Fitness & Skill Level
No skiing experience needed at all. What you do need is a reasonable base of general fitness, because learning to ski is more tiring than it looks and you’ll be doing it seven days in a row.
The conditions
You’re active from Day 2 through to Day 8, with no rest day in the middle. Five of those are downhill lessons and guided practice, one is your cross-country day, and the last is a free morning on the slopes before you travel home. Expect to be out for six to seven hours each day, split between a morning lesson and an afternoon session with a guide.
The lifts do the climbing, so this isn’t a trip that tests your uphill legs. What tires you is the descending. You’re holding a position you’re not used to, making constant small corrections, and using your thighs as brakes for hours at a time. Most people feel it properly on day three, in muscles their usual training doesn’t reach.
Then there’s the falling. You will fall, a lot, mostly in the first two days, and getting back up in skis on a slope is its own small workout. That’s normal and it costs energy, so factor it in.
Cold is the other factor. Daytime temperatures usually sit between -10°C and -3°C, colder in January, milder by March and April. Cold burns through your energy quietly, and everything takes longer when you’re doing it in gloves. Add in walking about in ski boots and hauling your kit to and from the lift, and the day is fuller than the hours on snow suggest.
The recovery side is good, though. The hotel is at the bottom of the lift, there’s a sauna, and if that final run down feels like one thing too many in the early days, the hotel runs transfers so you can get a lift back instead.
Fitness
Be honest with yourself about where you’re starting from, then give yourself the run-up that matches.
If you already train regularly and are used to being on your feet all day, you don’t need to change anything. Keep doing what you’re doing and add some leg strength work in the couple of months before you travel.
If you’re active but not consistently, give yourself six to eight weeks. Cardio three times a week for 45 minutes is the backbone of it, so running, cycling, spin, swimming or brisk hill walking, whatever you’ll stick to. On top of that, add squats, lunges and step-ups twice a week, plus some core work. Those are what stop your legs giving out by mid-afternoon and what let you hold a snowplough when you need to stop.
If you’re starting from a low base, give it three months and build gradually. Start with walking, add hills, then add the strength work once walking feels easy. Going from very little straight into hard sessions is how people arrive with a sore knee rather than fresh legs. A trainer can help you build something sensible, and it’s worth an hour of their time.
Whichever tier you’re in, cramming it into the fortnight before you fly won’t work. Fitness for this comes from consistency over weeks, not a big push at the end.
Skill
You need no experience whatsoever. You’ll start on the nursery slopes with a qualified instructor, work through the snowplough and turning, and should be linking turns on blue runs by the end of the week.
What you do need is a tolerance for the feeling of sliding. Until you’ve learned to stop and steer, you won’t have much control, so expect to feel unbalanced and to pick up speed you didn’t ask for. Some people find that a thrill and some find it genuinely horrible, so be honest with yourself about which you are. It settles fast once the snowplough clicks, and the sooner you make peace with it, the quicker you’ll progress.
The mental side is mostly about the middle of the week. Day one is exciting, day two is hard, and somewhere around day three you’ll be tired and convinced everyone else is picking it up faster than you. They aren’t. Turning up for the next lesson is what gets you to the point where it clicks, and it does click.
If you’ve skied a little before but want to go back to basics and build solid foundations, you’re welcome too.
