Perhaps most important part of your ski training workout is the Dynamic Warmup as it will help prepare your body for the functional strength ski exercises that follow. The dynamic warmup will also help mprove your mobility and help to overcome any muscle or postural imbalances that you may have, which can help in preventing any injuries.
Corrective Exercises – These will help improve common postural and muscular imbalances you may have. For example there are corrective exercises to improve the movement at your hips, which is a common problem as many people have a tendency to move more from their lumbar spine instead of their hips increasing the risk of lower back injury.
Mobility Exercises – Mobility exercises will help improve your ability to actively move through a full range of motion which can directly enhance your movement patterns when skiing by helping you to be more efficient, expend less energy and reduce your injury risk.
Activation Exercises – These exercises will help turn on any under-active muscles so that when you are performing the functional strength exercises your muscles are more likely to fire in the correct sequence. For example many people are quadriceps dominant and have glutes that are underactive. This can lead to inefficient movement when skiing and even injury. By performing glute activation exercises you can turn on the muscles so that they will used correctly when needed.
Balance, Core Stability and Rotational Core Exercises – Stability is extremely important for skiing and therefore needs to be adequately trained in your workouts. Exercises should be included that challenge your balance and core stability. In addition, as skiing requires a lot of rotational movements, you need to train both rotational stability and rotational power.
Multi-joint Exercises – The focus of your functional strength training should be on multi-joint exercises that use multi-planar movements (the 3 planes of movement). Gone are the days of doing isolated body building exercises. Instead you need to be doing compound movements like Squatting, Lunging, Lifting, Pushing (horizontal and vertical) and Pulling (horizontal and vertical).
Power Exercises – Your skiing will also benefit from including some power exercises which are basically strength exercises performed explosively. This will help develop power in your legs which is important for skiers.
Energy System Training refers to the cardiovascular part of the workout. This can be done after the functional strength training part of your ski workout, or depending on time you may choose to split it up and do it on a different day, alternating days between functional strength and cardio.
The most effective way to train your energy systems is with High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). HIIT has been scientifically proven to significantly improve both your Aerobic (with oxygen – for more sustained efforts) and Anaerobic (without oxygen – more short burst energy) energy systems simultaneously.
Using High Intensity Interval Training also allows you to do a shorter workout and produce better results when compared to traditional cardio training.
The ultimate ski training cardio is when you use…