In Vancouver, an event may last 40 seconds, or four hours. Whatever the duration, you can be sure that months, or more likely, years, of training came before.

But not all workouts are created equal. “The way that an athlete approaches training varies for each sport,” says Jennifer Heil, an Olympic veteran in freestyle skiing (moguls) and a gold-medal winner at the 2006 Turin Games. “My sport (in which competitors race down a 29-degree mogul course and launch themselves off two jumps) is 30 seconds or less. So it requires a lot of power, it requires speed, and a lot of flexibility as well.”

In the lead-up to competition season, Heil will usually do three workouts of strength a week, all revolving around the core. At times Heil will don a belt with cables that pull her back, the idea being to replicate the force of gravity skiers experience. Her schedule also includes plyometric training – popular among hockey players – which involves a lot of jumping, hopping and bounding.

Then there are the various cardiovascular workouts, which involve sprint training so intense that Heil and her teammates are often left with nothing in their tanks – literally. “I’ve already thrown up four times this training,” she admits with a laugh.

An athlete’s workout also varies depending on the time of year. For Jon Montgomery, two-time Canadian skeleton champion and world championship silver medallist, the hard work begins months before the temperature dips anywhere close to 0 C.

“We usually start off the season in May and we’ll do some baseline training,” ranging from cardio to strength-building, he says. “It’s just getting the body ready for the workload we’ll be placing on it for the rest of the summer.” By September, his weight training will consist of lower reps but more weight, to turn the muscles he’s developed over the summer into explosive power.

Like Heil, Montgomery does sport-specific drills like running bent over on a treadmill to emulate the push-start for skeleton. He and his sliding teammates also practice their push technique at Calgary’s Ice House, a world-class indoor training facility at Canada Olympic Park.

An athlete’s training is often overseen by a team of professionals. Heil works with a strength and conditioning coach, a physiologist, a technical coach and a psychologist, among others. “My trainers, they know what my heart rate has to be; they know the power that I’m producing, the watts depending on what machines I’m training on,” she says. “It’s all perfectly calculated to what we need to do that day.” She credits the B2ten program, which channels private funding to 24 Canadian athletes, for helping her connect with these resources.

When it comes to workout staples, there may be something more important for athletes to bring than an iPod or sports drink. “If I’m going to get anything out of my workout I need to be present and I need to be wanting to be there.“ says Montgomery. “So a must-have is the right attitude.” •