A musculoskeletal full-body simulation of cross-country skiing

This paper presents a measurement-driven, musculoskeletal, full-body simulation model for biomechanical analysis of the double-poling (DP) technique in cross-country skiing. DP is a fast and powerful full-body movement; therefore, it is interesting to examine whether inverse dynamics using static optimization is working for a musculoskeletal full-body model with high accelerations, a large range of motion, and realistic loads. An experiment was carried out to measure motion and pole force of a skier on a double-poling ergometer. Using the measurement data, a simulation model was implemented in the AnyBody Modeling System (AnyBody Technology A/S, Denmark). Experimental results of motion and pole force from the DP ergometer, and also simulation results of relative muscle force profiles, are presented. These results agree with results found in literature when the kinematics and external kinetics are similar. Consequently, it should be possible to use computer simulations of this type for cross-country skiing simulations. With a simulation model, it is possible to perform optimization studies and to ask and answer ‘what if’ questions. Solutions to such problems are not easy to obtain by traditional testing alone.