How to Prepare Your Body for Ski and Snowboard Season in Colorado
Ski and snowboard season is right around the corner in Colorado. Maybe you’ve already pulled your skis or snowboard out of storage, checked your boots, tuned your edges, and started watching the weather a little more closely. Your gear might be ready for winter, but it’s also worth asking whether your body is ready for what you’re about to put it through.
A lot of people don’t start thinking about their bodies until they’re already a few days into the season and something starts hurting. Preseason is a great time to take a closer look at how your body is moving and prepare it for the long days on the mountain ahead.
Skiing and Snowboarding Put a Lot of Stress on Your Body
Think about what your body goes through during a full day of skiing or snowboarding. You’re dealing with uneven terrain, repetitive turns, bumps, vibration, compression, sudden changes in direction, and the occasional fall. Your ankles, knees, hips, spine, and surrounding muscles are constantly absorbing those forces and adapting to whatever the mountain throws at you.
Not all of that stress is going to hurt or feel like an injury. You can take a small fall, get bounced around through a run of bumps, or finish a long day on the mountain feeling pretty good. Your body still had to absorb and respond to all of those forces. Add fatigue, multiple days on the mountain, and any restrictions or compensation patterns that were already there, and it becomes easier to see why preparing your body for the season matters.
Winter Sports Require More Than Strong Legs
When most people think about preparing for ski and snowboard season, they think about getting their legs stronger. Strength absolutely matters, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Skiing and snowboarding also require mobility, balance, stability, coordination, endurance, and the ability to react quickly to whatever is happening underneath you.
A big part of that comes down to communication between your brain and your body. Your nervous system is constantly receiving information from your muscles and joints about where your body is in space and how it’s moving. This awareness, often referred to as proprioception, helps your brain coordinate how your body responds.
Think about catching an unexpected edge, absorbing a bump you didn’t see, transitioning quickly between turns, landing a small drop, or reacting when the snow suddenly changes underneath you. There isn’t time to consciously think through each individual movement. Your body has to take in that information, adapt, and respond.
Your Spine Is Part of That Conversation
This is one of the reasons a comprehensive assessment should look at more than just where someone hurts. The joints, muscles, and sensory receptors throughout your body, including those associated with your spine, are constantly providing information to your nervous system. How your body is moving and the information your nervous system is receiving are closely connected.
During a full day of skiing or snowboarding, your body may spend hours absorbing bumps, vibration, compression, repetitive movements, changing terrain, and sometimes a few falls. That creates a lot for both the musculoskeletal and nervous systems to continually adapt to.
That doesn’t mean every bump or fall causes an injury, and it certainly doesn’t mean you need to worry every time you hit rough terrain. It simply means winter sports ask a lot from your body. If certain areas aren’t moving as well as they should, the body may find other ways to accomplish the same movement. Over time, those compensations can show up in different ways.
For some people, one turn might consistently feel better than the other. One hip may always feel tighter, balance may feel different from side to side, or the low back may start getting tired halfway through the day. Other people may not notice anything obvious at all. Pain doesn’t have to be the only reason to pay attention to how your body is functioning.
Preseason Is a Great Time to See How Your Body Is Moving
Once ski and snowboard season gets going, most people want to spend their weekends on the mountain, not trying to figure out why something suddenly feels off or why their body isn’t keeping up the way they expected it to. Preseason offers a good opportunity to establish a baseline and take a closer look at how your body is moving before adding long days and repeated weekends on the mountain.
At Champagne Chiropractic, every new patient starts with a Comprehensive Discovery Exam. Instead of only looking at one painful area, Dr. Solomon Champagne takes the time to understand how the body is functioning as a whole.
Depending on the individual, the exam can include health and injury history, posture, walking and gait, squat mechanics, balance and stability, range of motion, muscle function and strength, orthopedic testing, and spinal and joint movement. Looking at these pieces together provides a more complete picture of how different parts of the body are working together and where restrictions, asymmetries, or compensation patterns may be showing up.
For someone planning to ski or snowboard throughout the winter, this information can be especially useful before the season gets into full swing.
Prepare Your Body Like You Prepare Your Gear
Most skiers and snowboarders wouldn’t head into the season without giving some thought to their equipment, and the same approach makes sense for the body. Strength training, conditioning, endurance, and mobility can all be valuable parts of preparing for winter. Taking the time to understand how your body is moving can be another piece of that preparation.
No exam or adjustment can guarantee that you won’t fall or get injured. That risk is part of sports like skiing and snowboarding. The goal is to head into the season with a better understanding of how your body is functioning and address the things that can be identified before asking it to handle full days on the mountain.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t just to make it through ski and snowboard season. It’s to spend as much of it as possible doing what you love.
Champagne Chiropractic is located in downtown Denver and works with active adults who want to keep doing the things they love. If you’re getting ready for ski or snowboard season and want to see how your body is moving, schedule a Comprehensive Discovery Exam with Dr. Solomon Champagne.
