“To begin with, most people think of skiing as an aerobic sport but you will actually be able to ski better and longer if you work on strength and stability first. The first place to start is with a corrective exercise to strengthen long, weak muscles and stretch short, tight muscles – which we all have thanks to our desk jobs, stress and cars. I recommend finding a corrective exercise specialist such as a Chek Practitioner (C.H.E.K) to help you with this.”
“Then you can work on strength, power and endurance,” says Ollie, explaining that the key to training for skiing and snowboarding is as much variation as possible.
“A contradiction in sports-specific training is that you want to train movements similar to skiing – for example, train the muscles you would use for a snowplough – but you can never exactly replicate the movement off the snow, so you will actually make yourself weaker if you try! This means you need to introduce a varied range of at least six strength movement patterns in three planes of movement. The programme should be progressive and fun!”
