How Sturla Holm Lægreid Trains (Shooting Straight at 170 bpm)

At the 2026 Winter Olympics, Sturla Holm Lægreid won a medal in all five men's biathlon events. Silver in the pursuit, silver in the mass start, silver in the relay, bronze in the sprint, bronze in the individual. Five races, five medals, and no gold.

That is one of the strangest results in Olympic history, and it is also the most precise illustration of what biathlon actually asks for. He was never slower than everyone. He was never off on the range. He was, five times, a fraction away.

The sport is a heart rate problem

A biathlete skis at roughly 90% of maximum heart rate, then has to hit a target 4.5cm across from 50 metres with a rifle resting against a chest that is heaving.

The physiological literature on this is unusually clean. Approaching the range, heart rate falls by about 10 to 12 bpm over the last 50 to 60 seconds, so the athlete arrives at around 85 to 87% of HRmax. On the mat it drops further, with minimum heart rates measured at 61 to 73% of HRmax, roughly 20 bpm lower in prone than in standing. Accuracy is at its best at rest and at around 70% of HRmax.

Put your own numbers on that. For an HRmax of 195:

Ninety percent is about 176. Seventy percent is about 137. A biathlete closes a gap of nearly 40 beats, most of it in under a minute, while skiing hard into the range and then lying down and doing the most delicate thing in sport.

Why this is a training quality, not a trick

Two things govern how fast heart rate falls after hard work.

Parasympathetic reactivation. Your vagal system comes back online after effort, and it comes back faster in aerobically fitter people. Heart rate recovery in the first 60 seconds after exercise is one of the better-validated markers of aerobic fitness there is.

How hard the effort was relative to your ceiling. Skiing at 90% of HRmax is an entirely different proposition depending on what 90% costs you. If the pace into the range sits below your threshold, your heart rate drops quickly once you stop. If it sits above, it does not, because you are also clearing the metabolic debt of being over your limit.

So the range performance is bought on the ski track, months earlier, by raising the intensity at which 90% of HRmax is survivable. That is the Norwegian model behind Klæbo's dominance: a very large annual volume, most of it easy, with a small controlled dose of hard work.

The shooting drills matter too. Biathletes practise the approach, the breathing pattern, and the timing of the trigger squeeze between heartbeats, because the recoil of your own pulse moves the barrel. Research on the cardiac cycle shows the best and worst shots cluster in different phases of the heartbeat.

What we can and cannot say about his week

Norway does not publish Lægreid's training diary, so this is not a place to invent one. What is on the record is the system he came through and the shape of the sport: very high volume, mostly low intensity, on roller-skis in summer and snow in winter, with daily range work and strength underneath. His reputation inside the sport is for calm and consistency rather than a single freakish quality, which is exactly what five medals in five races looks like.

The number you can actually train

Heart rate recovery is measurable with any watch, and it responds to training.

Test it. After a hard interval, stop and stand still. Note your heart rate at the moment you stop and again 60 seconds later. The difference is your HRR60.

Read it. A drop of more than about 30 bpm in the first minute is a good sign in a trained endurance athlete. Under 12 bpm is poor, and in clinical research it is associated with worse outcomes. Most recreational athletes land somewhere in the twenties.

Improve it. Not with recovery drills. With aerobic volume, which is the thing that raises vagal tone, plus enough hard work to lift the ceiling that the effort is measured against. Track it over months, always after the same kind of effort, or the number means nothing.

What you can steal from it

• Your recovery between efforts is a fitness test. How fast your heart rate falls in 60 seconds tells you more about your aerobic base than how high it went.
• Anchor the percentages to a real number. All of this is meaningless if your max heart rate is a formula guess. Test it, then set your zones.
• If you need skill at the end of an effort, train the effort, not just the skill. Shooting, technical descents, a sprint finish in traffic. The calmer the same pace feels, the better the skill survives.
• Consistency is a physiological result. Five medals in five races is what a big aerobic base plus a repeatable technique buys you.
• Measure the same way every time. Same effort, same posture, same watch, or your heart rate recovery trend is noise.

More in this series: Johannes Klæbo, Quentin Fillon Maillet and Jessie Diggins.

Sources

• Wikipedia
• Olympics.com profile
• Nordic Mag on his fifth medal in five races
• Characterization of the heart rate response during biathlon
• Cardiac cycle phase and shooting accuracy
• IBU rules overview

Cover photo by Sandro Halank, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.