Tom Gellie walks through hip warm-ups for skiing, starting with pelvic shifts to find imbalances, then moving into staggered-stance drills that mimic ski turns. He emphasizes controlled loading, rotational mobility, and end-range movement to keep hips mobile and ready for high-performance turns.
Chapters
In this video, I show a few exercises that I use to help warm up my hips in two particular planes of motion. Those motion planes are lateral and rotational. I find that these two planes of motion in people are probably the most restricted and least aware parts of their body. So this little series of movements I'm about to show you is something you can do before season and during your ski season to help keep you in touch, aware, and mobile in your hip joints mostly. So here it is. So I'm gonna do a series where I'm assessing lateral shifting of my pelvis as I stay balanced left and right. So I'm gonna warm up left and right shifting of my pelvis here, trying to figure out if there's asymmetries or different feelings or any kind of discomfort in this movement. It's a critical movement for skiing, for us to be able to get on the edge and stay balanced. So just check your own ability to go left and right and compare. Then you can start making it more ski-specific because we're on a slope, so your legs will be staggered. So one foot will be up on a bench, a stair, doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter what height. Varying the heights is actually a really good idea because it'll challenge different angles for the joint. I'm trying to keep both of my legs parallel as I do this, which gives me an even shift across of my pelvis. From this angle, you see that my feet are staggered so that my inside foot is ahead of my outside foot, because this is in reality what would happen in a ski turn. It's mostly just focused on moving in a lateral motion, so just side to side. Later on, we add a little bit of counter rotation. So now I'm going to add my inside arm reaching high to put tension in a longer line from the outside of my left knee all the way up to my left hand. Now this would be the right side, same thing. So you're just teaching your body to load up with good tension, the muscles that sort of support the inside half of your body in a ski turn, because if they're short, you're probably going to fall inside. So you want to teach them to lengthen and support you with tension. So now I'm adding some rotational movements to my lateral pelvis and hip movements. So you can reach your inside arm forward and across your body along with your lateral motion. It's really important to exaggerate this movement. We may not use this much movement in a ski turn, but to warm up, you're really trying to find sort of where's your end range position, how much motion have you got, and then again, is it different from left to right? If I found one time that I'm, you know, perhaps after a long flight, more restricted on one side, I'll spend longer working on that one. So here I'm working on the ability to relax and let go of my inside hip so it can drop the outside hip. This would equate to me being able to level my hips off in a more high-performance turn, but even just a small amount of dropping of the outside hip is needed to keep the pelvis balanced when you start moving your mass inside a turn. So depending on your level, you can change the height of whatever you're standing on, but work on dropping controlled and slowly your outside foot to the ground. So here I'm just working on isolating rotations of the middle part of my body, my pelvis sort of rotating to the left. Without much else turning. So it's kind of core control in the rotational plane. I'm also looking to see if I can stay within two glass walls, so it's sort of a disciplined exercise to see if I can control my movement without affecting my lateral balance, which is really important if you want to stay laterally balanced but change your rotational plane, and you want to work on being able to stay, I guess, within two glass walls either side of your body. So now I'm allowing my whole body to turn, so I'm getting more mobility through both my hips. So really good internal rotation of the right, internal rotation of the left hip, and then I'm just looking straight ahead as I do it. Now in a lower position, same task. It will feel very different. You're actually going to start mobilizing your knees here because there has to be some rotation through the knees as well as the hips and ankles for this maneuver to be possible. Don't worry about looking like a bit of a goose, just know it's going to help your skin. So then this would be like a javelin turn type mobilizing exercise. So using a little bit of momentum from driving your inside leg forward and across to help counter and teach your body to counter against your outside foot, which would be turning across the heel. So we obviously can't simulate skiing in a gym environment, but we can simulate the motions our body goes through and see, is it even? How do we do it? How tight? How strong? All those things. So here I'm just checking the mobility and open chain of my lower leg. So I'm trying to isolate twisting my foot and my shin left and right with very minimal twisting anywhere else. So nothing in the upper leg. And then I'm going to work on just twisting the upper leg at the hip joint in and out, which actually ends up being an edging movement rather than a twisting type movement on the snow. As you can see, if I had skis on, I'd be one edge, then the other. And finally, this one is to teach you to be able to, to feel relaxing in your ankle joint, relaxing in the calf muscles, to change your fore and aft pressure. So I'm just trying to keep whole foot pressure, but I'm trying to bring my mass forward towards the balls of my feet by releasing and letting gravity tip me forward. I think this is a crucial movement to feel. So now I'm more in a ski position, and I'm letting go or slowly eccentrically lengthening my calf muscles so the pressure gets shifted forward on my feet to the balls of my feet without my heels completely coming off the ground. So this is how I make a really concerted effort to get forward. It's actually by letting my body move forward, not pushing it forward. So then just rechecking how I, how I move laterally left and right, just as a wrap-up to sort of feel how it's all moving. Feels really good after doing all those warm-up mobility exercises. And from side You'll see I'm adding a little bit of counter rotation in here because in ski turns, when you do shift your pelvis laterally, especially at the maximum point, there should be a counter rotation to the outside of the turn. So I hope you guys enjoyed this. Good luck out there with your ski turns.
