Get Ski-Ready: Olympian Doug Lewis Shares Pre-Season Ski Fitness Tips
Updated: Aug 14
Ski season is approaching, and if you’re dreaming of powder days and long runs, now is the time to start your ski fitness training.
In the latest episode of the Where to Ski podcast, host John Morgan sits down with Doug Lewis—two-time Olympian, World Championship medalist, and U.S. Ski Team legend—to share his best advice on pre-season ski workouts that anyone can do.
If you’ve ever felt wiped after only a few runs or struggled with altitude on a ski trip, you’re not alone. According to Lewis, the key to skiing with confidence, endurance, and control is simple: get in shape for skiing before you hit the slopes.
The best part? You don’t need a gym membership or expensive machines. Lewis recommends bodyweight ski conditioning exercises like squats, push-ups, burpees, lunges, and sit-ups. Combine these with cardio—jogging, cycling, or short sprints—and agility drills such as trail runs or even walking through a riverbed to sharpen balance. For explosive power on skis, add jump training.
Consistency is everything. Just 20 minutes a day, five days a week, for 60 to 100 days before your ski holiday can completely transform your experience. “Control gives you joy,” Lewis explains. Stronger legs, a stable core, and mental commitment mean more fun whether you’re carving groomers, tackling moguls, or heading into the backcountry.
So if your goal this season is to ski longer, stronger, and safer, start your ski workout plan today. Build strength, boost cardio, improve agility, and commit mentally—you’ll arrive on the mountain confident and ready to rip.
For more on Doug - www.eliteam.com
For more on the Utah Olympic Park
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Where to Ski, I'm John Morgan. Today we're talking about getting ready for some of those mountains we talk about all year long. We talk about how to get your body and mind ready for skiing.
How many of us have jumped from sea level to 10,000 feet only to find they're gassed after three or four runs, or found that on day two or three of a trip you just can't get air done? We'll help you try and fix that. Doug Lewis is joining us for this special episode. Doug is a U.S. Ski Team alumnus, two-time Olympian, World Championship medalist, and a U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Famer.
He's got some quals. After retiring from competitive skiing, Doug created an elite team to pass on his winning knowledge of world-class sports to future generations. Doug is actively involved in every level of the ski industry as a broadcaster, ski celebrity, motivational speaker, product consultant, and coach.
We're lucky to have him here. Doug can be a little hardcore. His workouts make most people look like couch potatoes.
His training is relentless. He runs up mountains just to see if he can do it faster than the last time. He does 100-mile, 24-hour runs for fun.
He knows his stuff, and I don't think there's anyone better suited to give us some insight on how to get fit enough to really enjoy and take advantage of your next ski days. We met up with Doug at the Utah Olympic Park in Park City. Not a bad place to talk fitness.
You might even see some action in the background.
So, welcome to Where to Ski. This is awesome to have you with us because at the beginning of the season, everyone's thinking, I want to go skiing, I want to go skiing. And the only way to really enjoy skiing is to be in shape.
Yeah, and I don't know anyone, anyone, who is in better shape than you. Well, thank you. I know a few people better shape than me, but for a guy over 60, yeah, I try pretty hard.
But I love to ski, so I live in Parson, Utah, mainly because of the weather and the recreation, for sure, in the summer. But there's eight ski areas within the mountain, and I just love to ski, so I just pick what I want to go to. Where's the snow the best? I love just exploring.
So, I live here because I love to ski, and we can talk about it, but if you love to ski and it's fun and that's your goal, the key is to have more fun, you've got to be in control. And how do you get in control? You've got to be in shape. You've got to work on your skills, and you've got to work on your mental skills as well.
So, it's all about control, and if you're in more control, you can ski more. You can ski in the moguls, if you're into that. My back doesn't say, hi, moguls.
So, my knees don't let me ski both legs. If you want, like, the skis are so amazing, you just want to lay it over, Ted, look at his style. You've got, that's control, and control gives you joy.
And so, how do you do that? You've got to be in shape. Yeah, and that's the key, in shape. As you said, it involves a lot of different facets.
It's not just going out and riding your bike under a monster. It's a combination of strength, power, agility, and flexibility. And as you said, your head, your head's got to be in the right place.
When you get strong enough and you've got the power, that helps you a lot, because you know when you put the edge down and roll it over, you can feel it, and you can park it, and you can power through it. You're not going to wash out. Imagine having confidence when you lay that ski over, that it's going to hold, that you're going to get all that rebound, all that energy out of it.
That's just confidence, and it comes from being in shape, for sure. So, how do you get in shape? How would you tell our audience, our listeners, and these are listeners, you know, probably in Europe, and Australia, UK, and the US are the biggest ones. How should they start? We're in September now.
You're going to be seeing this podcast probably, oh, second or third week of September. Yeah, you've only got like 60 days. Well, I'll tell you what not to do.
You don't have to spend $1,200 on some machine. You don't have to spend $2,000 on this and that. You can do it in your backyard with no equipment.
So, we'll start there, but then you can add on. So, if you have a gym that you go to, I'm a member of a gym, right? It's maybe motivating. You can do that.
You can buy some equipment, but it starts with strength, right? So, everything is built on strength. So, if you're strong, you're going to have more power. If you're strong, you're going to have more anaerobic and aerobic capacity.
If you're strong, agility is going to become a lot easier, right? So, it starts with strength. So, you can do that every day, and you don't need anything. You can start with full-body stuff, burpees, right? Everybody hates burpees.
I love burpees. Burpees get everything. They work everything, but burpees, lunges, air squats, push-ups, sit-ups, all that requires no gym membership, requires no equipment, right? So, we'll talk about the mental side of committing to this, but you can do it.
You can work on strength every day. I was just going to say, to put yourself into a program where you go burpees, sit-ups, and push-ups, sit-ups, and maybe some running in there, that's commitment. That is commitment.
You got to have the mental strength to be able to say, okay, I'm going to do this. I want to ski well. I want to go out and be able to rip out the first day and not make a fool of myself.
So, I've got to commit to 60 or 80 or 120 days of pushing myself, and it's going to hurt. Yeah, I mean, and we've just rolled back into the mental skills, but commitment comes from setting goals, right? Everybody has dreams. Oh, I'd love to ski 100 days a year.
I'd love to race masters again, whatever. But until you commit, like commit where you feel it in your stomach, you commit enough where you put your alarm at 4 a.m. because that's the only time you can work out, right? Because you have a real job. So, it starts with the goals.
Do you want to be stronger, fitter, faster, and enjoy skiing more? If that's the goal, then commit to it. And commit means setting your alarm, doing the work. And again, it doesn't have to be a lot.
It's up at 5 a.m., right? And spending that hour, you do a jog, which is free, just to warm up. You do some stretching, which we all need at our age, right, which is free. And then you do 100 squats.
You do 100 knee push-ups if you have to. You do 100 crunches. You then do 10 burpees, whatever it is.
That just took you 20 minutes, and you're well on your way. You do 20 minutes, 5 days a week for these next 100 days. You're going to arrive on that hill confident, strong, and just ready to rip.
It's that easy. That's not a huge time commitment. You know, I usually try to spend an hour to an hour and a half working out, which is very efficient.
So let's break it down. So you have some strength, and it can be as easy as squats, lunges, push-ups, just body weight. Yeah, I go to the gym, but if I'm quick on time, that's all I do.
Then let's add in a little bit of cardio, right? So that's easy. That's a jog. That's a get on your mountain bike, get on your road bike, and just spin.
It doesn't have to be hard, right? It's just getting that heart beating, getting that blood flowing, teaching your body how to utilize that oxygen better. That way, you're going to be able to ski all day, right? Who doesn't want to ski all day? I don't ski all day a lot because I don't have time, and 10 runs at Deer Valley works me pretty hard, but you're going to ski all day. Then you just do some sprints, right? You can do sprints by doing 50 jumping jacks as fast as you can.
You can do actual sprints. So getting in that sprint will teach your heart to go up and down, right? So you get off the lift, rip a run. Your heart rate's going to go up.
It may go anaerobic, and then it's going to teach it to recover. So, excuse me, you've done the strength. Then you moved on to the cardio.
Then you're going to move to agility, which is the most fun, right? I love agility. So that's trail running. That's setting up obstacle courses.
That's just walking up a river. Everybody knows where a river is. Just walk in the river for 200 yards.
The balance and the agility you will learn, and it's pretty cool and fun. That's it. So it's usually not hot, and it's not hot.
It's going to cool you down. So you've got the strength. You've got the cardio.
You've got the agility. You can't forget about power. So power's just all about jumping.
Anything that takes five seconds. As you can tell, we had a little technical issue at the end that cut it off a little abruptly. But thank you so much, Doug, for taking the time to talk to us about designing your own ski fitness program.
20 minutes a day isn't a lot, and I'm sure that'll expand for most people from 20 up to 40 or 60. You never know. You might see Doug anywhere on a mountain, either running or skiing.
If you want to contact him, best is through the Elite Team website at www.eliteteam.com. That URL will be in the show notes. If you like the Where to Ski podcast, please share them and subscribe on our website, wheretoski.org. It's free. Stay connected to us and listen to perspectives on some of the world's best mountains from the legends that live there.
Thank you, Doug. Thanks, all of you, for joining. And thanks to the Grits for the music.
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