Ski-inspired workout helps prepare for slopes
in a basement fitness studio underneath a Dunkin’ Donuts in Scarsdale, New York, grunting and sweating while sitting on a Bosu ball. I’m there for a 45minute Shred Fitness class, one of a small number of ski-inspired workouts available. It’s based around a series of exercises done for short intervals.
In this case, the class works through five movements for a minute each, followed by a five-minute cardio interval on a specialized machine called “Skier’s Edge.” Then the cycle is repeated three times.
Kim Kaplan, a trainer who has worked at Shred since it opened in April, offers up-tempo encouragement through a microphone headset: “Feel that burn! We’re moving to the machines in 10 seconds.”
Shred is the brainchild of Caroline Levere, 27, a lifelong skier who had worked in fitness. She came up with the idea while in business school.
“I looked at all the different boutique fitness classes people were doing, whether it was spinning or boxing or rowing, but there was nothing tailored to skiing,” she tells me. “And I thought: You could have a ski-inspired workout that’s easy on the joints. [You could] hit muscles you don’t in any other class and have fun doing it.”
Kaplan designed the program after consulting skiing instructors and trainers, including some who work with the U.S. ski team, and geared it toward those little-used muscles. The workout targets the legs and core, and many movements have a balance component, often thanks to the Bosu ball.
We did split squats, Russian twists, balancing deadlifts, side lunges, planks, thrusters, mountain climbers and balancing shoulder presses, to name just a few. A lot of these exercises reinforce something skiers often forget when preparing for the season: The legs are only one piece of the puzzle.
But the secret weapon of this workout is Skier’s Edge, which is the closest I’ve seen a gym machine come to replicating the motions of skiing. You step onto two independently swiveling platforms that are attached to huge resistance bands, then slide along two curved tubes for a leg-burning, balancechallenging, sweat-inducing cardio workout.
Used by the U.S. and other national ski teams for training, I found it to be incredibly adept at working the knees, hips and groin, areas full of small stabilizer muscles essential for skiing and, more important, for not getting hurt skiing.
The machine is not new. But unless you were to purchase one, it has not been widely accessible outside specialized training centers and rehab facilities, where it is used for knee and hip rehabilitation.
And while skiers have long amped up their leg training heading into a season, the existing crop of ski-specific training programs — such things as Alpine Training Center, Mountain Tactical Institute and Gym Jones — tend to cluster in mountain towns and are mostly geared toward athletes at the more elite end of the spectrum.
Shred aims at a different market. “It’s definitely a workout that people who don’t ski can enjoy and benefit from,” Levere says.