Nordic Training Sources
Mission Statement
The focus of this website is on scholarship and the spirit of collaboration on which creative thinking is based. It attempts to gather relevant information of all sorts of sources, domestic and foreign, research articles and international websites, and not just from skiing but other sports as well. The more we understand about the body and its movements and capacities in general, the better we will understand the complex nature as well as final simplicity of skiing movements and how most effectively to teach them.
With due admiration for past periods of inspired leadership and individual athlete successes, the last thirty years of upper level Nordic ski administration have not succeeded in providing Nordic skiing with an up-to-date, coherent or scientifically well-founded approach to development or high performance. Magazines responding to skier enthusiasm have been largely reluctant to publish serious, at times lengthy and footnoted, articles. That is understandable from the market point of view. It is also understandable that articles written by current or recent athletes lend the appearance of having information hot off the track. That aura of celebrity is attractive to readers even though the information it conveys is often narrow, even inaccurate. I do not lack for admiration of athletes, even though I have said that athletes are flowers, coaches gardeners. But research has also shown how often athletes tend to give both inconsistent and frequently inaccurate descriptions of how they perform the movements they do. Nor do blogs seem to encourage patient study of pertinent questions.
I do include here evidence from my own experience, but it is based upon both long reflection with reference to scholarship, personal trial, testing with other skiers, and critiqued by them. I will also list here various notes I have typed out from all sorts of books and articles which I found relevant to my thinking about skiing. In most cases I am not needed to interpret them; they speak simply and clearly for themselves and may thus be helpful to any coach or athlete. I'll keep adding these “short takes” as the site grows.
Whatever the format, I do not see this collection of writings as definitive but as an ongoing and modest engagement with a community of curious men and women who wish to see our skiers enjoy their sport more completely through reaching higher levels of performance. ~Richard Taylor
Visit the Archive page for a comprehensive list of publications which are downloadable as .pdfs.
No Pain, No Gain?