You usually know by November whether you're going to get a season.

Here's the thing it took me an embarrassingly long time to say out loud: almost nothing about a ski turn resembles the way we all train for one.

The stance is asymmetric — one ski carrying far more than the other. The hips are turned relative to the feet. The ground under one foot is higher than the ground under the other. The torso is doing something entirely different from the legs, and the terrain changes its mind about all of it every few seconds.

Now picture the standard preparation for it. Squats, facing forward. Leg press, facing forward. A machine that helpfully holds your torso still so you can isolate one thing at a time. Every one of those is a perfectly good exercise. Not one of them has ever met a mogul.

Then there's the arithmetic of day one, which nobody does. For most Colorado skiers the first day is more total leg volume than anything they've done in eight months — at altitude, in the cold, on snow they haven't stood on since March. Treating that as the opening session of a season rather than a normal Saturday isn't being precious. It's just counting.

The full breakdown lives in the ski season prep guide, along with squats that actually match the turn, balance for the moment an edge catches, and the mobility side of it.

It starts with a 60-minute assessment — your history, the injury or the surgery if there was one, the rehab you already did, and the specific thing you want back. Then we find out what your body currently accepts under the kind of load skiing actually applies: one leg, sideways, decelerating, on a base that isn't level and won't hold still.

From there it's one-on-one sessions of 45 to 60 minutes, with me, at the private studio at 1800 Glenarm Place downtown. Not a printed sheet. Not a shared appointment. And if your case isn't a fit for what I do, I'll say so in the first half hour and point you at whoever is — a considerably cheaper conversation on day one than on day forty.

I've been running ski conditioning in Denver since 2008. The Denver Post ran my ski prep work in December 2010, and I've covered it on 9NEWS across my years as their fitness expert.

So. The turn is asymmetric, the training is symmetrical, and the biggest day of the year is the one nobody prepares for. Read that back and it's fairly obvious — which is the irritating part, because it was obvious the whole time, to all of us, and we went and did leg press anyway.

Anyway. You know it now. Best of luck going back to not knowing it — and to being the one who gets down the mountain on a single ski with the paperboy still after him. Two dollars was a lot of money in 1985.