Being at peak fitness

The fear of making an idiot out of yourself is the biggest turn-off for most skiers. By making sure you’re at your peak fitness, you can make sure you make the most out of your skiing holiday, instead of finding that you are too physically exhausted to get out of bed four days into your trip. Even if you’re a skiing beginner, doing the same manoeuvres over and over again for six or seven hours a day at high altitude for an entire week can be exhausting. The only way to make sure you have the energy – both physical and mental – to fully enjoy the experience is to get in shape long before you hit the slopes.

You don’t have to be at professional athlete standard before you go on your holiday, but the fitter your body is, the less the chance of injury. For this, make sure you include stamina and endurance training, strength and flexibility and ski-specific exercises into your workout routine before you go.

• The most important points that your body needs to be strong at include quad and gluteal muscles, as these are the main stability and power muscles used during skiing. These can be trained with exercises such as lunges, split squats, step ups, deep squats and cycling.

• The lateral hip muscles also require strengthening before you go on your trip. There are no sports that rely on the external hip rotation movement as much as skiing does so the importance of training these muscles cannot be underestimated. Lie on your side with your hips and knees in a skiing position. Keep your ankles together and your hips steady as you lift your top knee, you should feel the muscle working in the outside of your bum. Repeat 30 times and then practice the same movement standing so you can use the benefits when skiing.

• Your body will work super efficiently if you build up your stamina to cardiovascular exercise. Carry out circuit or interval training to help burn fat, and make you lighter on the slopes, but also to improve the length of time you can endure the sport for. Try going for a 20 or 25 minute run without stopping – if you find yourself out of breath, make sure that you slow down but don’t stop in order to keep you stamina up. If running isn’t your thing, try fast walking for an hour, or cycling on varying difficulty levels for 30 minutes

• If you have a disability you can also adapt a fitness routine into your lifestyle for before you hit the slopes. For those with mobility issues, common sports-related injuries such as shoulder pain and tendonitis can happen if you over-do it. Whilst shoulder injuries are common in certain sports such as basketball and baseball, they are also common to the everyday wheelchair user so extra caution should be exercised when undertaking a fitness regime.
  Wheelchair users should perform stretches to strengthen their body whilst focusing on the upper back and shoulders, as when these are strong, the shoulders, elbows, wrists and hands will show greater power, endurance and efficiency as well as reducing any chance of injury – this will help your control and accuracy when navigating the adaptive equipment.

View all posts by Takara Moore