Snow Sport Assessment & Performance Training

John Appel, MPT — physiotherapist and strength & conditioning coach with 25 years working with professional athletes. He founded Pure Performance in Wanaka, a facility built specifically around the crossover between physiotherapy and performance training for snow sport athletes, from World Cup and Olympic competitors through to weekend skiers and the next generation coming up through junior ranks. He coached the New Zealand Ski Cross team at the 2024 Youth Olympic Games.

His work centres on the biomechanics that decide outcomes in jumping, landing and gate sports: ankle mobility, dynamic knee valgus, and landing mechanics, the same research base behind ACL injury prevention in elite skiing and snowboarding. It's the same testing and programming framework used with our World Cup and Olympic athletes, adapted to whatever level you're training at. For younger athletes specifically, formal testing standards barely exist anywhere in the published research, so John built his own: an assessment and programming framework adapted for pre-adolescent and adolescent snow sport athletes, the kind of individualised, sport-specific testing a young athlete in this sport can't get anywhere else.

Every assessment is delivered by one of Pure Performance's trained coaches, using the framework John built and personally trains every coach on. You get the same standard of screening and programming whoever's running your session.