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How many hours do you train a year?

The number of hours spent training each year is unique to each athlete and should be tailored specifically to their needs. Quality of training is more important than quantity, and it is important to make sure you are properly recovering from your training.
 
Transcript: "This is different every single year. We actually dropped my hours in the Olympic year to help me do kind of a four-year super peak cycle. This year, it will be around 875 hours a year. However, the one thing I will tell, especially young skiers is it really-- the hours that you train is super individual. It will be different for every single athlete. It will probably be different every year of your life. And I think it's really important to make sure that it's quality hours. Don't just chase the number. Don't just chase bigger and bigger hours. Make sure that what you're doing in those hours is right for you and that you recover from it, because it's recovering from the hours of training, that is where the magic is going to happen. And that's where you're actually going to get faster and stronger."
4 Answers
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Jessie Diggins

US Olympic XC Skier๐Ÿฅ‡๐Ÿฅˆ๐Ÿฅ‰
This is different every single year. We actually dropped my hours in the Olympic year to help me do kind of a four-year super peak cycle. This year, it will be around 875 hours a year. However, the one thing I will tell, especially young skiers is it really-- the hours that you train is super individual. It will be different for every single athlete. It will probably be different every year of your life. And I think it's really important to make sure that it's quality hours. Don't just chase the number. Don't just chase bigger and bigger hours. Make sure that what you're doing in those hours is right for you and that you recover from it, because it's recovering from the hours of training, that is where the magic is going to happen. And that's where you're actually going to get faster and stronger.
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Gus Schumacher

๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Olympic XC Skier
How many hours do I train a year this year? I will do about 1,000 maybe slightly under, and it's a little dependent on, you know, if I get sick the rest of the year. But I like, Jessie's answer this question, that that's very individual, and I've worked up on that for many years and made sure that there's a balance there that I can tolerate, and I have enough recovery. Because if you're not resting enough between sessions, you're not going to adapt to them. So it's not that helpful would be better to train less and adapt. Better. And that's always a hard thing to get, right. I think there's not like a ton of things that you can like a ton of hard numbers that you can look at to see if you're adapting or not. I think you just have to go with a coach and based on feel feel if you're like getting better and able to absorb that training and you're not just like tired all the time.
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Matt Whitcomb

๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Head Coach - XC Ski Team
Breath. So the question is, how many hours do you train in a year? And I'm a coach. So I'm just going to answer sort of based on perhaps what our team does, our team on the World Cup trains on the low end at around six hundred and fifty six hundred and 80 hours per year. Those would be younger skiers all the way up to at the extreme end 12:00 a year. However, the right amount of training is the amount. That you as an athlete can absorb and because there's nothing more simple than just going out and training a lot. The question is, does that volume of training make you any faster? And for a lot of people more is not better. So we tend to increase from the young age. We tend to increase volume by just general rule of thumb by 10% or something like that, you know, 50 hours a year. Could be added. So as a junior might do for fifty one year and then 500 the next all the way up to, you know, maybe close to 9:00 as the senior racer later in one's career, the volume tends to tends to plateau. And you might be stuck at 100 or 150 or 9:00 a year for multiple years in a row. The variations within those years then are based more on the type of training that build up. Those are ours. Volume is just one. One simple metric was a lot else in there.
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JC Schoonmaker

๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ Olympic XC Skier
The question is, how many hours do you train a year? So this year, I was aiming to train 820 hours, definitely. A little bit behind that goal because I sprained my ankle, this fall and missed out on a couple weeks of training just didn't quite get the volume I needed. So, I'm around probably going to get her down to 800 this year. If everything goes, well, I'm not trying to make up those missed hours or anything but that's a pretty big jump. For me last year. I trained 700 in the Air before that I trained 730. So 120 was a pretty big jump, but so far I'm handling it pretty well. And that's kind of the most important part because at the end of the day, the hours that you trained aren't necessarily going to make you a better skier, it's actually just getting faster and making sure that you're handling those hours. Well,