SKiA Sweetspot Ski Trainer Review
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SKiA Sweetspot Ski Trainer
SKiA Sweetspot Ski Trainer Overview:
When October 1st hits, the countdown for opening day at your favorite ski resort starts. For me, I enjoy watching Arapahoe Basin and Loveland feverishly compete to be the first mountain open in North America. As this madness ensues, I start to get the “itch” (you know the one I’m talking about) to get out my gear and make sure it’s still “working”. When the SKiA Sweetspot Ski Trainer arrived at my house on October 2nd, I was stoked to have a reason to pull out my boots.
The SkiA Sweetspot Ski Trainer is a dry-land trainer geared towards skiers of all abilities. By finding your “center”, the trainer is intended to increase strength, improve balance and ultimately improve your on snow ski performance. The SKiA Ski Trainer comes with a boot mount, training manual, and various sizes of rounded blocks that vary in difficulty. The rounded blocks come in 4 sizes, green being the easiest and black being the hardest. The training manual provides thorough instructions on how to get started and provides progressively harder drills as you get more comfortable with the trainer.
SKiA Sweetspot Ski Trainer User Experience:
Installation of the SKiA was intuitive and took no time at all. I opted to start with the blue blocks, the second easiest block. After popping the block on the boot mount and buckling up my boots, I was ready to go!
SkiA Installed on my Lange RX 120’s
I stepped onto my carpet and started to find my “center”. My immediate impression was that this was a lot harder then I was expecting! After rocking back and forth, I was able to balance on the center of my boot without letting the heel or toe touch the floor. In the time it took me to find my balance (about 5 minutes) I noticed that I was working my quads, lower back and abdominal muscles. After a few minutes rest, I balanced myself and tried “turning”. Once again, I could feel my muscles working, coincidentally, the same muscles I use while skiing! I tried jumping up to the black blocks (the hardest ones) and could not even balance on them! I quickly decided that I needed a lot more training on the blues before jumping to the advanced black blocks.
Balanced and Simulating a Turn!
SKiA Sweetspot Ski Trainer Final Thoughts:
The SKiA Ski Trainer is a good tool to add to your dry-land ski training repertoire. If you train on SKiA regularly, you will certainly build up your “ski muscles” and improve your overall balance. Another EXCELLENT application for the SKiA trainer would be to use it for rehabilitation. I could foresee this being a great way to rebuild muscle from a skiing or athletic related injury.
The SKiA trainer prepares you for the season, but you do need to have realistic expectations. If you are a green/blue skier, you will not simply become a black diamond skier by using this trainer. However, if you were to use this trainer during dry-land training, I believe there is a good possibility that you will be able to improve your ski performance more quickly, due to the fact that your “ski muscles” and balance would be optimized for skiing.
For more information and purchase please visit www.amazon.com/skia.
