The Norwegian method is more than just an endurance training approach based on lactate threshold. It’s an extension of the Norwegian way of life outdoors.
This article is an excerpt from The Norwegian Method: The Culture, Science & Humans Behind the Groundbreaking Approach to Elite Endurance Performance, by Brad Culp.
Norway supports trial and error
After winning his first Ironman 70.3 world title, Gustav Iden was asked about the best part of growing up as an athlete in Norway. He went on to credit his homeland for providing a safe space to explore the edge of possibility. In his words, young athletes in Norway aren’t afraid to fail, because if they do, they know they’ll be OK. There will always be a decent-paying job of some kind waiting for them, even if it’s not in an elite sport. There’s a social safety net for athletes—and everyone else—in Norway that exists in only a handful of countries worldwide. Imagine what goals you might attempt if the fallout of failure was more contained.
If a sturdy social safety net were the biggest factor in cultivating world-class athletes, the Arab Gulf nations and Singapore would be a lot better at sports. Raising sturdy kids with the foundation needed to consistently become the best in the world in activities as physically and mentally challenging as running, triathlon, cycling, or skiing takes a village—or, in this case, a country. A 2020 study published in Lancet, England’s leading children’s health journal, ranked children between the ages of 0 and 18 from nearly every country in the world by a handful of mental and physical metrics. These included very basic things like nutrition and access to health care to more abstract criteria like life satisfaction and general happiness. To the surprise of very few, Norway came out on top, with their Scandinavian neighbors (and Finland) close behind. The United States finished 39th.
A major takeaway from the study—and subsequent studies in Lancet about youth and adolescent culture in Scandinavia—is that access and impetus to play outdoors as often as possible are what make the pagans of the north perhaps a bit better at raising children than the rest of us. It also highlighted the level of free play Norwegian children have relative to other Western countries and the sentiment that kids should learn to take ownership of their actions as soon as they begin to act. That’s something that bleeds heavily into the Norwegian model of sport. Ownership and skills come first, and true competition can wait until the teenage years.
The advantages of an open-air life
The most peculiar sight for a first-time visitor to Norway is often seeing baby strollers lined up outside of coffee shops and restaurants in the dead of winter. It’s not that the proprietors want to keep the strollers out of their establishments but rather that the parents want to keep their babies—sometimes tiny babies—out in the cold, fresh air. (This can be a common sight in major cities in Denmark and Sweden as well, just a bit less striking because the weather is usually better.) If you ask a Norwegian mother why her baby is out in the cold while she warms up with coffee, she’ll likely tell you that it’s good for developing the immune system. If you ask a Norwegian father, he may tell you that it breeds toughness and comfort in the outdoors. Both are probably right.
Norwegians are proud of their love of the outdoors and the way they seem to withstand the elements better than people from places with better weather, which includes basically all the other 195 countries on earth. So much so that they have their own unique term for the lifestyle called friluftsliv. Literally translated, it means “open-air life,” and it means just that. They’re so fond of this term that it’s one of the first things you see when you visit VisitNorway.com. Norwegians are born with skis (or hiking boots) on their feet, they spend as much of their youth and adolescence outside as possible, and once they have kids, it’s time to get outside with those kids and do it all over again.
Walls and ceilings are reserved for school time, meal time, or sleep time, and even then, Norwegians like to do things differently. One concept that has garnered a bit of press in North American media recently is udeskole, or “outdoor school,” which is often referred to as “forest schools.” These are prominent throughout Scandinavia and are often boarding schools where parents send their kids for weeks at a time. Some are fully private, but like most things in Scandinavia, the majority receive a healthy amount of government support. The udeskole concept is even woven into traditional primary and secondary schools, typically with one day a week or every two weeks spent completely outdoors.
It’s a type of free-range learning that is increasingly rare in the Western world, and it’s part of what has created a generation of Scandinavians with an even greater love for nature, more independence, and an unbridled curiosity for the world they’re ready to conquer. Kids learn by doing things, not by hearing things, and this often involves a lot of trial and error, which is something that has carried over to the Norwegian method of sport: Try something new, test it as much as possible, and keep only what works. As with the creation and evolution of the Norwegian method, a decades-long trial-and- error project can pay off when you are willing to try, err, and test a lot.
Unfortunately, it takes a bit more than happy, healthy, independent, and outdoorsy kids to build world champions. If that’s all it took, Denmark (with the same population and even happier children) and Sweden (with double the population and almost as happy of children) would be as or more dominant on the biggest stages of world sport. That’s not to say that both countries aren’t having a moment across a variety of sports, but as much as it would kill its two neighbors to admit, Norway is doing it a bit better.
Greatness that defies all odds
Norway’s current golden generation of athletes comes from very different walks of Norwegian life and has very different upbringings. Erling Haaland and Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Norway’s two most prominent athletes and the best in the world in the most competitive of sports, had rather cherished childhoods from a purely athletic perspective. Jakob’s dad had him training as a professional at age eight, but Haaland had him beat by a few years. The son of a professional soccer player, Haaland was born in the UK while his father was playing in the English Premier League. He returned to Norway at age three and started in the development program for his local professional team, Bryne Fotballklubb, at just five. Haaland’s upbringing, like the Ingebrigtsens, didn’t exactly fall in line with the Children’s Rights in Sports Act. As much as the Norwegian government and the Norwegian Olympic Committee aim to promote joy, independence, and a lack of competition among its youngest athletes, that doesn’t stop plenty of parents from sending their children down a competitive and often joyless track from a very young age. It is a free country, after all.
For the most popular sports, and especially soccer, there are elite soccer academies that will treat kids as young as five as pros. This, of course, isn’t unique to Norway. Nearly every major soccer club in Europe has development programs for kids from ages 5 to 16. Norway’s programs just haven’t received much attention because they’ve been terrible at men’s soccer for as long as they’ve played. That all changed when Haaland burst onto the international soccer stage with Viking-like speed in 2020. All of a sudden, the international soccer media was paying attention to Norway like never before.
A tale of two Norwegian athletes
Endurance is no doubt a huge component of soccer, but it’s not like Haaland grew up living by the Norwegian method like the Ingebrigtsens did. It’s likely that the soccer star has never heard of double-threshold days and has probably only seen a lactate meter in a lab setting, if at all. But there are still remarkable similarities between the two athletes, who were born 59 days apart and were raised 11 miles away from each other. Both had demanding fathers, and Haaland’s was a successful athlete himself. Both families also had the means to take what they needed from the academic and athletic structures provided by their home country and supplement where they saw fit—which was a lot. The travel restrictions placed on many young Norwegian athletes certainly didn’t apply to its two biggest superstars, who got their first taste of international competition shortly after learning the fundamentals of their sport.
Haaland underscores the exceptional circumstance that two of the world’s very best athletes—competing in sports that are arguably the most competitive on the planet—come from the same little dot on the globe and were raised there at the very same time. If you want your kid to become the very best in the world at something, the last thing you would want is for them to play soccer or run the 1500. There are at least a billion children right now who want to be either the best soccer player or the best runner on earth. Shooting, archery, equestrian, or any other sport with a high barrier to entry Modern Norway and the Golden Generation 115 and a smaller competition pool offer exponentially better chances of reaching the top.
Triathlon might offer a narrow path to world-class greatness, and of course, Norway has served up another fascinating case study there. The fact that triathlon has a much smaller competition pool than running doesn’t make Norway’s climb to the top of the sport any less likely. It’s still a very global sport, with 172 countries having national federations, Norway’s being among the newest.
Kristian and Gustav grew up in opposite parts of the same place—Bergen— with the former sometimes catching jokes from the latter about growing up in the ghetto. (There is, of course, nothing in Bergen that could be deemed “ghetto” by any standard.) Kristian grew up close to the city center, in a more blue-collar part of town, while Gustav hails from the countryside, over one of the seven mountains that surround Bergen, which made for different lifestyles for the two future triathletes. But growing with slightly different means didn’t stop either from finding the path to the top of their chosen sport in a country that makes that just a little bit easier. Or a lot easier, depending on where you’re from.
It pays to live like a Norwegian
The real juice of the Norwegian method of training is in the Norwegian model of living. Both are focused on a holistic approach to the human body and mind, starting first and foremost with getting outside, being independent, and dealing with whatever comes their way. It works for a lot more than endurance. In addition to Haaland, Norwegian athletes have reached the top of the world rankings in some of the most competitive global competitions. Viktor Havland is consistently ranked in the top five in the world in golf, and Magnus Carlsen is the greatest to ever do the hardest game ever invented: chess. When it comes to both body and mind, the Norwegian model of life is generating extraordinary humans.
The fundamentals of the training programs of Kristian, Gustav, Jakob, or any of the other great Norwegian athletes aren’t that much different from that of the best runners in East Africa, the best cyclists in Belgium, or the best speed skaters in the Netherlands. (The Dutch way outperform even Norway on the speed-skating oval.) The differences between the Norwegian or Kenyan (or Dutch) methods are as subtle as the differences between polarized and pyramidal training. But the real ticket may be as much in living like a Norwegian as training like one.
The golden generation of Norwegian athletes (and chess grandmasters) owes a little bit to science but a lot more to the art of living well—something Norway has nearly perfected over the last century. The United Nations publishes something called the Human Development Index each year, which ranks all 196 countries on earth based on how healthy and wealthy its citizens are. Switzerland finished first in the 2022 rankings, which was most remarkable because it ended Norway’s 14-year streak at the top. Now if this list were indicative of athletic performance, athletes from Liechtenstein would strike fear in the rest of the world. What it is indicative of is the foundation needed to mold healthy and happy children. The rest is a matter of good coaching and maybe a bit of luck when it comes to the right athlete finding the right sport—as was the case for Kristian Blummenfelt.
Explore The Norwegian Method
The Norwegian Method explores the coaches, athletes, and lactate threshold training methods used to win races and smash records.