Getting ski fit: what to do in the eight weeks before you go

A ski holiday is one of the few weeks in the year when most people ask their body to work hard for six hours a day, six days running, having done comparatively little for the previous eleven months. It is not surprising that the second and third days hurt.

Preparation changes that, and it does not need to be elaborate. What it needs is to start early enough, which for most people means six to eight weeks before you fly.

Why fitness is a safety question, not just a comfort one

Most ski injuries happen late in the day, when people are tired. Fatigue slows your reactions, makes your technique deteriorate and leaves you less able to recover a position you would have saved at eleven in the morning. Being fitter does not make you a better skier. It extends the part of the day in which you are still skiing like yourself.

That matters most for the knee. The ligament injuries that end holidays tend to happen in awkward, slow, twisting falls rather than in dramatic ones, and tired legs produce more of those.

What to actually do

Start with endurance. If you do not currently exercise regularly, a progressive programme of walking, cycling or swimming, building gradually over six to eight weeks, will make a larger difference to your week than anything else on this list. Check with your GP before starting if you have not exercised in some time or you have a heart or lung condition.

Then add leg strength, because skiing is mostly a sustained legs task. Squats, step ups, lunges and wall sits, two or three times a week, progressing the difficulty as they get easier. Wall sits in particular reproduce what the front of your thighs will be doing on a long run, and they are a reliable indicator of whether you have done enough.

Add balance work, which people skip and should not. Standing on one leg while you clean your teeth is a genuine start. Progress it by closing your eyes, or by standing on something soft. Balance and the ability to correct a wobble are precisely the qualities that stop a small mistake becoming a fall.

Finally, do something for your trunk and hips. Skiing asks you to hold your upper body quiet while your legs work underneath you, which is a demand on the middle rather than the legs.

If something already hurts

A ski holiday is a poor time to discover that your knee does not like being loaded. If you have an existing knee, hip or back problem, get it looked at well before you go rather than a week before, so there is time to change something.

That is particularly worth doing if you have osteoarthritis in a knee or hip, or a previous ligament injury. Skiing is very often still possible, but the preparation and sometimes the equipment need thinking about, and that conversation takes more than a few days.

Gill Onslow, one of our physiotherapists, has spent many winter seasons in Val d'Isere and sees skiers at our Haslemere clinic both before they travel and when they come back with something that did not go well.

In the last fortnight

Do not suddenly train harder. The fitness you have by then is the fitness you are taking, and arriving tired helps nobody. Keep moving, keep the sessions short, and make sure your boots fit, since more holidays are ruined by poor boots than by poor fitness.

Strength and conditioning programmes and musculoskeletal physiotherapy cover the preparation work, and sports injury assessment and treatment is there for when a holiday does not end the way it should. If you come back with a swollen knee, have it assessed rather than waiting for it to settle on its own.