Hip strength for better skiing

Strong hips bring about two major advantages when skiing:

1. It gives you the strength to apply proper skiing technique
2. You can take a lot of stress off the lower back.

The hips is an often neglected muscle group

- don't make the mistake of forgetting about it!

One of the most common errors we see on a ski hill is skiers who let their hips shift out to the sides when they turn.  This causes a loss of ski edge grip in the snow and over-rotation of the upper body.  Since you need the edge grip to stay in better control and steer your ski properly this is to avoid.  The over-rotation of the upper body is also to be avoided, since it makes it harder to start the new turn when your body is rotated half up the mountain.  You can read more about the most typical ski mistakes here. 

But then how do we avoid this? That’s where hip strength becomes relevant.  You need your hip muscles – the external rotators and abductors in particular – to hold your hips in place as you put pressure on the skis to turn. This applies in particular to those of us who are engaged in all-day office work, or people who have back problems. In these groups of people, the hip muscles are often weakened because they tend not to be used much. Working at a desk all day long it is evident that the hips don’t work much. 

For people who suffer from back problems, the pain often causes people to change their movement patterns in the acute phase to stay within a limited range of motion in the lower back and hip area. This adjusted pattern often stays with you unless you do a rehab which is focused on getting the range of motion back. The problem with this is that the muscles in the area get weaker and weaker. Weaker hip muscles put our lower back at higher risk of injury and we have entered a negative spiral. Fortunately we can break this spiral with proper training in most cases. 

A simple test of one's strength in hip level is to stand in front of a mirror and lift one knee up against the chest. If you cannot stay balanced keeping your hips staright above your supporting foot, and you have to let your hips shift out to the side of support to avoid tilting down towards the side of the lifted knee, then you should definitely start working those hips muscles. This test can be used as an exercise in itself if you focus on learning how to stay straight. What happens is that when we lift the one leg from the ground, we remove part of our supporting surface on one side. If we were stiff and had no muscles to counteract with gravity, we would simply tilt to that side – like if your removed one of the legs from a chair. To avoid this we can either activate our hip muscles to keep our hips from tilting sideways or we can make that hip translation so that our center of gravity is moved to be vertically above our reduced surface of support. The former solution puts less stress on the lower back but it requires good hip strength. The latter - shifting of the hips - is an indication that your hip muscles are weak or for some reason don’t activate naturally. Keep training this until you are able to keep your hips at the same level even when you are only supported by one leg. It works the abductors and external rotators of the hip.

Adductors and internal hip rotators

Working the adductors and internal rotators of the hips is not a bad idea either. Both for the principal of muscular balance around the hip joint, but also more directly towards better skiing. If you lose control of your skis for a moment and they are parting in two different directions it is nice to have the strength to get your lags back together before ending up in a Bambi position. 

Hip flexors

Tight hip flexors Is also a common problem that will bother you when skiing. Again, if you spend most of your time at work sitting down or driving a car, your hip flexors are likely to be short and tight, This problem may show as a sharp pain in one particular spot in the lower back very near the spine where these muscles attach.

Make sure your stretch the hip flexors prior to going skiing. It may be enough simply to lie down on the edge of the bed and let one leg hang out over the edge while holding the other leg bent and pulled up against your chest. You should feel this stretch on the front of the hip of the leg hanging out over the edge. 

It is not unusual that there is some assymmetry so that the one hip flexor is strong and tight and the other is weak and loose. This results in the loose side shifting slightly forward compared to the tight side - and in fact, the leg with the tight hip flexors may seem a bit shorter than the other if you were to compare with straight legs. There can be up to a 1-inch difference between the two legs, if one leg has ben pulled into the hip joint by tight muscles. 

Almost all the exercises standing on one leg, help strengthening your hips to some degree. If you need to work the hips more isolated - if for example you find it difficult to feel whether you activate the right muscles or if you feel too weak, then you can do all kinds of variations of exercises lying on the side lifting your leg in different directions keeping your back straight.