Skiing is a full-body workout. Not only that, when you ski, you engage muscles that you probably don’t use as much in daily life. This is why it’s important to train your body before you hit the slopes. Without preparing your body beforehand, you’re more likely to injure yourself while skiing.
To make sure your body is in the best possible condition before you ski, you will need to practice a variety of exercises that focus on strengthening your muscles and improving your balance, flexibility and overall fitness.
Here, we’ll take you through essential exercises to prepare your body for a season of skiing.
When should you start training?
Strengthening your muscles and building more muscle mass takes at least 3–4 weeks before you will notice any improvement. To guarantee that you will experience the benefits of your training, it is, therefore, important to get started about 6–8 weeks before you go skiing.
Warming up
It’s important to warm up for around 15–20 minutes before you start your training session. This will reduce the risk of injury while you exercise.
Start by jogging on the spot for 5–10 minutes. Then, try 5 sets of leg swings, gradually increasing the extent of the swing until you reach your full range of motion. Continue to warm up your leg muscles with 5 squats.
Then, perform 10 thoracic rotations to the left and 10 to the right to warm up your neck, shoulder and lower back muscles. Next, perform 5 push-ups to engage your arm muscles and core.
Finally, try 5 burpees for a full-body warm-up. A burpee involves performing a squat, push-up and jump in one fluid motion.
1. Cardiovascular exercises
Cardiovascular exercise improves the strength of your heart and its ability to deliver oxygen to your muscles efficiently. This means your heart will not have to work as hard when you are skiing.
Cardiovascular exercises can include anything that significantly increases your heart rate, such as running, swimming or cycling. A particularly good way to improve your cardiovascular fitness and stamina is high-intensity interval training (HIIT).
HIIT involves very short periods of high-intensity exercise that pushes your heart rate up. These bursts of intense exercise should last around 20–40 seconds and should be followed by a period of rest of around 15–30 seconds.
The intense burst of exercise could involve running as fast as you can or exercises that use your bodyweight, such as burpees.
2. Strength-training exercises
It’s important to strengthen your arms, legs and core. You do not have to use gym equipment to do this and can instead use weights or resistance bands at home.
Exercises to strengthen your arm muscles include bicep curls, overhead tricep extensions and tricep kickbacks, which can all be performed effectively using a resistance band.
Pistol squats, standard squats and lunges help strengthen your calves, glutes, hamstrings and quadriceps.
To strengthen your core muscles, effective exercises include the plank, side plank, mountain climbers and Russian twists while holding a kettle ball.
3. Balance exercises
Balance is essential when you are on the slopes so you can quickly adapt to changes in the terrain. Balance tools such as a stability ball or stability board can help with this type of training. For example, you can perform squats while standing on a stability ball.
Other exercises for balance include toe taps in different directions and hopping from side to side with increasingly bigger and faster hops.
4. Flexibility exercises
As skiing often involves making sudden changes in direction, flexibility is key to avoid injuring your muscles, tendons and ligaments.
Yoga poses can help improve your flexibility. Poses to try include the standing forward bend, warrior 1, chair pose, forward kneeling lunge and downward facing dog. Try to hold each of these poses for 30 seconds.
Cooling down
As with warming up, cooling down is an essential part of any workout. It will help your body recover from your training session and reduce muscle soreness. It also helps prevent injuries as warmer muscles allow for deeper, more effective stretches.
To cool down, while standing, bend your knee and pull your ankle to your glutes. This will stretch your quads.
To stretch your hamstrings and lower back, while standing, bend forward and reach for your toes.
To ease tension in your hips, while sitting on the floor, place the soles of your feet together and press your knees down towards the ground.
Hold each of these stretches for 30 seconds.
How often should you train?
It’s important not to overdo your ski training or you could end up injuring yourself before you even reach the slopes. Training every day does not give your body enough time to rest and recover. Instead, try to train 2–3 times every week.
