On Balance

By: In: Health and Fitness, Skiing

 
 
 
One of the key factors in ski & snowboarding health is balance. Often times when we think of physical fitness for the snow we think of getting our legs muscles up to snuff and our cardiovascular fitness up.

However, who thinks of balance? I know the ski publications do, they often have many exercises aimed at improving one’s ability to keep one’s self balanced. However, in general at the gym most people don’t seem to think of balance you will see people:

  • spinning RPMs on the bikes
  • pounding miles on treadmills
  • pumping iron
  • working the ellipticals

and so on.

However, how often do we see people working exercises that challenge their balancing ability? Very rare. In fact, a person’s ability to balance is often derided, for example, the commercial implying it unmanly to perform feats of balance (unless it is someone else running down a football field). I say rubbish, I say the ability of a person to tippy-toe in field of green without a football translates nicely to a person being able to maintain their balance in a field of moguls on a 40% slope.

I am not going to discuss specifics on challenging your balance you can google that up, but I am trying to remind all of us that working on our balance should be included with our strength and cardiovascular training.

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Working Out for the Ski Season

By: In: Health and Fitness, Off Season, Skiing

 
 
 
The Wisconsin Ski Bunny and myself have just rejoined the YMCA. We were members for sometime but had essentially stopped using it years before. Now that it has been years since we have had an active exercise program we changed that. We rejoined and so far we are using the membership.

Our workouts are not major affairs, we need to treat our time as precious. I spend about 30 minutes in the cardio-vascular machine land. With 10 minutes on three of them, rowing, bike, and elliptical. Rowing is a great exercise that gets the upper body involved! All three are knee friendly none of them putting undue stress or banging on those ski-critical joints. I finish with one machine and then on the next machine with minimal time for recovery.

After that, it is to the weight machines. The Y we go to has a number of machines but less than a full set. I concentrate on the machines that workout my legs and core. This means 7-8 stations, again I setup and attempt to do as many reps in one minute as I can, when I am done with the station, I move rapidly to the next station and repeat.

The goal is not so much strength as it is endurance and perhaps more explosive strength. I find skiing is more about muscles being able to expend force at a moderate level for long periods of time, with occasional bouts of explosive power demands (e.g. yanking back an errant ski). I don’t ski bumps nor do I go airborne (i.e. jumps & tricks, flying off a headwall is a different matter). In addition, I keep the heart rate up for the entire visit helping out with my overall cardiovascular endurance.

Now, you go and do likewise!

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The Crud

By: In: Off Season

One week from last Saturday I took a bike ride. The weather was not optimal and I was not dressed appropriately. Not only those two factors, but I had little and poor sleep the night before and was extremely stressed out with an incident from the day before eating at my soul.

To add to that, I took a longer than normal ride.
(more…)

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Ski Conditioning

By: In: Health and Fitness, Skiing

Skiing & health

On Physical Conditioning

Right now I am watching the downhill portion of the Men’s super-combined ski event. The reason I do not flag this as an Olympics related post is because I want to focus more on the idea of the physical conditioning required for downhill skiing.

Watch those Olympic skiers and watch them when they come to a stop, they are a huffing and a puffing!
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