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Time To Start Getting Ready For Ski Season
Teams are starting to their voyage south for their on-snow pre-season training. It’s time to get skiing back on the brain (for some of you it’s never left – we get that!). The first to address as we approach the start of ski season, is getting the body back into skiing shape. This is so our legs don’t scream in pain and force us to stop several times on the way down the mountain. So that you are able to get up from a chair after the first day of skiing and ski those big lines you’ve been dreaming about.
The main motivation however should be to decrease your risk of injury. No one likes getting hurt and coming back from an injury is so much harder than working to help reduce the risk of injury.
So is it time to hit the gym and knock out a world record number of squats and crunches? Yes and no. It is time, to start incorporating some gym work into your cross-training routine, but knocking out crazy numbers of squats and crunches won’t be for a little while. The! focus at this time of year should be on creating stability and mobility that might have been lost while lounging in the houseboat, or reading bestsellers in the hammock. Having good mobility and stability allows better muscular sequencing to take place and work more effectively as a unit. When the sequencing pattern is off, this creates microtrauma and compensation patterns in our bodies that can eventually lead to pain or possibly injury.
Mobility and stability must coexist to create efficient movement in the body. Stability which is the ability to control force or movement is a necessary precursor to building strength. Mobility and stability allow you to create better strength, endurance, speed, power and agility. Performance and injury prevention rely on integration of muscle groups. Movements require multiple muscle groups to work together to generate an outcome. For example, throwing a ball requires effort from muscles in your arm, forearm, hand, shoulder! , back, abdominals, and hips.
You can evaluate your own sta! bility and mobility through a series of test. Once you identify areas of weakness, you can target your you gym workouts to develop and correct those areas of weakness. For a functional movement self assessment, refer to pp 9-17 in Total Skiing by Chris Fellows and pp 93-137 for correctional & developmental exercises.
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