Pre-season Ski Fitness Workout

With bumper snow fall in the Alps already, the 2024 ski season is all set to be a good one, making up for the sketchy start to last year’s. If you’ve got a ski trip booked for this winter, get started on your ski fitness now and you’ll be making the most of every second on the slopes, skiing stronger, longer and having more fun. 

Skiing is an intensely physical activity, for 6-7 hours a day, six days in a row. Even two or three weeks of exercise can make a difference – although a two month programme is ideal for optimum results.  Research shows that even from short term strength training (i.e. less than two weeks) the body can make neural adaptations which improve the co-ordination, timing and speed of muscle contractions.

This alone can provide a skier with improved balance and stability, and reduce the risk of injury.

Our Personal Trainer, Lum, has created a full body skiing conditioning workout that will make sure your strength, stability and endurance is primed and ready for a week of snow days on or off the piste. 

Full Body Ski Fit  Workout Plan

Get started with a cardio warm up of 10 – 20 minutes on the bike, rower, ascent climber or treadmill, and some mobility exercises. A good warming up before exercise increases your heart rate and blood flow, enabing more oxygen to reach your muscles. A warm-up also activates and prepares the connections between your nerve and muscles, which improves the efficiency of movement.

Next, move over to the squat rack for weighted Back Pause Squats. Squating and pausing at knee height and powering back up to standing, focuses on the entire lower body and the key muscle groups used when skiing. 

Single leg work in the form of a weighted single leg Romanian Deadlift (RDL) into split squat and front-loaded step ups will stabilise the muscles around the knees, ankles and hips to help prevent injury.

Skaters – both slider skaters and cardio skaters – are a great way to gain stability in the hips and lower back, engaging the supporting leg to build endurance and strength through the quads and glutes, with short bursts of cardio to get the heart rate up!

A strong core is the key to balance, control and power when you’re skiing. The core is everything connecting the upper body to the lower body, from the tops of the knees to the middle of the chest, wrapping all the way around the body like a thick belt. Simply put, core strength gives the ultimate support to your legs, so you can ski more effectively. 

Sets of press ups, gorilla rows and weighted wall sits, followed by plank pull throughs, side planks with leg raises and hollow holds will strengthen the entire core, both front and back, along with the adductors and obliques, firing up the all-important posterior chain to give you improved rotation and alignment through motion.