Preparing Your Body for a Week of Skiing: A Sports Physiotherapist's Guide

2026-09-30

By Thomas, Founder of OFF-PISTE

Ask most people booking a week in the French Alps whether they're preparing for a trip or training for a sport, and the honest answer is neither. A ski week gets planned like a vacation: flights, chalet, maybe a lesson booked for the kids. The body doing the actual work rarely enters the conversation. We sat down with Romain Dumont, a sports physiotherapist based in Lyon who has worked with elite athletes and treats recreational skiers before, during, and after the season, to ask what a few weeks of preparation actually changes, and what happens when it's skipped.

ACL reconstructions make up a meaningful share of his post-operative caseload, and by his own estimate, roughly half trace back to a skiing injury. His read on why is straightforward: a ski week gets treated as a hobby rather than what it actually is, a sport with real physical demands, especially across a full week of skiing every day. Preparation doesn't make you invincible, he's careful to note, but it does one concrete thing: it pushes back fatigue, and fatigue is where most of the injuries he sees actually happen. “The diagnosis we hear most often is: I hurt myself on the last run, it was the end of the day, I was tired,” he says. “If you're physically ready, you stay more alert, you fall less, and if you do fall, you get hurt less. There are other factors involved, but being prepared buys you time before that happens.”

How far ahead should you start? It depends less on the calendar than on your starting point. If you already train two to three times a week with some lower-body strength work, four weeks of ski-specific preparation is enough. If you're mostly sedentary, plan for six to eight weeks instead, with two to three sessions a week, each at least 45 minutes. The goal either way is the same: arrive at the top of the first run already familiar with the demand, rather than meeting it cold. This lines up with the broader research on injury-prevention training: a widely cited meta-analysis found that neuromuscular and balance-based programs cut knee injuries by roughly 27% and ACL injuries by over 50%³, and the benefit was consistently stronger when the training started in the preseason rather than once the season, or the ski week, was already underway.

The order of what to train matters as much as the exercises themselves. Quadriceps come first: they're the primary stabilizers of the knee in a sport built on flexion and pivoting, and they absorb most of the load. Cardiovascular fitness comes next, not for speed but to hold off fatigue, since it's the tired, late-day runs where most injuries happen. Proprioception and core work follow, the ability to sense where your body is in space and stay solid through an unexpected bump rather than get thrown off balance. Hamstrings and the rest of the posterior chain round out the list; skiing simply asks less of them than of the muscles in front.

Four exercises cover most of that ground, and they scale from a first-timer to someone who trains regularly: an isometric wall sit for quadriceps endurance, a loaded squat for overall leg and glute strength, a Bulgarian split squat for single-leg strength and stability, and a lateral hop for the reactivity and balance a ski turn actually demands.

Rather than changing the exercises for age or fitness level, he adjusts the effort. Every movement should sit around a 6 to 7 out of 10 on the RPE scale⁴, a simple measure of perceived exertion, meaning sustained and controlled rather than maximal. “That way, everyone can do the exercise, the sensation is the same for each person, and the adjustment happens naturally, through hold time or added weight,” he explains. If time is genuinely short, one exercise earns priority: the isometric wall sit, held long, with a few squats added if there's room. And on the idea of having no time at all, his view is blunt: “Can we really find nothing? I think everyone can find two, three, four, five minutes, once or twice a day, for a wall sit or a few jump squats. It's enough to create some fatigue and still prepare the muscles.”

The most common mistake, by a wide margin, is skipping preparation altogether, then treating a full week of skiing like a week of raclette, fondue, a glass of wine at lunch, and late nights. “Add it all up, and the second half of the week gets complicated, and the injury risk goes up,” he says. “The mistake is treating skiing as just a hobby, rather than as a sport in its own right, and preparing for it accordingly.”

When preparation is missing, the injuries follow a pattern. The serious ones center on the knee: an ACL tear is the most common, typically meaning surgery and months of rehabilitation, the kind of injury Lindsey Vonn has gone through more than once. The less severe but far more common issue is patellofemoral pain, discomfort around the kneecap from repeated stress the joint isn't used to, which can take several weeks to fully resolve. The quadriceps and knees carry most of that risk, and anyone who's mostly sedentary carries more of it than most.

Mornings start with general mobility work to wake the body up, followed by a short isometric wall sit, a few sets of squats, and squat jumps to finish, before clicking in.

Many skiers assume day one is the most dangerous day of the week. He pushes back on that: unless conditions are genuinely bad, skiers are fresh, cautious, and not yet fatigued, so it's rarely where injuries happen. His actual advice for day one has less to do with risk and more with sequencing: start on green runs, move to blue, and add speed and difficulty gradually as confidence builds, rather than starting a full day at pace. The data backs him up in the other direction: one large resort study found 36.7% of injuries clustered in the last two hours of the ski day⁵, and orthopedic surgeons point to a specific mechanism behind it.⁶ Muscles normally absorb the shock of a turn or a hard landing; once they're fatigued, that load transfers to the ligaments instead, which is how a tired quadriceps turns into a torn ACL. It's less a reason to stop early than a reason to match your last runs to how your legs actually feel, not to how the morning felt.

Between two consecutive ski days, the tools that matter most aren't exercises at all. “The best recovery is eating well, hydrating well, and above all sleeping well,” he says. “Some light stretching in the evening won't hurt, but the day is already intense enough without adding to it.” His framing is worth remembering: the useful question isn't what to do between two ski days, it's what not to do, since a heavy dinner and a drink or two in the evening will cost you sleep, and sleep is the real lever. One signal is worth acting on immediately: pain that builds through the day and doesn't ease off on the chairlift is a stop signal, not something to push through. “The more you push through pain, the more the brain and the muscles go into protection mode, and they perform worse. When you need to react quickly after a bump or a turn, if the muscle isn't responding the way it should, you can fall and get hurt.” Pain that doesn't fade as the week goes on is a sign to ski shorter days rather than push through.

Recovery once you're home follows the same rule of thumb: about 80% of it is sleep, hydration, and a varied diet. Beyond that, massage around the quadriceps and lower back, stretching, a foam roller or a massage gun can help with the soreness a pivoting sport with heavy isometric and eccentric load on the quadriceps tends to leave behind, before easing back into your usual sport gradually. Asked what years spent working with elite athletes taught him that applies just as much to an occasional skier, his answer was direct: the main cause of injury, at every level, is simply not preparing for the winter season. It's why his practice runs six-to-eight-week strengthening blocks before the season starts, so clients arrive with more strength and more confidence, and it's a group he says comes back with consistently positive feedback, year after year. “Several people think skiing is just relaxation, just leisure,” he adds, “when it's actually a real sport, with very real strain on the joints. Preparing for it is essential.”

We don't build training programs ourselves, but a physiotherapy or massage session during your stay is something your concierge can arrange, worth considering if a niggle shows up mid-week rather than waiting it out. This article draws directly on a conversation with Romain Dumont, a sports physiotherapist at the Centre de Kiné du Sport La Sauvegarde in Lyon. If you'd like to book a session with him, you can do so on Doctolib. For more on what a stay with us includes, see our concierge services, or get in touch to talk through your own trip.