The Kinesiology Department at Boise State University worked with alpine skiers this week in an effort to help them achieve their peak athletic performance.
The Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation brought their U-18 to U-21 girls for a camp where they were tested in several areas at multiple locations at Boise State.
"We decided this year we needed to work on our strength and conditioning, we wanted to give the girls the opportunity to look at a very high end facility and get their testing done with very professional sports scientists."
Iona Halliday is one of the sport scientists in Kinesiology Department that put these ladies through the program. We caught up with them at the Center for Orthopaedic and Boimechanics Reseach where the girls tested their power output, lower body strength and lateral movement.
"We are doing some performance testing and looking at some injury management techniques, we are trying to build a profile of the athletic performance so we can help and aid with their training."
We also went to the Human Performance Laboratory for the VO2 Max test. This test on the bike provides data on the maximum oxygen rate the athletes consume during exercise. It's part of the puzzle to test their aerobic and anaerobic capacity while looking at their lactate threshold in their muscles.
"Alpine skiers start off very anaerobic when they first leave the gate, it’s short high intensity to get going, then it moves into aerobic so they actually build up a fair amount of lactates towards the end of the run."
The Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation team will take the data from the camp and use it to create a training program for the summer. Anika Angriman told us training during the summer is so important ahead of the grueling race season.
"This is an opportunity to gather a lot of informant and a lot of data on their physical fitness, we do believe that getting really strong and knowing their bodies better is going to move the needle a lot for them through out the winter season."
The Camp also featured education sessions on nutrition, sports psychology, team building, goal setting and visualization. Halliday and her team really enjoyed having the girls on campus.
"I think it has been really good, I come from a very strong sports science background in Australia and I love doing this kind of thing."
It's shaping up to be a huge year in Sun Valley as it has been announced that Sun Valley will host the World Cup Finals in March of 2025.. It's the first time in a long time the finals will be on U.S. soil, but it's not official yet, that announcement will come in September.
"If anybody from Boise wants to come and watch some very high level skiing, we are talking about World Cup athletes,"
