#physiotheapist

http://www.body-works.ca   604-983-6616

Hello my name is Taylor McCabe, physiotherapist here are Body Works Sports Physiotherapy in North Vancouver. This is the 6th video in a series that we’re posting each week to take you through an exercise to get your body ready for ski season.

So far we’ve worked on the endurance of the major muscles of the thigh and hip, our hip abductor strength, our squatting movement pattern and finally our oblique strength. This week, we’re going to revisit the wall squat but we’re going to do it facing sideways to the wall and working on one leg. This will increase the challenge for our lateral hip and abdominal muscles and also bring together everything we’ve trained so far.

I’m going to demonstrate this will a ball, but you can also do it without in which case, your body would just be directly against the wall. So that’s when you’re going to get started either against the wall or the ball at your trunk, feet about hip width apart. When you’re ready to start, you’re going to lift your inside leg off the ground, you’re going to keep pressure of your body into the wall or the ball as you lower down into your squat and then use your glutes to drive back up to the starting position. Remember to synchronize your breath with your movement. So it’ll look like that. Also it’s really important to watch your knee alignment when you’re working on one leg; to think about having the kneecap fall over the second toe throughout the whole movement.

A sample program to start would be three sets of 10 repetitions taking 30 seconds to rest in between. You would have to decide what’s a good challenging number for you and be ready to do more if you’ve been progressing well with the exercises so far. And like in our other squatting exercise, you can experiment with the pace, taking it slow up and down for a challenge or making it faster to be more like what you’d be doing on the slopes.