I give up. I quit.
(HITTING THE WALL)
(BUFF DUDES TRAIN FOR SKI CROSS)
Based on the weather in Calgary so far,
I'd say if you want to be a gold medallist in ski cross,
this is about the perfect time to do it.
Yeah. Brady Leman definitely picked the right spot.
I can kind of feel hypothermia kicking in already.
So do you want to head in?
Sounds good. I can't feel my face.
(CALGARY, ALBERTA CANADA)
My name is Brady Leman. I'm from Canada.
I was a gold medallist in ski cross
at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
The moment I knew I won gold, I was feeling just so happy
and proud and surprised.
Hitting the wall to me would mean hitting that mental wall
with training, whether it's on the hill or in the gym.
Ski cross is a really time consuming thing to train for.
- Brady? - Hey.
- How you doing? Brandon. - Good. Brady.
- Nice to meet you. - Brady, Hudson.
- Nice to meet you, Hudson.
So what got you into the sport?
I grew up raised in Alpine.
My family was totally a ski family.
When ski cross got to the Olympics,
it seemed like the perfect fit.
Ski cross is a really reactive and really adaptive sport.
No two runs are the same and it's really hard
to plan a perfect race.
I think all of that plays to your reactiveness on skis.
When you're putting your body through this much training,
how do you recover?
Just spend time outside as much as I can in the summer,
playing golf or you have some yoga
or just going out and chilling out in the mountains.
Are we ready to try your schedule, your routine?
- Yeah, let's go. - I'm pretty excited. Yeah.
- All right. - Right on.
Welcome to the gym, guys.
Thank you. Is this your second home?
This facility? Yeah, I spend lots of time here.
We're going to run through a little bit
of linear mobility stuff.
Keep that head position.
So you want to pull on just a little string from kind
of the back your head.
So your head is up and tall and then your chin's
tucked under a little bit.
Yeah, a lot harder than it looks.
How much do you feel like this type of warm-up,
mobility stuff, helps?
Oh, it's huge.
It's big for your mobility and posture and everything,
and then it's also huge for injury prevention in the gym.
Yeah.
You need to really take the time to run
your body through a good warm-up, especially
if you're going to be doing kind of maximal effort stuff.
There.
(SKI CROSS TRAINING)
In ski cross, we get into a lot of weird positions
on the ski hill. You're in your tuck a lot,
you're making big presses off the jumps,
so being able to get into some uncomfortable positions
is super-important, so instead of going over hurdles,
we're going to go underneath them.
So the big part of this is just trying
to get that nice, wide step and slide it through.
This is tough.
The wider you can make that first step,
the easier it's going to be.
Oh, damn.
Can these be electric?
I know. They do. They do.
They need to be, like, cattle fences.
Feel the hips opening up a bit?
Oh, very much, very much so. Yeah.
A lot of it, too, is knowing where
your body is at, where the hurdle's at,
trying to sense it.
Nice work. Nice work.
Yeah, thanks.
With training today, the focus would be balance under fatigue.
We do different stuff to make yourself tired
and then try to activate the balance side of things,
so we'll start off on the eccentric trainer.
But the key here is to try and let
your lower body do the work and keep your upper body quiet.
And if you feel good there, then you
get down into a tuck position.
So I'll stay on here for a minute,
but really just try to stay as low as possible
and aerodynamic, and letting your legs come to you
and trying to be soft with your feet.
Kind of the same idea like if someone was balancing something
on your back. It's not going anywhere.
And once you're nice and tired from that,
you go and try and get on the slack line.
I'll use this guy for a little bit of support.
Now that your legs are nice and tired,
try to get everything back in focus.
Try to keep your eyes a couple meters ahead of where
you're going. Just try to relax as much as you can on there.
It's going to give you a little bit of a countdown here
and once it's kind of up to speed, try and find
that ski position,
that upper body and the hips nice and level, and just let
the legs work.
I'm not imagining skiing right now, Brady.
I'm just imagining surviving.
Brady made that look pretty damned graceful.
And I know you said flow, but quads, my quads at least,
are already on fire.
About a minute there, so just hit stop.
Oh, thank you, Brady.
This is where they do the side by side shot of you doing it,
and then us doing it.
- Yeah. - That's going to look awkward.
Oh, yes.
All right. You ready for this?
Am I ready?
This... Wow.
Oh, my God.
The closer you get to the middle,
- the harder it's going to get. - Oh, what?!
There you go. Just try to relax.
All right.
Yeah, just relax.
All right. Looked fine. You ready?
Yeah, I think so. Let's do it.
Yeah, there you go.
Nice.
This is kind of like an active wall sit.
You're halfway there.
Wait, that's it?
Oh, my God.
I'm dying!
Oh, I couldn't do it.
I was going to faceplant there.
Wow.
You made it look so easy.
Yeah, so now you're feeling nice and fresh.
Oh, yeah.
- The shakes! - Yeah, I know.
- The shakes! - Gates are kicking in.
Keep 'em tight.
Oh, no!
I quit.
That was too close for comfort.
Yeah.
That's a little taste of ski cross training.
So what's next?
Next, I think we're going to hit the force plates.
That sounds kind of cool.
I'm kind of looking forward to that one.
- Maybe I shouldn't be, but... - Yeah!
Nah, it'll be all right. You'll make it.
Ski cross is part of freestyle skiing.
And it's different from other alpine events
because there are multiple skiers racing at one time.
It was first included in the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Each course consists of terrain elements
like trees, banks, and jumps.
The skiers have to navigate the courses in the fastest time
while hitting all of these elements.
(HITTING THE WALL)
(CANADA)
All right, guys.
This is the final challenge - the Hitting the Wall medal.
Oh, yeah.
So we're going to do force plates challenge. This is Mike.
He can tell you a little more about it.
Well, welcome to our strength and power laboratory.
So what we're going to do with you
guys today is just a vertical jump test
- on the force plates here. - It's building anticipation.
You're going to jump on my command.
Jump as high as you can. Do five jumps.
Jump.
Buff dudes smash.
- Ready? - Yup.
Jump.
All right, Brady, you've seen us both.
What do you think?
I don't know. Tough to tell.
We'll have to see what the force plates say.
This is actually something I do twice a week in my training
when I'm here in the summer.
It lets us see how the training load
is affecting my power output.
So then hopefully we see,
as the summer's training season kind of rolls on,
a little bit of a progression in the numbers,
and start to really see the gains as it translates
into something super-functional,
like a vertical jump.
I don't know if we'll be as impressed by our own numbers,
but OK.
You guys ready to find out who's taking home
- the Hitting the Wall medal?
- That's right. - Oh, yeah.
- We're ready. - Drum roll.
All right, the winner of the force plate challenge is...
..Brandon.
Yeah!
Buff dude, number one. I win it.
Yes, thank you. Thank you so much.
- Congratulations. - I appreciate it.
Now that I have you here, Mike, I just...
I want you to explain how awesome I am
- through technology. - Oh, happy to do it.
So if you see here, and as I promised
we wanted to look at the peak power that you could produce,
and you had a 58 watts per kilogram and Hudson had 54,
so it's still rather close,
but that's why we do the science.
That's why we do the science, right?
We were able to tell that you jumped higher, as well.
You got some pretty good bragging rights
- for the next one, man. - Yeah.
Hudson and Brandon were awesome.
It was cool to get those dudes into some uncomfortable
situations and definitely try to push some things that I know
that they hadn't done before.
It was cool to see them having a good time with it.
I wasn't really knowing what to expect,
but once we started going to the training,
it was pretty evident that it was
going to be a lot of core stabilisation,
a lot of mobility, and it's a lot harder
than it looks and sounds.
I'm just glad he didn't take on the slopes!
He probably took one glance at us and thought,
yeah, I'm probably going to be
keeping these guys in the gym today.
Next time on Hitting The Wall...
We're meeting Lutalo, a Taekwondo Olympian.
- Can we keep up? - Guess we'll find out.
(HITTING THE WALL)
(OLYMPIC CHANNEL ORIGINAL SERIES)
(OLYMPICCHANNEL.COM)