THE EFFECT OF UNILATERAL STRENGTH TRAINING ON CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING DOUBLE POLING PERFORMANCE

At the highest level of sports performance, further progress is already very limited. Therefore, it is very important to implement more new training approaches and methods to our training process. The main purpose of our research was to find out if unilateral strength training is more efficient for developing cross-country skiing double poling performance than traditional bilateral strength training approach. Our research sample consisted of 8 probands (Age 17.94 +/- 1.04), national and international level cross-country skiers. The experimental group implemented a unilateral and the control group a bilateral strength training program within 6 weeks (3 training sessions per week). For tests we used SkiErg machine from Concept 2. The experimental group achieved improvement in total distance of about 6.66% (9.25 m) and control group 2.69% (3.75 m). Although we did not register a statistically significant difference between groups (p = 0.724), the experimental group improved its performance with medium effect size level (p = 0.11, r = 0.4), while the control group achieved a small effect size level only (p = 0.19, r = 0.17). The gap at the finish line between a winner and a loser in cross-country skiing is often just a few centimetres, so our result (difference of almost 6 meters between our groups) would make a big difference in real races.