Knee pain after skiing is something most skiers explain away as age, and it’s an easy story to believe when you’ve got a few more birthdays behind you and your knees ache at the end of a long day. In most cases, though, it has more to do with mileage than age. Your body has been asked to repeat the same movement thousands of times, and the same repetition that makes you better at skiing also wears on you.
Coach’s Corner
I’ve spent more than 30 years in health and fitness, and 15 of those in the osteopathic model I teach, and I hear the same thing from active people all the time. They ski, hike, golf or garden, so they figure they are covered and then they tell me their knees or their lower back complain after every one of those things. They aren’t out of shape. They have done a lot of the same thing for a long time, and the body keeps a tab on repeated motion.
Why You Get Knee Pain After Skiing Even When You’re Strong
Skiing does make you stronger, but only in a pattern. As you repeat a movement you get better at that movement, and the wear comes from that same repetition, which is how you can be strong and achy at the same time. Think about what a ski day asks of you: hours with your knees and hips bent your quads holding you there, your lower back holding your trunk forward, and snow that keeps changing under you. Your knees, hips and lower back work as one connected unit, so what you ask of one gets passed along to the others.
Why More Activities Don’t Balance You Out
The usual answer is “I do lots of different things, so I’m balanced.” Different activities are good for you, but each one leaves its own pattern behind, and those patterns stack up, so the wear from skiing doesn’t get erased by hiking. Mixing things up spreads the load around without undoing what each activity leaves behind, which is also why how balanced you feel isn’t a reliable test. We wrote about that in why you can’t trust how balanced you feel.
Where to Start: Look at What Your Activity Uses Most
Start by asking what your activity uses the most, which for skiing is the knees, the hips and the lower back. The common mistake is jumping straight to ski-specific exercises, because those repeat the same movements skiing already does to you, so you get the same strength along with the same wear. A better plan does two things together: it balances your body as best it can, and it trains the areas skiing leans on hardest so they can handle the load. That’s the difference between training for skiing and training your body to handle skiing.
Training here means more than lifting weights. It includes proprioception, so your joints can sense and react, stretching so your tissues can lengthen and move freely, and strength built one piece at a time first and then globally, the way your body actually works. Even the fascia that wraps your thigh has a part in this, since a recent preprint on the fascia lata (not yet peer-reviewed) describes it carrying force through the thigh depending on how your hip and knee are positioned.
Watch the Full Breakdown
In the video I walk through the knee, the thigh, and how it all connects up through your hips and lower back, and why the order you train it in matters. Watch the full breakdown: It’s Not Age: Why Your Body Aches (and What Actually Fixes It)
Where to Go From Here
The video explains the why on purpose, so it doesn’t hand you a list of exercises. If you’d like the pieces and the order laid out for you, we have two courses that focus on the lower back and the pelvis, and each one walks you through a full routine and then breaks down the individual exercises so you can practice on your own. They are one piece of a growing system, not the whole answer. Each course is normally $350, and right now you can get the Lower Back ELDOA course for $52 and add Big Bang at checkout for $164, which makes $216 for both.
Follow the Thread — Where Movement, Fascia, and Freedom Align
Find more insight, reflection, and fascia-informed care:
Leave a Reply