XC Ski For Women

[Manney]

Not everything is about you or yours or me. Hard to imagine, right @Musk Ox?

Women under poling has been studied to death in XC skiing. Lots of physiological reasons… arm length, upper body strength, body length ratios, upper body muscle mass, muscle density etc. Google “cross country skiing research” and you’ll find professional and academic studies on this and a great deal more.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... rom_poling

And nobody’s buying you a subscription to ResearchGate or spoon feeding articles to you that you’ll neither read nor accept. So don’t bother asking. (Spoiler alert… you’ll blow this off by saying that the differences only apply to elite athletes, expecting ppl to believe that they don’t have trainers actively engaged to close the gap.)

As for wax and most things in life, “use as directed” kinda goes without saying. Except for ppl who think they know more than the effin company that made the wax. Oh, hell no, why should they know anything, right?

The irony is that ppl apparently trust the products enough to buy them. Then they go on to believe their uninformed beliefs justify going off label in their use. And somehow, by the miracle of the internet and chat rooms, this makes sense? No. It is not only technically incorrect but so internally flawed that it’s hard to know where to begin.

The only explanation is that ppl don’t know how to read. It’s either that, or they don’t know how to think. Sometimes they don’t even know that they’re skiing at a snail’s pace, or why.

But just keep thinking this is all about you… or me. That keeps things on a personal level and reduces the chances of anything ever being learned online.

[mca80]

You've never, in your whole life, used a product except exactly as the manufacturer recommends? Never modified anything purchased?

[Manney]

The flip side to women underpolling is men overpolling.

Still don’t know what that means, @Musk Ox? It means using less or more than optimal force on your poles to assist in propulsion.

There is an energy balance in XC skiing which, if exceeded for a particular muscle group, ends your ski day. Recreational skiers experience this when their legs or arms wear out on a long ski. Doesn’t need to be a fast, racing pace. Just needs to be long enough and far enough into the aerobic zone for the muscle to effectively run out of energy.

The correlation in professional sport isn’t as prevalent due to training*. Go to the gym long enough and you can build the arm and core strength to over-poll an entire race distance. This is obviously much easier for men to do because of a little molecule called testosterone. That little molecule helps us build muscle far more effectively than women. This is not my view, it’s exercise science.

Over-polling in men’s XC skiing got so bad that FIS worried about the death of the classic stride. Male athletes were booking it in the gym and double polling an entire race, which is something that is phenomenally challenging for female athletes to do… all because of testosterone.

FIS eventually stepped in with zoned courses… classic zones, double poll zones, and free style zones.

Professional female athletes have a hard time getting to the stage where they can overpoll out to race distance, so what do you think women who aren’t professional athletes/gym rats will do? Their physiology places them at a disadvantage to men… not because they don’t ski well or try hard. It’s because they lack the testosterone levels to build the necessary upper body muscle. They are, like Joe Average Man, doing things other than hanging out in a gym all day long.

So women rely more on their legs, which makes sense because the glutes are a very large muscle group… by far and away the largest muscle group in a woman’s body (they’re exceedingly large in men too, but the proportional differences aren’t as extreme because men typically carry more upper body muscle than women due to their physiology).

[JohnSKepler]

My wife overpoles. She can't get enough of it. And neither can I.

[Manney]

You've never, in your whole life, used a product except exactly as the manufacturer recommends? Never modified anything purchased?

Sure. But don’t whine about it when it doesn’t work. Or advocate it’s blanket use when you know it isn’t reliable.

Here’s a good example… WD40. The Rocket Chemical Company (who developed and manufacture this stuff) brag about its 1001 uses. So much so that people stopped thinking about what it was (penetrating oil + kerosine) and brag about how well it works on their bike and motorcycle chains. This misuse of an otherwise good product has killed more chains than beach sand ffs.

Why? It’s a penetrating oil. People don’t know what that means. They hear “oil” and they’re convinced.

Not unlike hearing “wax” and doing what they please.

There are many key differences between grip and glide wax. They operate on completely different principles. Some of those principles are obscured in daily use, on lightly used skis. Some of the principles are associated with other things (like “my ski doesn’t glide well”). Betcha that very few ppl actually understand how both waxes work, which is the reason why they have trouble accepting there is a difference at all.

They just know what they do, attributing what’s happening under their feet on snow, skins, scales, side cut, adult weight gain, etc.

[mca80]

My wife overpoles. She can't get enough of it. And neither can I.

Lol

[Manney]

My wife overpoles. She can't get enough of it. And neither can I.

Ha ha. Keeping my mind out of the gutter for the moment…

Doesn’t surprise me that you over-pole. If your wife does, then she’s in a very small group of women who actually do. Not my view but the result of too many studies of the sport to ignore.

The one thing that you might also read up on is pole length. Obviously, longer poles provide more thrust (mostly due to the follow through). The FIS regs are typically used in charts to sell the “correct” pole. But the FIS regs are a competition standard that has a minimal basis in human performance. It’s just a way to prevent skiers with unusual torso and arm lengths from bringing vaulting poles to create an unfair advantage on the piste.

As part of your quest to find a great k&g ski for your wife, look into how her poles are sized. There is a tendency for the charts to underserve women in general and over-polers in particular… because they’re based on a sporting regulation whose purpose it is to level the playing field.

This might translate into a better recreational ski experience… she gets the speed she’s after, you’re not having to break flow and stop up the trail for her to catch up. Everyone wins. That’s what recreational skiing is about.

Unless you’re out with the boys… then it’s “take no prisoners”. Ha ha

[Musk Ox]

This whole grip wax nose to tail is the biggest bit of chat room stupidity going. It’s mostly done by ppl who don’t own an iron or are afraid to use it to lay down glide wax outside the grip zone.

To get back to this for a moment, tip-to-tail Swix Polar is a tried-and-tested method that has a perfectly valid use in actual snow on actual hills, and it would be nice if you could tone down your spectacular and unnecessarily aggressive confidence, maybe just until winter.

[Musk Ox]

she would stick her Åsnes carbon adjustables up your arse.

With deep snow baskets?

Caked in Swix Polar, for perfectly adequate glide in temperatures about 5° below freezing, which I understand are the precise conditions obtaining in Manney's rectum from about October to May.

[CwmRaider]

Tip to tail grip waxing is quite common here (Norway) for off-track xc skiing / fjellskiing, especially in powder snow.