Some of my clients have skiing holidays booked for over the Christmas and New Year period and so for the past six weeks I have really been focusing their sessions around strengthening ski-specific muscles to improve their performance and avoid injuries when they’re out there. When skiing you’re on your feet for most of the day and so it’s really important to build up your quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes and calves. The best kinds of training to do for your legs before going skiing are functional resistance exercises. You want to try to focus on exercises that involve a whole range of movement and that best mimic the actions involved in skiing. Squats are an excellent starting point as they train the quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes at the same time and work on you being able to hold a position that is vital for skiing, especially if you are a beginner and are going to be in the snowplough position a lot of the time. It’s a good idea to also do some one legged squats to really work on the glute muscles as you often put a great deal of force and pressure through a single leg when turning and stopping. Hamstring curls can also be done by lying on your back and putting your feet on a swiss ball. You should aim to roll the ball in towards you using your feet, whilst keeping your hips off the floor. This is a great exercise to strengthen the back of the leg, which will protect your knee and help to prevent knee ligament tears. Lunges are another excellent exercise to build strong legs. Usually people ski for quite long periods of time and so when performing these exercises we are focusing on improving muscular endurance. Four sets of 15 reps should be done of each exercise in order to really focus on that specific training system.
Core strength is also important when skiing, especially if you’re a beginner and will be falling over a lot and having to pick yourself up off the ground! Straight and oblique crunches as well as plank are a simple but effective way to improve core strength. Functional exercises like mountain climbers and bicycle crunches are also brilliant at working all of the core muscles needed to keep good balance and form when on the slopes.
On top of this it’s good to work on your cardiovascular fitness to improve your skiing stamina and to compliment your resistance training. Your training for this could be brisk walking, running, swimming, cycling or boxing and you should aim to do at least 20 minutes, three times a week.
If you stick to doing resistance and cardiovascular training regularly for 6 weeks before going skiing you’ll definitely see a vast improvement in your skiing ability and stamina, which will mean that you have plenty of energy left after a day of skiing to enjoy the après-ski activities!
