The Ultimate At-Home Ski Exercises
Votes:
Want to feel more confident on the slopes, or even tackle tough terrain on your next trip?
Although you may be far from the mountains, there’s no better moment to take action and recalibrate your skiing fitness. Try these interesting body movements and you’ll be in an even better position to improve your skiing when you next make it out to the mountains.
The video that pairs with this post is a follow-along style workout that will stimulate all of the joints in your body, recalibrate and reset the ranges of motion you are using and help prepare you for skiing.
Before you check out the video here are a few of the key points I’d like you to think about:
Quick Links:
Tip 1: Feel your base of support
Tip 2: Stability is freedom
Tip 3: Test your extremes
Feel your base of support
Learn to pay attention to your base of support and centre of mass. How big a range of motion do you have with different bases of support before you topple and move away from your base? The better your awareness of where these edges of your balance are, the more relaxed you can be when performing a sport like skiing. After all, it’s at the edges of your balance where your skiing becomes fun and exciting.
Stability is freedom
Notice the relationship between stabilizing the base of support and gaining more freedom with other parts of your body. Or said inversely, notice how much less range of motion your body will allow when your base is unstable. You can find stability on even a small base of support - like one foot - when you pay attention to it.
Test your extremes
We can recalibrate our ranges of motion by pushing our limits and testing our extremes, the points just before we topple. The cool thing is that after doing such an exercise, the recalibration sets us up back in the centre of these extremes. Test your extremes in all directions and you’ll get a far more centred recalibration.
Get ready to join in with me by taking your shoes and socks off. Get rid of distractions and get back into your body. You’ve only got one so why not invest some quality time in it? The dividends pay off big time like any good investment.
If the video is helpful please check out my online ski technique resource www.bigpictureskiing.com for more videos on body preparation and how-to lessons on all aspects of skiing.
Written by: Tom Gellie
APSI Level 4
Tom is an industry-leading ski coach and instructor. He also operates his own biomechanics practice in Sydney, Functional Body, which helps people improve their mobility.
To find out more, head to www.bigpictureskiing.com.