ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Biomechanics and Control of Human Movement
DATA DRIVEN ANALYSIS OF BIOMECHANICAL FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH IMPROVED CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING PERFORMANCE
Provisionally accepted
- 1Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada
- 2McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
- 3Universita degli Studi di Trento, Trento, Italy
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The objective of this work was to implement a data-driven biomechanical approach that can assess the biomechanical determinants of cross-country skiing performance. To achieve this, full-body kinematic data were obtained and analyzed during over-ground cross-country skiing trials of varied efforts to quantify propulsion strategies, spatiotemporal coordination, drag, and joint power outputs. Eight athletes of varied skill levels were analyzed, encompassing a total of 5,568 movement cycles (i.e., propulsion strategies). To assess the many interacting modes of variation potentially associated with the skilled performance cross-country skiing two complementary analyses were implemented. First, an automated objective classifier was trained on a subset of data to detect varied propulsion strategies associated with different athlete skill levels. Second, a principal component analysis was utilized to provide animated reconstructions of representative movement styles and relevant indicators of variance related to skill level. Results suggest that several factors were associated with skill-level including: (1) dominant propulsion strategy, (2) smaller frontal area, (3) reduced ski external rotation, (4) increased upper and lower body joint power. The data driven approaches implemented here can identify key features associated with cross-country skiing performance and have the capacity to be used in a sport-field setting to communicate efficient strategies to athletes.
Keywords: Principal Component Analysis, Support vector machine, joint power, Ski Propulsion Techniques, motor coordination
Received: 11 Jul 2025; Accepted: 28 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 MacNeil, Kritzer, Napper, Fruet and Beaudette. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Shawn M Beaudette, sbeaudette@brocku.ca
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