Tom Gellie demonstrates a lateral hip drill that improves balance and strength for skiing. You keep your pelvis level while sliding it sideways, maintaining three points of contact with your foot. Adding a box increases the range and mimics the weight shift onto your outside ski during a turn.
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Hey everyone, it's Tom from Functional Body, back with video 2 of ski prep moves. It's getting very close to my trip to Canada coming up in less than 2 weeks now, and I just thought I'd share another thing that you can use. I personally do it just to get your body prepped and your proprioception and balance prepped for the sport of skiing. So in this one, it's going to be more of a lateral lateral-based exercise with the pelvis. So first of all, just get some awareness of where your pelvis is. So put both hands on the two parts of the ilium, just here, and just first of all get it moving laterally across. So the first range of motion in your hips in this lateral movement should very much be with your pelvis staying flat relative to the ground, okay. It's only right at the very end where you'll feel it kind of has more of a rocking up motion. So try and work on not having that up motion come in too early. So if you're dropping in like this, not sort of the, the emphasis, as you need to move flat. Now, my friend JF talks about this idea of a gravity drop, which is sort of, I guess, one interpretation he's taken of not engaging muscles to make this movement happen,, but to let his joints do the movement and his muscles react. So as you move across, there should be a feeling of the pelvis actually dropping down and across a little bit with gravity, okay? Because being on the two levers of your legs, there should be no real up movement in this. So as you go across, let your pelvis move and drop side to side, okay? Next progression, we can add in a box. To start moving across and really challenging how far you can get your hips across past this foot. And then your ability to stand up and balance on what would be the new outside ski, because the key I feel to a good turn is going from being balanced on your outside leg all the way inside the turn to then starting to shift early onto this new outside ski, going up and being really composed in balance and ready to move into the next turn. Both sides, not too far apart, because the goal is to get the hips and pelvis moving across as level as possible. Upper body relaxed, eyes looking ahead. Once you've got it as far over as you can, you should feel all this line engage. Stand up, balance on it, move in, across. Get real low if you like, up, or get something taller. A little low on this side. Up, balance. I'm going to get Pete, who's come in today sailing, to just try that because maybe some help, corrections, would help you guys. So jump on the box, Pete. Pete's going to slide his hips across to the left. I'm going to tell him, keep even weight if you can on this foot, the 3 points. Okay, now go push up, balance on that left leg. Perfect. Come back down. Okay, so go back, start again, Pete. Pete's first move was a downward movement. So let your pelvis slide across first rather than going down because that'll be better. Keep moving it right across, challenge how far you can get out here without losing the 3 points of contact on this foot. Perfect. So notice how his knees come in a bit to help support that, that's good. Now stand up. Nice. Does that feel like there's more balance and control? Perfect. So try it once more. See, he's not going to drop his hips, he's going to— perfect, just let gravity help him slide them over and he's going to challenge how far. See this hip coming out past the knee? Really good sign that you're going to now use the glutes, the quads to stand up. Stand please, we're going to try the other side. That's it. Cross. Awesome. So here we see the knee's gone further than the hip. Perfect. You feel the difference in your glutes when you do that? Yeah? And then stand up. Boom. Balance. Give it a few seconds. Exactly. Again. So let the pelvis slide. Perfect. Center of mass lives around here, L4, L5, S1 kind of area, so you've got to move that in order to get great effect in, you know, pressure and balance. Perfect. Did you feel these These muscles work way hard that time, all the back stabilizers in the knee. So last one, I'm going to get Pete to put his foot back like a few centimeters. Yep, because that'd be more like where you'd be in a ski turn. So the hips are now going to have to travel more forward towards this foot. Perfect. And whenever you feel you've got to your maximum extent, you just stand up. Perfect. Back down. Awesome. Thanks, Pete. So there's one, uh, exercise you can use at home or in the gym using a step to bring not only awareness but balance, strength, and control of how you, how you move your pelvis laterally in skiing. So watch the video again, take away some of the key points, and give it a go. I'll see if I can get one more video out next week before I go. If you enjoy this, please share around on Facebook and social media. Again, my website functionalbody.com.au, and so my Facebook page functional body. Thanks for following. See you guys.
