Poliquin - Healthy. Lean. Strong.

Training Articles

Tweet Print

The Athlete’s Training Diary: A Classic Workout for Figure Skating

A look at the training plan of Canadian champion Josée Chouinard

With all the costumes, drama and dancing – and a special place reserved for athletes and coaches called “The Kiss and Cry” – we often think of figure skating as more performing art than sport. But the fact is this sport requires exceptionally high levels of power, flexibility, coordination and muscular endurance. Triple axels for the women and quad jumps for the men – only a few exceptional athletes can achieve such results.

This article will focus on women’s figure skating, particularly on how I trained Josée Chouinard, one of Canada’s most accomplished figure skaters. She has enjoyed a wonderful athletic career, has won the Canadian championships three times, placed fifth at the worlds, and placed in the top ten in two Olympics. The highlight of her professional career was winning the 2000 Sears Canadian Open, defeating Michelle Kwan, the 1999 World Champion, and Sarah Hughes, who went on to win gold in the 2002 Olympics. Before looking at a snapshot of Josée’s training diary, let’s take a closer look at the physical requirements to excel in figure skating.

The Evolution of the Revolutions
Because of the increasingly higher levels of performance displayed in this sport on an international level, there is considerable pressure for skaters to perform more difficult jumps at a younger age. Many athletes, for example, start working on their double axel and their triple jumps at the age of 11 – in fact, 2010 Olympic silver medalist Mao Asada of Japan landed her first triple axel in international competition at the age of 14! But the point I want to make is that adapting to the intense training necessary to perform these jumps requires special physical preparation that adheres to the principles of structural balance and functional strength.

Although performing ballet will help resolve many postural problems associated with figure skating, these athletes need to do much more to correct their muscle imbalances. For example, skaters tend to have a relative weakness in the vastus medialis oblique (VMO) because the high volume and intensity of jumping they do in practice strongly develops the vastus lateralis but does little for the VMO. The vastus lateralis has an opposite line of pull on the patella than the VMO, and can create alignment problems with the patella if the VMO is weak. In fact, I’ve found that many instances of patella tendonitis can be resolved simply by performing special exercises for the VMO such as the Petersen step-up.

In terms of strength, figure skating requires high levels of relative strength to attain maximum height in the jumps; in any case, you don’t want to emphasize the Type IIb fibers, as they will contribute little to jumping – besides, the extra bodyweight would compromise jumping ability. Using free weights is best, because figure skating involves considerable disruptive forces that torque the knee. Leg presses and hip sled exercises are fine for the average trainee, but the strength developed is not going to carry over to the jumps. Step-ups and lunges would be better choices. However, when training young athletes, it’s important to have a progressive series of weightlifting protocols – you can’t, as they say, look at children and adolescents simply as little adults. This is why I included “Training the Prepubescent” as one of the seminars in my Special Consideration Training Series to ensure that my PICP coaches know how to design safe and effective workouts for young athletes.

For energy-system training, aerobic exercise is often recommended for skaters, but this is a mistake. First, it’s the short-term energy system that is predominately used in figure skating, and performing treadmill workouts that focus on working at 60-80 percent of max heart rate for 30-45 minutes will not prepare an athlete whose sport will spike their heart rate to 100 percent in a matter of seconds. There are many long-term problems associated with focusing on aerobic exercise with young athletes, such as overtaxing the adrenal glands and reducing the ability of the body to use the Type IIb muscle fibers.

In terms of body composition, for maximum jumping ability and to reduce the stress of landing, skaters must stay extremely lean. Further, the technical nature of the sport means that athletes must stay lean year-round, avoiding weight fluctuations that could affect jumping ability. However, poor education about how to eat well often leads many figure skaters to adopt dangerous nutrition practices, as evidenced by the relatively high rate of eating disorders among figure skaters compared to other athletes.

A great first step to educating skaters about good nutrition is to use Biosignature Modulation methods to determine why an athlete may be retaining excess fat. Because of the high stress levels associated with practice sessions that total 30 hours or more a week, you would expect to find these athletes have high cortisol levels (as indicated by a high umbilical score). Also, many skaters tend to carry a large percentage of their fat stores in their thighs, which often indicates an estrogen problem. However, there are many variables that influence the way athletes store bodyfat, so it’s important to have a qualified Biosig practitioner perform an assessment.

Snapshot of a Championship Workout
For Josée’s program, as with all my programs, I alternated between accumulation (low intensity/high volume) and intensification (high intensity/low volume).

The shorter rest intervals associated with the accumulation phase will help skaters develop muscular endurance, and the higher growth hormone production will help these athletes maintain low bodyfat levels. During the accumulation phase I’ve often found it’s best to focus on addressing structural balance issues that result from such a high volume of sport-specific training, as these exercises are generally less technical in nature. Also, during this phase I will look at the muscles that are frequently injured in an athlete’s sport (and with skaters it’s often the knees and lower back) and to, using the popular term used now by strength coaches, “pre-hab” exercises so that if an athlete does injure that area, they will be able to rehab those areas much faster.

The heavier weights and longer rest intervals associated with the intensification phase are the ideal format for more sport-specific, functional exercises. Because skaters jump from and land on one leg, split squats and step-ups would be good for these athletes. If an athlete has the training experience and a good coach, they could also include Olympic lifting types of exercises in this phase such as power snatches and power cleans. Plyometrics could be used in this phase, but when you consider that skaters already perform such a high volume of jumps in their training and that they skate year-round, such exercises could easily lead to overuse injuries.

Finally, when you look at the repetitions I prescribe in my workouts, understand that I have to take into consideration the neurological efficiency of the athlete. Although Josée was already a high-level skater when I started training her, she was a beginner in terms of her strength level – for example, she could not perform a single pull-up. As such, the repetitions I gave her were higher than those I would give to an athlete who has considerably more strength-building experience.

With that background, let’s look at one of the intensification phases I gave Josée.

Intensification 1
Lower Body
A-1. Front Split Squats, 4 x 4-6, 3021, rest 60 seconds between each leg
A-2. Leg Curls, Feet Inward, one and one-third reps, 4 x 4-6, 3010, 90 seconds
B-1. Step-ups, 3 x 10-12, 2010, 90 seconds
B-2. Seated Good Mornings, 3 x 10-12, 2010, 90 seconds
C-1. Low Cable Pull-ins, 3 x 12-15, 4020, rest 90 seconds
C-2. Seated Calf Presses, 3 x 15-20, 2010, rest 90 seconds

Upper Body
A-1. Chin-ups, 4 x max effort, 2020, 2 minutes
A-2. Mid-Grip Bench Presses, 4 x 4-6, 4010, rest 2 minutes
B-1. External Rotation with Dumbbell, 3 x 10-12, 4020, rest 90 seconds
B-2. Decline Flyes, 3 x 10-12, 4020, rest 90 seconds
C-1. Seated Dumbbell Press, 3 x 6-8, 1 x 10-12, 4020, rest 90 seconds
C-2. Seated Scott DB Curls, 3 x 6-8, 1 x 10-12, 4020, rest 90 seconds

For Josée’s lower body, the goal was to correct the weakness in the VMO; two exercises ideal for this are front split squats and step-ups. Although squats are certainly a valuable exercise, skaters jump off one leg, so from a biomechanical perspective single-leg exercises would be considered more sport specific. For landings, strengthening the soleus and the biceps femoris has been shown to be valuable; two exercises that do the trick for these two muscle groups are leg curls (for the biceps femoris) and seated calf presses (for the soleus). Note that I instructed her to turn her feet inward on the leg curls, as structural balance testing found that her biceps femoris was too strong for the strength of her semitendinosus and semimembranosus. I also added seated good mornings to strengthen the gluteal and hamstring muscles that create most of the hip extension power that is essential for jumping.
 
For the upper body, pull-ups and chin-ups are key, as the sport requires upper body strength but requires extra work to develop it. Skaters need to be able to pull in their arms quickly, and this requires a stable trunk and strong latissimus dorsi muscles. Chin-ups and pull-ups are much better than lat pulldowns for developing strength in these muscles, the reason being that during pulldowns the muscles of the trunk do not have to work as hard because the lower body is stabilized by the machine. For posture, I included an external rotation exercise for the shoulders to help correct the round shoulders that are common with these athletes.

Competitive figure skating has always required a high degree of athleticism, but in the time since I trained Josée Chouinard, the physical requirements have reached startling new levels. In this sport, as in any activity requiring complex skills, you can’t work on everything at once, and that’s the key idea I’d like you to take away from this article. The best approach is to work on structural imbalances first, followed by functional training protocols and sport-specific exercise, and also keeping the athlete’s bodyfat in check with Biosignature Modulation methods. Yes, developing the proper training approach is a science, but as with the sport of figure skating, it’s also an art.