The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Why I’m skiing better than ever in midlife
Can a series of scientific tests and pre-season exercises help people hit the slopes more safely? Gabriella Le Breton tries them – with success
When a friend told me on the eve of my 35th birthday that I was middle-aged, I objected vehemently. A decade later, it’s harder to deny, particularly when considering my former skiing self. In the past five years, I’ve gone from skiing some 40 days a winter and exercising daily to missing two entire winters on snow, having two children and exercising infrequently (read: never).
Staring down the barrel of midlife last summer, considering a ski season fraught with injury caused by my lack of fitness, I resolved to take action.
My saviour transpired to be one of Great Britain’s best-known skiers, Warren Smith. From humble beginnings setting bindings at the Hemel Hempstead dry ski slope as a teenager in the 1980s, Smith has gone on to develop a unique approach to teaching skiing. Through his eponymous academy – the Warren Smith Ski Academy (WSSA), founded in Verbier in 1998 – Smith performs a series of comprehensive tests on his clients’ biomechanics. The aim is to assess their unique physiological abilities and suggest personalised, specific exercises designed to help them perfect their skiing technique.
“We’ve developed these deceptively simple exercises over 20 years, testing them on more than 6,500 skiers from beginners to instructors,” explains Smith. “Pretty much every single one has failed to meet all the physiological requirements to ski with perfect technique on their first test.
“We each have our own unique physical capabilities and significant differences in strength and flexibility between the two sides of our bodies,” continues Smith. “Add old injuries to the mix, which can create issues of weakness and overcompensation, and you will have certain biomechanical blocks that will prevent you from progressing your skiing.”
Over the years, Smith and his team have worked with supermodels, rugby stars and royalty, paring them back to their physiological basics to help them achieve perfection on the pistes. Inspired by such credentials and with four months to prepare myself for winter, I took the plunge and started my biomechanical improvement journey in
August last year with a Zoom call – Smith bathed in sunshine outside his Verbier base and me sporting ski boots in my Kentish home office as I undertook his Six-Way Foundation tests.
I was surprised by the results. I reported better than average ankle flex and core stability and decent – though not perfect – symmetry. My leg steering range was strong on the left but only just above average on the right (explaining my tendency to let my knees collapse inwards into an A-frame shape while turning on the slopes). That lack of symmetry was echoed in my leg lean and extension tests.
I came away from the call armed with simple exercises that would be easy to implement at home and determined to improve my results before our next meeting, scheduled for late September. Then my eldest daughter started primary school, the other got sick, work mounted up and somehow even engaging my core while pushing the pram and practising my leg lean against the kitchen work surface while the kettle boiled fell by the wayside.
My lack of exercise was brutally exposed when Smith retook my tests. No improvement, just a decline in ankle flex. Chastened, I started up my exercises with greater success, before plunging into the Christmas chaos of being a mum of two.
Suddenly, it was January, I felt no fitter than I had been in August and yet I was on a train to Verbier in Switzerland to meet Smith for my reckoning on snow. Phoning me from the slopes,
Smith’s energy crackled across the airwaves: “Hop off the gondola, grab some skis and join us at the mid-station. We’ll get two hours in before the light goes.”
Sure enough, 45 minutes later Smith was teaching me the art of braquage, or linked pivot turns, beneath snow-filled skies. Feeling the lack of symmetry between my left and right turns, the results of my leg steering range tests instantly made sense and the drill helped to develop my hip rotation and ski separation.
The next day dawned with 21cm of fresh snow on the ground and more falling. As I battled to engage my long-lost inner thigh muscles to bring my skis together in the deep, chopped up snow, I recalled Smith explaining the importance of his leg adduction and abduction exercises: “Not only will these exercises build your strength, stamina and movement patterns, but they’ll also build muscle memory before you even reach the snow.”
I could have done with some of all the above while chasing Smith down Verbier’s finest off-piste itineraries. As I watched the resort’s resident freeriders joyously back flipping off cliffs and straight lining couloirs, I tried to ignore my shaky legs, bad knee and nagging back pain. I kicked myself for not having made much more time to do my exercises. I couldn’t even pass off my rusty skiing and creaking body as an age-related issue – the best skier in our group was 55 years old and Smith, aged 50, broke four ribs while digging his car out of the deep snow on the third day of our trip, yet still skied with trademark elegance and dynamism.
That said, after three days spent tackling deep powder and repeating drills, my body was exhausted but I’d skied better than I had done in years. Despite not having engaged with my pre-skiing regime religiously, my understanding of the tests and repetitions of the associated exercises had built muscle memory and prepared me mentally for skiing. It served as an excellent foundation for executing Smith’s drills on the snow, with incredibly quick results. This out-ofshape midlife mummy had survived a season-opener of three epic powder days without injury, skiing better and more confidently than before.
‘My body was exhausted, but I survived three epic powder days without injury, and I was better and more confident than ever’