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Skiing is a great sport for getting fit, burning 600+ calories an hour and using many different muscle groups. Your body needs to be prepared for such vigorous activity or you may spend more time off the slopes than on them with strained muscles and other associated aches and pains. In this article we look at ways to help you get ski fit and avoid pains and minor injury.
Whether you already have a regular exercise routine or not, you will need to concentrate on a few key areas to help avoid the risk of injury when skiing. Before your holiday try to incorporate a series of exercises concentrating on key areas which will be under extra pressure when you ski.
In order to get the most from your ski holiday it will help to minimise breaks, improve your degree of strength, and raise your level balance. Always remember to warm up properly before you exercise, warm down, and see your doctor before working out if you have any illnesses, injuries, or concerns.
Cardiovascular exercise will help improve your level of endurance, something you need a lot of especially in the first few days of skiing. If you don't exercise regularly you may wish to start with more gentle cardio exercise with sessions of about 20 minutes, 3-5 times a week. If you already have an exercise routine you may wish to up these sessions to 45 minutes, again 3-5 times a week. Good ski based cardio exercises may include running, step, swimming, cycling and cross training. If you start early, at around 6 weeks of your cardio workout you may be able to consider moving on to circuit training or a similar activity to further increase your endurance levels for your skiing holiday.
Skiing places a lot of strain on the muscles of the legs. To help prevent aches, pains and muscle strains it is important to build up your legs to be able to cope with the extra pressure. On a daily basis you may consider wearing leg weights, to improve muscle strength. Squat thrusts and hover squats will help you build up your quad muscles, which are under stress when skiing. Lunges and reverse lunges will further help your legs strength for skiing as will skipping and jumping. Many skiers find it hard to commit to parallel turns and concentrate heavily on the knees, putting them under unnecessary strain. By enhancing your awareness and the strength within your ankles you will find your posture when skiing will naturally improve and parallel turning will become easier. Core strength and lower back strength are also important so be sure to include exercises working these areas of the body too. We will cover these in more detail in future articles.
Balance is of the highest importance when skiing, but don't worry if you aren't blessed with natural ability on this area, it can be learned. The ankles are again important here, by slowly leaning backwards and forwards flexing only at the ankle you will become more aware of your own sense of balance. Do the same from side to side, then try jumping from side to side and flexing your ankles to help maintain better posture when skiing. Concentrate on the messages your feet are sending you with each exercise.
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