Cross-country (XC) skiing is good for you!
YOU START at a gentle pace but even as a beginner you will be having a
great workout, for XC skiing exercises almost every muscle in your
body. As your technique improves you will gradually build up to longer
and faster sessions - superb for cardio-vascular fitness and muscle tone.
As long as you have average fitness you can enjoy one of our
beginners’weeks without any special preparation. But you can also use
a cross-country skiing holiday as part of a more general programme -
to get fit, lose weight, drop a clothes size, feel better. Once you have
booked we will send some general and specific ideas to help you set
realistic fitness goals - and achieve them.To benefit from this you
should book as early as possible. Any fitness programme should start
gently and build up gradually, and a six-month programme will do you
twice as much good as a three-month one.
Getting started
AT ITS highest level XC skiing involves a lot of different
techniques, and you can spend a happy lifetime trying to master
them. But a newcomer needs to learn just a few basic skills, and
with good instruction they are fairly easy to pick up. On our
holidays we would expect beginners - after morning instruction
- to ski at least a couple of kilometres on the first afternoon.
As a beginner you will ski on tracks called loipe. Prepared by
caterpillar-tracked vehicles, the tracks have two parallel grooves
and your skis run along them.We supply skis, boots and poles.
Naturally, you do need warm clothing, and long thermal
underwear is a must, but if you are already a regular country
walker, cyclist or runner you will probably already have much of
what is required.We send full details after you have booked.
Age Limits
OR DOES IT? With our group holidays we don’t operate a strict upper age-limit.
Many over-fifties, after all, are in much better shape than people half their age, and
we know some extremely fit 70 year-olds who can ski all day over hill and dale and
be up bright and early next morning,wanting more.These, however, are people
who have been skiing for years, and know their strengths and weaknesses.Older
beginners need to choose conservatively. Fitness is not the only issue - you need
to be happy with the idea that as a beginner you will fall over - repeatedly - into
the snow. If you are too concerned about the risk of injury (to your body or your
dignity) then your very anxiety will impede your progress, and make you fall over
all the more, and you would be better to choose a different kind of activity
altogether.We are happy to advise, and we do reserve the right to telephone any
client to make sure that they are suitable for the holiday that they have chosen.
We don’t think our group holidays are suitable for children under the age of 14,
but our independent ones certainly are. In some centres we can arrange
instruction if required
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