During the course of a typical day of skiing, it’s easy to bag 10,000-30,000 vertical feet of descending. As you go down the mountain, you’ll drop from one leg to the other several hundred times.
The basic skiing motion entails going across the fall line then turning your body to look down the hill. When you look down the hill, the first thing you do is pole plant which swings your rear end to the side, snaps your legs around and gets you on edge. All of your weight transfers to that edge, then you cross the fall line and repeat the motion going the other way. Most skiing injuries happen when a skier loses control and is ‘stood up’ on one ski resulting in a knee injury.
Munching up thousands of feet of vert while snowboarding can make your thighs burn like they’re covered in molten iron, too. But in snowboarding, the motion is more frontally oriented than the side to side motion of skiing, but turns are still initiated in a similar manner: the downhill arm/shoulder leads followed by the caboose followed by the
board turning beneath you.
Whether you’re skiing or snowboarding, gravity doesn’t just propel you down the hill - it tries to fold your body into the hill, too. Your objectives as you tackle the program below are to:
- Increase Mobility
Flexible hips are a must for getting down the
hill, and your increased flexibility will serve you well when you
inevitably eat drift, too, and go tumbling downhill like a rag doll. - Increase Strength
- Increase Muscular Endurance
So you can go all day every day you’re on
the slopes without having to stop to catch your breath.
- Increase Power
So
your last turn of the day has as much pop as your first!
This program has been designed using exercises that specifically address the challenges of snow sports. In part one we focused mainly on the core, now we are going to rock your legs and shoulders to help protect your knees as you bomb down those hills and hit the moguls.
Complete the following set of exercises as many times as you can in 20 minutes. Start with two days a week and build up to as many as four days per week over the course of nine weeks.
Notes:
- in weeks 1-3 focus on form and increasing mobility
- in weeks 4-6 add speed, increase tempo of exercises
- in weeks 7-9, emphasize power with explosive movements and increased resistance.
- start with 30 seconds per exercise/side each 3-week cycle
- when 30 seconds per exercise becomes manageable, add 15 seconds
- progress with15 more seconds per exercise as needed
Workout Part 2:
- Postural squat
- Shoulder Series
- Suspended Lunge
- Balance Lunge
- Sprinter’s Start
Ski Conditioning Workout Part One