometer in a sports laboratory.

Listen to Your Body

No device can replace the perception of your body’s signals. Some mornings, you might wake up feeling tired, with a resting heart rate higher than when you’re full of energy. Similar deviations occur with heart rate during exercise.

The ideal approach is to combine both—technology and your own feelings. Use your watch but also learn to listen to your body and do some training sessions without any sensors. Learn to distinguish training intensities without relying on them.

In a race, you don’t always have the chance to check what your device says. Or in a situation where your competitor is pulling away, you need to estimate by feel whether you can handle increasing the pace.

Read more: Awestruck by the volume: How Andreas Fjorden Ree trains

The Death of Tempo

You finish work and are excited to train. You set off enthusiastically and don’t even realize that your pace is higher than it should be. If this type of training dominates, your performance will decrease in the long term. Tempo training is relatively demanding on the body, especially on recovery. The result is that you won’t be able to respond to an increase in pace during a race by your competitors—you’ll just keep doing “your thing.”

Slow or Fast

Strive for variety in your training. Do endurance or recovery sessions at aerobic intensity, and sometimes include intervals at your anaerobic threshold. Or, if you’re feeling good, try a sprint session where you push at maximum effort.

How to Differentiate Training Intensities

There are many ways to divide intensity zones. Below is one method that works even if you want to monitor your heart rate without a sports tester.

Zone I – Leisurely Pace

Keep a pace where you feel you could go for hours. Plan an outing with a friend—if you can talk without “gasping for air” and are able to breathe through your nose, you’re in Zone I. This is the aerobic zone where energy is sourced aerobically. You have sufficient oxygen, and your muscles do not become acidic.

In hills, it’s hard to maintain this intensity. You don’t have to run. It’s enough to walk briskly or, on skis, use the herringbone technique.

Zone II – Tempo Training

You no longer feel like you’re on an outing but are keeping an increased pace, where it’s harder to talk to your companion. Breathing through your nose is no longer enough. You’re in the heart rate range between the aerobic and anaerobic thresholds. There’s partial muscle acidification, but your body is still able to break down lactate.

As mentioned earlier, if you do an entire endurance session in this zone multiple times a week, it’s a significant load on your body. Stick to Zone I and include Zone II intervals during the session.

Zone III – Anaerobic Zone

You’re at a heart rate corresponding to lactate levels at the anaerobic threshold. Your muscles are getting a borderline amount of oxygen, where they can still break down lactate and avoid acidification. You’re breathing fully through your mouth. You feel that if you pushed harder, you’d be “over your limit.”

Zone IV – Race Pace

This is the pace where you try to give your maximum on the course. This zone is mainly used in shorter races lasting around half an hour, where you can push on short climbs and recover a bit on descents. In longer races, such as ski marathons, you mostly stay below or at the anaerobic threshold and only occasionally exceed it. Your muscles burn, your breathing is intense, and you might feel a metallic taste in your throat from highly vascularized mucous membranes.

Zone V – Sprint

You aim to achieve maximum speed over a short segment lasting about 15 seconds. In such a short time, you cannot raise your heart rate to its maximum, but you try for maximum movement frequency. Short sprints can be included regularly, as they don’t cause prolonged fatigue and instead refresh monotony in endurance sessions. For this type of training, you need to be in good shape and free from any muscle issues.

Read more: Disheartened after Norwegian season premiere: “My body didn’t respond”

Push Yourself in Training

Do interval sessions ideally in Zone III or IV. You can include them 1–2 times a week, depending on fatigue. These involve repeated segments lasting 3–8 minutes, with rest periods of 1–4 minutes. The rest is usually about one-third to half the length of the segment. For example, if you run 6×4-minute segments, take a 1:30–2:00-minute break between them.

Be cautious during the warm-up phase before intervals, which should be done exclusively in Zone I. Only then can you complete the fast segments effectively.

A well-developed cardiovascular system is one of the key factors in athletic performance. You can log miles, you can lift weights, but if you don’t “train” your heart and test it with rhythm changes, you won’t progress in performance. If you’re short on time, skip one endurance session rather than an interval session.

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