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Curling is a varied sport of high skill, mental strategy and high physical effort.
Athletes must be able to deliver intermittent bursts of energy into sweeping, with varying lengths of recovery before delivering their own shots. Vanessa Zucco, an Exercise Physiologist at the sportscotland institute of sport, has been working with the GB Men and Women’s curing teams for the past two years to best prepare them for success at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.
The mixed nature of curling suggests that athletes require very good overall upper and lower body strength and well developed cardiovascular fitness in order to cope with the demands of the game, which usually lasts around three hours. It is well documented that physical fatigue has a direct impact on skill and performance, which is of particular interest for curlers.
During the two year period leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics, the aim has been to ensure that both the male and female squads are prepared physically and mentally for their campaign. The team at the sportscotland institute of sport have worked hard to develop their knowledge of the physical demands of curling, which has allowed them to provide individualised and focused training programmes for each athlete. A combination of laboratory-based testing and curling specific on-ice profiling has been applied to both teams in order to achieve their goals.
The laboratory-based analysis is conducted four times per-year and is broken down into pre-season testing, in-season testing, completion phase testing and end-phase testing. This feeds into training schedules and shows fitness levels for each athlete at these key points in the season.
On-ice competition analysis was completed during the first year at both local and international level. A combination of video recordings and physical analysis allowed the team to understand the impact of a competitive match on the athletes. However due to the nature of curling competition full analysis was only possible at the start and end of games, which missed out key variations during the match.
During the second year, on-ice profiling was completed under mock competition conditions. This allowed the team to generate a complete picture of how the athletes perform and react throughout the duration of a game.
All of this work has involved an interdisciplinary team of providers who have contributed to the planning, collection, analysis and discussion of strategies and the implementation of outcomes. The team includes David Hay (men’s coach) and Nancy Murdoch (women’s coach) as well as performance analysis, strength and conditioning, physiotherapy, sports medicine, nutrition and psychology.
The team at the SIS have combined their expertise to ensure that the GB teams are suitably prepared for their hardest demands, especially towards the end of the week-long competition when levels of mental and physical fatigue start to increase.
