Ski Fitness Tip #7 – Balance Training

Hi, this is Jamie from Body Works and I’m just following up with some of the videos that Taylor has done on ski conditioning. What I want to talk about today is just a little bit of balance training that you can start before you get into the ski season.

So there’s a couple main things you want to think about when you’re working on your balance.

  1. Let the area that you’re trying to work do the work. So if you’re doing a one foot balance, you want to make sure the arms and the legs stay quiet and the ankle and the foot actually do the balancing for you. That’s one thing that you’re going to try to carry through.
  2. The other thing is you don’t want to stare at your feet while you’re doing your balance. Pick a spot further away. For skiing, the further away you’re looking the better off you’re going to be, so you can transfer that into your balance work here.

Here are three progressions:

  1. The first one that you’re going to do is a single foot stance with no surface to deal with. For the single foot stance, you’re going to do 3 repetitions of 30 second holds. Once you get comfortable with that you can move on the next exercise.
  2. You can pull a cushion off the couch to give you an unstable surface to balance on. You’re going to use the same parameters 3 x 30 seconds. You’ll find when you balance on the cushion you don’t really get the foot to stay still. This makes you work a little bit more as you’re constantly adjusting yourself.
  3. Once you’re comfortable with that, the most difficult of them will be doing the balance on the upside down Bosu ball. Most people find it’s got quite a bit of movement to it, so when you first get on it you’lll notice that it wobbles around side to side quite a bit. Oonce you get comfortable with it, it will just kind of settle down and then you’re in this position. Try to do that same thing – 3 x 30 seconds on the Bosu ball as long as you’ve mastered the other ones.

So that’s it for the balance training exercises and progressions.

If you have any questions, just let us know at the clinic. See our other ski training exercise videos here.