Get Your Legs Ready for Ski and Snowboard Season in Six Weeks

A day of skiing is a four-hour strength test for your thighs, and by the drive home you have lost some of it whether you felt it or not. Six weeks of single-leg strength, slow lowering under load and an aerobic base raises the level that day starts from. You do not have to become a lifter. Two sessions a week is all I will ask of you.

The clock is already running. OnTheSnow projects Arapahoe Basin to open 9 October, Winter Park 30 October, Keystone 31 October, Copper and Loveland 6 November, Breckenridge 7 November, Vail 13 November. Those are projected dates, and the page that lists them says so. Count back six weeks from the hill you hold a pass for and that is your start date. For most of the Front Range, it is this week.

I do not sell workouts, I coach standards. The standard for a ski season is simple: your legs still work on the last run, on the drive home, and on Sunday morning.

What does a day of skiing do to your legs?

It takes strength out of them, measurably, and the strength does not come back overnight.

Researchers strength tested twenty-four fit recreational skiers, men and women, the day before a four-hour ski session, an hour after it, and again the next day. After skiing, their hamstrings were weaker in the lowering direction in both thighs, and one thigh's quadriceps were weaker the same way. A day later the loss was still there. The researchers concluded that this gives some justification for the judicious use of extra eccentric training for skiing.

Eccentric means the lowering half. When you sink into a turn, your quads are not pushing you up, they are letting you down under control and then holding you there while the ski bites. A ski day drains exactly that.

Technique goes before the muscle does. Six recreational skiers made twenty-four standardised runs with sensors on their thighs, and in the last two runs against the first two they were loading the outside leg harder, with their muscle activity peaking later in the turn. The authors read that as skiing becoming less controlled before the muscle was spent. Six people is a small group, and it matches what I see: the late-day skier is not exhausted, they are sloppy.

Is the last run really when people get hurt?

No, as far as anyone has measured.

Researchers interviewed 588 recreational skiers who had torn an ACL, at two injury clinics over five winters. About 81 percent felt no fatigue or only a trace of it in their legs at the moment of the accident. Around a third were hurt on the first day of their trip and about 57 percent within the first two days. The paper's conclusion is that fatigue does not seem to be a major risk factor for an ACL injury in recreational skiers.

So I will not tell you this work keeps your knee safe. I cannot. What six weeks can do is give you legs that hold a level through the afternoon and start the next day closer to where they should be. That is durability.

Over eighteen seasons at one Vermont clinic, the wrist led snowboard injuries at nearly 28 percent while an ACL sprain led ski injuries at 17 percent. The leg argument is a skiing argument first, but a day of riding still drains the legs and still runs on the aerobic base, so the six weeks apply. The wrist is a different conversation.

Why single-leg strength, and why the lowering half?

Because that is what a turn is.

A carved turn puts most of the load on the outside ski, and the tired skiers above loaded it even harder. Fifteen studies of 355 team sport athletes, none of them skiers, compared single-leg training with two-leg training. Single-leg training built single-leg strength and single-leg jumping better, and the two were no different for two-leg strength, sprinting or agility. If the task loads one leg at a time, train one leg at a time.

Heavier lowering builds more strength than pushing does. Across twenty randomised trials in healthy adults, eccentric training at higher loads than the concentric comparison produced larger gains in total strength, eccentric strength and muscle size. The authors put the advantage down to the heavier loads a muscle can handle while lengthening, and they note the gains appear specific to the kind of contraction trained. If you want legs that resist, you train resisting: a three-second descent on a split squat, a step-down you control the whole way, a slow lowering on a leg press with a faster push up. I argue the same thing about hunters walking out under a pack in why the walk down is harder than the climb up.

Fifteen junior racers are the closest test in skiers. Eight of them swapped part of their weight training for twenty minutes on an eccentric cycle, three times a week for six weeks, while seven kept lifting. Only the eccentric eight added lean thigh mass, and only they improved their ability to finely control force while lowering, by half. The eccentric cycling did not significantly improve their isometric leg strength. Junior male racers on a machine your gym does not own, and six weeks of lowering work still changed their thighs.

Do I need an aerobic base to ski?

Yes, because the run itself is vigorous work and a day of lift laps repeats it until the lifts close.

Thirteen young adults on one intermediate run put a cost on the run. Skiing at a set pace with a metabolic mask on came to about 7.8 METs, and thirteen snowboarders on the same slope came to about 7.4. The authors classify both as vigorous intensity. In six skiers around sixty, heart rate across 75 minutes of skiing sat near 77 percent of maximum while oxygen use sat near 45 percent. Those authors say the split points to a mix of aerobic and anaerobic work. You recover from the anaerobic part on the lift, and the aerobic base does the recovering.

That base moves inside a preseason. In a meta-analysis of 28 controlled trials with 723 healthy adults aged 18 to 45, endurance training raised VO2max by about 4.9 mL/kg/min against no-exercise controls and interval training by about 5.5. Longer programs and lower starting fitness added more. The trials ran two weeks and up, so that is not a six-week number. Twenty to thirty minutes at the back of each of your two sessions, one steady and one intervals, is what I would give you with the time you have.

Is six weeks before opening day enough?

Enough to move all three things. Not enough to make you a different athlete.

The thigh-mass and control changes in those junior racers arrived at six weeks. Strength itself moves inside five weeks in seven young healthy volunteers, on the evidence of one study. The front of that curve is the steep part, because part of the early gain is neural, which is why the first weeks feel fast.

Lowering work changes the thigh inside six weeks, single-leg work builds single-leg strength, and aerobic fitness responds to a short block. The picture is typical, and yours will vary.

What does the six weeks look like when I coach it?

Two sessions a week, about an hour each, and I design them around your calendar and the hill you ski. Each session is the two single-leg movements first and then twenty to thirty minutes of aerobic work, so the whole week is two visits.

My four steps are Connect, Design, Execution and Transformation. Design is where I pick the two single-leg movements, set the tempo on the lowering half, and place the two sessions on the days you can defend. I run your programming through TrainHeroic, so the session on your phone on Tuesday is the one I wrote for Tuesday. Then I read your weekly scorecard on the HEROES pillars and I adjust the load when your week goes sideways.

I put nothing else in: no barbell, no third day, no becoming a lifter. If you already lift, I keep your lifting and change the tempo on the lowering half. What I hold you to is the standard: the sets are hard, the descents are slow, and the week happens.

Once the lifts open, I shrink the work to one short session between your ski days. If you want me to build those six weeks around your opening day, start here.