Moguls at Saddleback Ski Resort in Maine
Someone who is trying to gain weight should typically avoid cardio exercises. Cardio will cause you to burn a lot more calories than heavy lifting exercises, impeding your weight gain goals. Thus, us hard gainers usually stick to heavy weight lifting, muscle bulking activities.
One of the best muscle mass weight gaining exercises for your legs are squats. Squats work out virtually every leg muscle, targeting mostly your quadriceps, glutes, hamstrings, and calf muscles… (depending on your stance you can significantly alter which muscle groups are effected). The bad thing about squats is that it is easy for you to strain your back or other muscles from loss of balance, and it is very easy to strain from poor form. Teetering a few hundred pounds of weight on your shoulders is inherently risky anyways.
I can only think of one alternative to squats that is just as, if not more effective at targeting your core leg and back muscles… The activity I’m talking about is skiing, and not just any sort of skiing. I’m talking moguls. Big fat bushy moguls on steep skiing slopes that you pound into relentlessly at over 20 MPH on your way down the ski slope. What are the advantages that Skiing Moguls have over squats?
- Skiing doesn’t put any weight on your shoulders, you remain with a steady low center of gravity.
- Your entire body gets a workout when maintaining balance through moguls (from pole planting with your arms, to heavy leans with your back and abs, to the relentless hits you take with your legs), as opposed to mainly just your legs in squats.
- Skiing moguls keeps your heart rate up for a significantly longer amount of time than plain old squats without the lean fat burn of cardio.
- You get to be outside, enjoying nature!
Skiier hitting Moguls
(Picture right, skiier in lowest “squatted” position after just landing on the top of a mogul)
Of course, there is a significantly larger learning curve to being able to ski moguls than there is to learn how to do squats. I have been skiing Maine slopes since I was a toddler and consider myself a pretty advanced skier. Moguls are a pretty big deal in Maine. Most ski hills will have quite a few natural skiing areas either through the trees or trails left un-groomed to develop moguls. It was not until this year that I really got comfortable with moguls. There are a few reasons for this. Moguls are intimidating. The first few times you go down them, you will find it incredibly hard to stay in control. The backs of moguls are icey and they are usually on steep slopes. People often try and turn through the moguls and end up scraping down the back side of them (the icey part) and falling. Stopping can be difficult because of the large amount of ice usually associated with moguls. The next biggest reason people avoid moguls is the difficulty of the trails. Moguls are usually on the double diamond trails (You will rarely find moguls on a blue trail), double diamond can make for some bad falls and can be dangerous if you are a beginner that doesn’t know how to handle very steep slopes. For these two reasons, most people give up after one or two tries.
But there is an art to skiing moguls… And you probably wont even start to understand it until you have gone down the same mogul trail at least 5-10 times. People are used to turning to slow down, thus beginners try and turn around and through moguls on the icy parts and fail miserably… But the trick to slowing down on moguls is to hit the big bushy top of the mogul where all the loose snow has built up. The snow on top of a mogul is usually so loose and puffy that you could stop instantly if you wanted to.
Think of it like you are literally jumping from mogul to mogul, using the moguls as your fluffy landing pads. Once you understand how to start planning for which mogul you are going to “jump” to next, it gets much easier. And by jump, I dont mean you should be going air born. You should never actually get any “air” off the ground unless you’re purposely trying to.
Skiing Maine Moguls at Saddleback
Hitting these moguls requires a tremendous amount of leg power. If your legs cannot absorb each mogul hit like a shock, and then re-extend before hitting the next mogul, you will either lose control and fall, or you will do a jump off the mogul and end up in the air.
(Picture left – skiier using entire body to throw weight balance after hitting mogul, preparing for the next hit)
So how can I equate this to a squat like workout? Imagine that you have the barbell on your back, except it is empty, and instead of performing a squat, you are jumping down a large stair case, skipping 2-3 steps each jump, for about 25 stairs. Your legs go through the same movement as a squat but they are constantly absorbing energy. It really feels completely different than a squat because there is no lifting, gravity is just pulling you down into obstacles you absorb and move over… and its a very addictive feeling… And I assure you, in every was as difficult as good a workout as a squat, if not better.
Saddleback Ski Resort in Maine is one of my favorite ski locations. They have a huge variety of terrain, and the most “Steep Skiing” terrain in New England. This massive area of just Black and Double black diamond trails has a huge variety of conditions to offer, from glades and tree skiing, to steep groomed trails, and a lot of natural mogul skiing terrain. Definitely worth the trip and a lot bigger than you think!
