Use your bodyweight to scull faster! What is the similarity between Nordic Skiing and Sculling? Raf found this great blog post from Troy Howell in which he aligns Nordic Skiing with sculling and draws brilliant parallels with the best scullers and the mediocre.

If you want good cross-training it seems that nordic skiing is a step up from your average indoor 90 minutes ergo.

Nordic skiing exposes the limitations of steady-state training on flat water: because there are no hills in sculling, the sheer sameness of always training on a level surface can be problematic if for no other reason than that it’s all too easy to fall into a routine in which the most important training principle (VARY THE STIMULUS) is insufficiently honoured. Ninety minutes of steady-state at 22 SPM three times a week is almost inevitably going to create a less varied stimulus than three skiing outings of ninety minutes over varied terrain including climbs, descents, transitions, and varying routes and snow conditions. As has been observed more than once around here, “Nordic skiing is 100% fartlek; there’s no such thing as steady-state unless you live where it’s flat.

But whether you can get out on some snow and skis or not, the next part of the post is where we can all take learnings. Adding the momentum of body weight affects the speed of travel.

If the bodyweight is positioned appropriately, the skis still move on their own, even on fairly steep inclines, and it becomes apparent that it isn’t just alpine skiing that involves playing with gravity; if anything, Nordic skiing places even greater importance on it. An observant skier begins to notice that, more than perhaps anything else, it is the position of the body over the ski that determines whether one moves through space rapidly or slowly (or perhaps even goes backwards). This may lead to the realization that skiing, in an important sense, can be understood as controlled falling… Furthermore, it doesn’t take long for an attentive skier to notice that shifting one’s bodyweight skillfully during the rhythmic cycle of moving from one ski to the other makes a huge difference in the speed that one travels.

And so he quietly draws us back to the art of moving a rowing or sculling boat.

How to integrate the use of body mass into your technique in order to maximise your potential boat speed

I think that if body position over the ski and rhythmic, effective shifting of the bodyweight is critical to speed in Nordic skiing (and it is), then body position within the shell and rhythmic, effective shifting of the bodyweight is probably critical to speed in sculling and that if playing with gravity skillfully by intuitively adjusting the position of your body as it moves through a rhythmic cycle is what separates great skiers from mediocre ones, the same is probably true for scullers. ….. Sculling, like skiing, involves playing with gravity, and that has everything to do with how you position your body weight throughout the stroke cycle.

Sculling well involves learning to fall horizontally – this is part of what wise coaches mean when they say “rowing is not a pulling sport.”

Learn to play with gravity – it never gets tired.