Lunge Toward Ski Season: Start Now
You don’t need a gym. You can lunge around the neighborhood.
Nick and Carol Bowling are enthusiastic senior-age Alta skiers who enjoy staying fit year round. They just added lunges to their pre-season fitness routine, and they’ve become lunge junkies. But there’s a learning curve to doing lunges correctly, and they’re still working on it.
Carol and Nick Bowling of Washougal, Washington, tune up now for ski season.
Credit: Harriet Wallis
“Lunges use your own body weight to strengthen your lower body. They’re excellent for your quads and hamstrings – for the big muscles,” says Jo Garuccio, Professional Ski Instructors of America Trainer and Examiner who also teaches at Snowbird. “But be sure your knee is over your shoestrings – not further forward.”
Equipment needed: Your body and a large mirror. Watch yourself. Critique yourself.
Position: Back erect, thigh parallel to the ground, knee over shoestrings.
Incentive: See how many you can do each day while keeping good form. When you’re good at the basic lunge, move on to one of the many variations.
What a lunge should look like:
So here’s a challenge for you. Watch the video, then study Carol and Nick’s position. Pretend you’re a coach. Is there something you’d tell them to improve as they lunge toward ski season?
When will you start to lunge?
She's a senior-age skier based in Salt Lake City and she enjoys nearly a gazillion ski days each winter. She also enjoys two stainless steel knees.
Harriet loves to be outdoors, so during other seasons she swims, bicycles and kayaks. She also single handedly rips up her yard, converting it to an arid and low water landscape with indigenous plants that she propagates. Skiing is a lot easier!
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Back in 2004 Charlotte Moats had a piece in Skiing magazine to build balance muscles. I wish it could be reprinted but it does exsist on Google books – scroll to page 151: https://books.google.com/books?id=5ZXLE1u_HIUC&lpg=PA76&dq=2004+skiing+magazine&pg=PA152&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=true
Thanks Bob. We are going to run this as a feature plus other exercise articles. Now is the time to start strengthening and becoming limber for the season ahead.
Can’t be overstated. Preseason conditioning is key but I do the exercises from that magazine for a week before I ski for the first time and I have none of the usual first day muscle soreness. (First day after doing the exercises I do though.)
Great example, Carol and Nick. I”m proud of you and appreciate all you do for “the Wild Old Bunch of Alta, Utah”.
George, Thanks for the compliment. You are the example we follow.
Thanks for getting us involved in the WOB. It has made skiing at Alta even more fun with all the friends we have made. Nick and Carol