87. THE TRAINING PRACTICES OF SUCCESSFUL WORLD-CLASS NORWEGIAN ENDURANCE COACHES: PART 1
In all the previous KisW Research Notes, we saw ‘only’ data about endurance athletes/cyclists. In fact, most of the endurance sport science studies are performed measuring adaptions directly on athletes, while only very few studies collect information about performance from coaches. According to the website www.greatestsportingnation.com, a project which ranks the best nations in sports based on competition results (weighting each result for importance), in 2025 Norway is at the first place in the ranking which normalises success for the number of people living in the country. This outstanding achievement is a result of Norway being particularly good in endurance sports. Given that we are not aware of any genetic variations which might help the Norwegians to excel in endurance sports, it can be interesting to know how they train.
What are the training characteristics/practices applied by successful world-class Norwegian endurance coaches?
A study published by Øyvind Sandbakk and Colleagues (School of Sport Science, UiT The Artic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway) on Sports Medicine in 2025 tried to answer this question. In addition to being a university professor, Øyvind (with whom I collaborated on a research project) is also the director of NTG (Norges Toppidrettsgymnas), a network of Norwegian upper secondary schools specialized in combining academic education with athletic training for young talents.
When you read case studies about successful athletes/coaches (like this one), you should keep in mind that what you read is not the best training practice ever. On the other hand, it is likely that they are doing something good/great to obtain their results, so I find this type of data very interesting.
WHAT DID THEY DO?
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