Preseason Ski Conditioning: A Six-Week Plan Before Opening Day

Sep 25

The aspens have already turned above Kenosha Pass, Loveland and A-Basin are running snow guns overnight, and your skis are somewhere in the garage under a bin of camping gear. You have about six weeks.

That is enough time to meaningfully change how your legs feel after a day on the mountain.

Start the week before opening day and you will spend your first trip sore and underprepared. Six weeks of consistent ski conditioning gives your tendons and connective tissue time to adapt alongside your muscles. Strength shows up fast. Tendons take longer.

What skiing asks of your body

Skiing is mostly isometric work at the legs. You hold a quarter-squat position while absorbing terrain, edge to edge, for four or five minutes at a time. Your quads are under continuous tension and your feet are making small corrections you never consciously notice. Your middle is doing something else entirely. Every turn asks your pelvis and ribcage to move on each other so your hips can point one direction while your shoulders and hands stay aimed down the fall line. That separation is where turn force gets built and passed along. A midsection locked into one position cannot produce it.

This is where a lot of ski training advice goes sideways. "Core stability" gets sold as bracing hard and holding still, and holding still is close to the opposite of what a turn requires. The core works as a link in the chain. Treating it as a clamp costs you force. Two of the drills in the plan below, the down dog toe touch and the oblique reverse crunch, are in there specifically to train this.

Snowboarding loads things differently and asks for the same quality. The ankles and hips do more of the steering, the torso rotates further, and falls tend to send force into the wrists and shoulders instead of the knees.

Both sports share one demand: you produce force on one leg while your pelvis, abdominal wall, and ribcage move through the turn with you. At Ascend, we look at that as a whole kinetic chain question. How your foot contacts the ground affects your pelvis. How your ribcage moves over your pelvis affects whether your glutes can fire at all. A knee that collapses inward on a turn is rarely a knee problem.

That is the lens worth bringing to any ski fitness plan. The exercises below are ordinary. Doing them with the whole chain in mind is what makes them work. So when people ask us how to train for skiing, the short answer is that you train for single-leg force production under fatigue while your torso keeps moving side to side and rotating underneath you. The six weeks below are built around that.

The six-week ski workout

Three sessions a week, 35 to 45 minutes each. Leave at least one day between sessions. If you are also riding bikes or hiking fourteeners into October, fold these in rather than stacking them on top of a full training week.

Weeks 1 and 2: Build the base

The goal is movement quality and tolerance. Nothing here should leave you sore for three days.

Goblet squat. 3 sets of 10. Keep your ribs down over your pelvis rather than flared open.
Split squat. 3 sets of 8 per side. Slow on the way down, four seconds if you can stand it.
Staggered deadlift. 3 sets of 8 per side, light weight or none at all.
Step-down from a 6 to 8 inch box. 3 sets of 8 per side. Watch your knee in a mirror. If it drifts toward your other leg, lower the box.
Side plank with top-arm reach-through. 3 sets of 8 reps per side, threading your arm under your body and back up. The reach is the part that matters.
High plank to alternating down dog toe touch. 3 sets of 8 per side. Move slowly and let your hips and shoulders travel in opposite directions. The reach is the part you are training.
Oblique reverse crunch. 3 sets of 10 per side, controlled on the way back down.
90/90 breathing. 5 breaths at the start of every session, feet on a wall or chair. This is not filler. Getting air into the back of your ribcage is what lets your hips move under a stable trunk.

Weeks 3 and 4: Add load and time under tension

Now you build the engine. This is where most exercises for skiers earn their keep.

Rear-foot elevated split squat. 3 sets of 8 per side, adding weight each week.
Patrick squat. 3 sets of 10 reps. Your thighs will complain. That complaint is the point.
Skater hop. 3 sets of 8 per side, landing and holding for a full second before the next rep.
Half-kneeling cable chop and lift. 3 sets of 8 per side. This trains rotation you can control and deliver, which is what a turn asks for.
Rotational medicine ball throw. 3 sets of 6 per side against a wall. Let your ribcage and pelvis separate, then let them catch up.
Hill or stair intervals. Once a week. Six rounds of 60 seconds hard, 90 seconds easy. Denver has no shortage of options here. Green Mountain, the steps at Red Rocks, or the hill at Sloan's Lake all work.

Weeks 5 and 6: Train for fatigue

Most people get hurt on the last run of the day, not the first. These final two weeks build the ability to keep moving well when you are tired.

Jump squat. 3 sets of 20 seconds, continuous, landing soft.
Lateral bound for distance. 3 sets of 6 per side, sticking every landing.
Wall sit. 3 sets of 75 to 90 seconds.
Single-leg balance with head turns. 3 sets of 30 seconds per side, eyes tracking left and right. Sounds easy. It is not.
Box jump with controlled landing. 3 sets of 5, absorb the force in the landing in a quiet stretch
Circuit finisher. Run the first three items back to back for three rounds with 90 seconds of rest. This is the closest a gym gets to a bump run.

Snowboarding exercises follow the same template with two adjustments. Add heel raises and controlled ankle work, since your ankles do more steering on a board, and add rotational medicine ball throws for the torso.

Ski stretches that are worth your time

Static stretching before you ride has limited value. Mobility work on your off days is a different story. These four ski stretches address the restrictions we see most often in Denver skiers and snowboarders.

Couch stretch. 90 seconds per side. Six months of cycling season leaves hip flexors short, and short hip flexors pull your pelvis forward into a position where your quads have to do everything.
Sock drill. 20 slow reps per side. If your knee cannot travel forward over your toes, you will ride in the back seat all day.
Thoracic rotation, side-lying. 10 reps per side. Snowboarding stretches should always include this one.
Wide Stance KB Switch. 60 seconds. The inside of your thigh works hard on every edge change and rarely gets attention.

The injuries that send people to the clinic

Knee injuries account for roughly 30 to 40 percent of all skiing injuries, with the MCL and ACL taking the brunt. Most happen in a twisting fall or a slow-speed catch where a ski goes one direction and your body goes another.

Snowboarders tend to land on their hands. Wrist and shoulder injuries make up a large share of snowboard injuries, and a meaningful number of them happen in a rider's first few days on a board.

Here is what walks through our door in January, and what each one tends to feel like:

A knee that feels loose or unreliable on stairs after a fall, sometimes with swelling that showed up hours later. This is worth an assessment quickly rather than waiting to see if it settles.
Deep aching along the outside of the knee that appears on day two of a trip and disappears by the drive home. Usually a loading and control issue, and usually very responsive to skiing physical therapy.
Low back tightness that starts mid-afternoon and makes the last two runs miserable. This one almost always traces back to how the ribcage and pelvis stack, not to the back itself.
Shoulder soreness with overhead reaching after a hard fall, which snowboarding physical therapy addresses by looking at the whole shoulder blade and ribcage relationship rather than the joint alone.
Thumb pain when gripping a pole or a coffee cup, known as skier's thumb, from the pole strap catching during a fall.

None of that replaces a real evaluation. Swelling within an hour of an injury, an audible pop, a knee that gives way, or any inability to bear weight means you should be seen by a medical provider before you ski again.

Where to start this week

Pick your three days, put them on the calendar, and start with the week one list. Progression beats intensity here. A skier who does six weeks of moderate pre ski season exercises will have a better December than one who does two ferocious weeks and then a two week break.

If something already hurts, or if you have a history with a knee or shoulder that makes you cautious, get it looked at before the plan rather than during the season. Our team at Ascend Rehab & Performance works with skiers and snowboarders out of our Denver locations, and a movement assessment before opening day is a good deal cheaper than a February rehab plan.

Either way, start now. Opening day is closer than it looks.