Skiing Made Simple

A few of you have asked for simple materials to aid the recreational skier in self-improvement at skiing. I agree! Cut away all the gobbledygook and jargon and give people the essence, the crux, the secret, the keys to the kingdom.

Here it is. Balance is the golden key that unlocks all the doors to good skiing. “The skier is in balance when they can have a positive, selective effect on any of the skills with either leg at any time.” (PSIA D-Team Training Notes, November 2004, by Doug Pierini and Michael Rogan)

We can infer from this definition that without balance, a skier cannot perform the skills in a positive or selective fashion, nor can the left and the right legs perform the skills independently.

Balance in the future--balance ahead, look ahead, always moving toward and not away. The direction of your movements communicates your intent to your skis. Wherever you go, even if only in your mind’s eye, the skis will go too. When your mind is on taking a certain line ahead, your body and skis will go there. When your mind is on the side or is stalled back in a turn you just did, your body and your skis will follow, away from where you intended to go. So the helpmate of Balance is Focus: focus your attention on what’s coming up and you will be ready to respond instead of rushing to react.

Optimizing a skier’s stance and alignment universally and unequivocally yields improvements in balance. Working on skills in the absence of a rock solidly aligned stance increases the likelihood that the skills will be done wrong and lead to persistent bad habits.

The only value of a movement in skiing is to enhance balance; if a movement doesn’t enhance balance it is an error.

So, if you want to work on improving your skiing, work on improving your balance. Which leads us to the old saw: "Learn to ski in summer..."

Learn to ski with nordic skis. Nothing beats that for balance!

My favorite Stu Campbell quote - "skiing is simple. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it is simple".

Indeed! So simple and so true....wanna cheap method to improve your balance offseason?....after all you can't ski on one foot on those catwalks with no snow on em right? Go to you local lumber shop and get 1 long, straight 2x4. Pick out a real nice one and shine it up nice with some minwax. Using your basic athletic stance(knees flexed hands forward like a tennis player waiting to return serve or a shortstop waiting the next grounder) stand on one foot on the beam. 10 seconds, then 30, then a full minute. Alternate left and right feet, always maintaining the athletic ready position....once you have mastered that, walk the beam, 1 step at a time first - then 2 - finally the whole length, turn around and do it again and again without stopping all while maintaining the athletic stance. Think it's easy? Try it....and do it all summer and you will be a better on skis in the fall. You wil also be a better more confident athlete. Works like a charm.

Very good topic!

Offseason practise is offcourse important but for skiing nothing beats skiing. Same goes for sex . Balance is important at all levels but if you want to improve skiing on a lower level, off season balance practising is not bang for bucks. At a higher level it becomes much more important. Lets get as radical as this: without very good balance you will never become an excellent skier!

How do I teach balance in skiing? Well, I dont teach balance, I teach stuff that enchanses and improves balance. My approach to teaching is to keep it simple. The most important thing IMHO is weight shifting and outside ski pressure. In order to keep it simple I leave out all fancy terms and theorys and focus on simply shifting weight to the outside ski. How to balance between both skis and fore and aft and how to deal with the different forses that interact with us at different times. This is the reason I speak so highly of the nordic ski consept. In my country we have deep traditions in nordic skiing and almost everybody learns to ski this way at first wich shows and rewards once put on downhill gear. Same with scating. Fore aft balance and gliding.

Also if you look at good skiers they all have one thing in common: they are very athletic. They are good at all kinds of sports like soccer, hockey, rollerblading, bascetball, tracks, tennis, surfing, climbing etc. so if we want to improve our skiing we should do all kinds of sports as much as possible.

I think you are wrong about that. I try like hell to keep that out of my students skiing. I think toom uch outside ski pressure is detrimental to application of the other skills in skiing. But that's another thread.

Epic's right, you don't need to teach or focus on those areas that will occur naturally as a result of speed and terrain. Weight shift and outside ski pressure fall in to this category for sure. Not to say that there's not a time and place for actively making each occur, but generally speaking they will take care of themselves.

Right-on. Then move to Telemark turns. Of course, I did it backwards. It was just those stupid little cleats on the sides of the skiis where the binding cables attached that retarded my development, though. Kids hate that sort of thing i.e. getting their fingers cold outside their mittens in the snow. What ever happened to the reality that experience is the best teacher? Ski instructors are as useless as wheels on a sled.

i found that in the off season finding ski movements in other activities helps me too... i do a lot of mountain biking, and i look at a singletrack like a well picked-thru tree run. i maintain a 'skiing frame of mind' while doing other stuff, trail running, biking, etc. to find similar movements and parallels to skiing.

I didn't know that skiing is good for sex. :

epic, yes I know that weight shifting is not to everyones liking here at epic but thats why I included the word "humble" in my post. Thats my humble opinion. Somebody else can have some other humble opinion. I like to keep things easy, plain and simple and leave out as much as possible of the high tech micro management of little toes and degrees of lateral ancleflex. Basicly its all about how you balance on your skis and how you controll your speed. And since down hill skiing is mainly outside ski pressureing I teach that at all levels from 2y and up but that is indeed a matter of another thread....

If somebody asks me how they can improve their skiing my advise is allways to buy nice new 150-170cm carving skis, comfortable boots, take a lesson from a great ski-instructor and to ski as much as possible. Keep fit, strech, warme up before skiing, eat healthy and do sports during off season.... there is no real short cut so why make it more complicated than it is. Now shift your weight to the outside ski and plan ahead...

If you want to have sex ski teaching is good.....

Good topic Nolo. I'll just through this thought out there, Balance and stance have an attitude element to them, that is required for effectiveness. From a lateral view, we need to allow our balance to move to our primary ski, not towards the hill, but away from the hill, and from a front to back view, we need to have the attitude the we move forward with all our body and not resist forward movement.

If skiing were too simple, no one would want to do it. Sure the sensations seduce us, but isn't it also the sensations that mess with our attitude. Later, RicB.

Well spoken. We all approach this issue a little in our own way and manner. I have just experienced over time that not understanding how it really works is the biggest problem intermediate skiers encounter. Its a bit of a catch22. But the way I teach it it is more of a way to deal with the natural outcome of skiing correctly.... now it sounds too complicated....

Balance. And to develop it, sports that require balance.

My fave is rollerblading. Especially down hills. I BUILT a set of harb-like carvers last summer. They are very good. I really enjoy using them. But they are especially heavy with ski boots. I really use them most when I have a car to drive me back up the hill. I would not build them again. It took too much time.

IMO, rollerblading is better since climbing hills is not so hard, the moves are fairly close and I am more likely to blade than carve. Using my DIY carvers is certainly more like skiing, just fewer opportunities.

But the trick is not just to blade around, but to do things to challenge your balance. Slalom, jump, skate backwards etc... anything that makes you *sense* and control balance.

One cannot effectively control balance without sensing it. Other sports that focus on sensing balance are excellent--gymnastics, tai-chi etc....

So that's the two prongs of the summer improvement--improvement of the sense of balance and improvement of the control of balance.

Right on When I took my ski-teaching exam we had to practise one afternoon on nordic skis in the pist. That was fun. And enlightning. If I raced an intermediate 3y old on slalom gear down a short slalom track on nordic skis I would come second. Gear has a lot to do with the way we ski.

I dont agre with your last statement but I think that a ski instructor is useless if you dont practise on your own at all.

Agreed.

IMO, the skill of stance and balance is horribly misnamed. Stance suggests a static position, and that is what I see with most skiers on the hill. They ski as if caught on film in one position alone -- perhaps posing for a medallion.

I prefer to call it "positioning and balance". What determines your position is where you need to be to remain balanced. And what you need to do is maintain the CM over the feet, opposing the forces in the turn. IOW, move with the skiis. Positioning is a dynamic act; it is not static.

In thinking this way, urging folks to "move downhill" vanishes -- they only need to remain properly positioned over the skis at all points in the turn to remain balanced.

Certainly they will move downhill, but their focus changes to maintaining balance through proper positioning. It is not a disjoint "move downhill" directive -- it's a re-positioning to remain in balance.

IMO, once you realize it's all about properly organizing yourself above the skiis, then and only then will you begin to have control over your skiing.

That's my two cents.

I agree also BigE. Somehow we need to get there for the first time though. To quote a tai chi master, "we need to drive our intent before our intent can drive our action". My challenge is to introduce external practice that leads to the internal understanding of how to move over and use their skis. Later, RicB.

Exactly!

I would call that a poised attitude, Ric, how about you?

"organizing yourself above the skis" - this is a great concept!!

Sure. As in self confident, self posessed, equilibrium. Later, RicB.

My desktop dictionary says, Poise: 1. self-possessed composure of bearing. Actually, I think we could substitute: organizing yourself above the skis.

This is profoundly simple, which is to say it is extremely difficult to do.

2x4

hrstrat57, hello, just wanted to thank you for the
> 2x4 post of april 10th in Nolo's thread "skiing made
> simple". I got a 2x4 out of my garage last evening
> and began the balancing act! Your'e right, not as
> easy as one might think. Interesting how much my
> focus can be directed to various joints in the
> foot,knees, and hips when trynig to stay balanced on
> that damn board. Of course mine is warped so it adds
> an extra degree of challenge. I'll work on it till
> the snow comes home.
>
> thanks again for the suggestion.
Mark

nolo, great post.

hrstrat57, is the board on edge? Is an 8' long enough?

hrstrat57 - Is the 2x4 lying flat on the ground?

Every see a never-ever with an extensive gymnastic background learn to ski? Talk about natural fluid grace from the get go. Everyday I am reminded that balance is the underpinning to all athletic endeavours, skiing among them.

hrstrat57's idea of walking a 2x4 is nothing more than a gymnastic balance beam lying on the ground.

I gotta come clean on this, I didn't dream this up on my own. Credit to 1986 ski magazine video "learn to ski" - that video was produced by PSIA and all the "rock stars" of skiing were in it, Andy Mills, Stein Eriksen, Tim Petrick, Dee Byrne, Mike Porter, Jerry Warren, Ellen Post Foster and many more. The video actually also turned me on to PSIA Centerline and got me signed up for ITS at my local hill, yep I was into it. As Stein says in the video opening scene "skiing has been my life"

One segment in the video( which was a for public consumption street version of Centerline) had placekicker Jan Stenerud talking about balance and the basic athletic stance. I stole the balance beam idea from him....placing a 2x4 flat on the floor (mine was a 10 footer I recall) to replicate a gym balance beam. Same effect without the wasted time climbing back on the balance beam after you fall off. Trust me, you will fall off. In short, it changed my life as far as sports went forever. Skiing, tennis, golf - my performance improved dramatically as a result of one summer doing the exercise I describe above. No BS - it works. Nolo is a wise lady. Balance and the athletic stance....the backbone of all athletic endeavor. Enjoy!

Great post, and my discovery this year has been the solid truth of the quote above. Where the basketball player looks, he shoots. Same with the skier - where we think and look, we go. This is THE KEY, and I want to spend the summer skiing, but if not, my second choice is to develop progressions to make this point.

This, I believe, is the very essence of skiing and coaching.

surprisingly, I agree with nolo and feel NO need to qualify that agreement.

imagine that!

I try to improve my balance all the time. Proprioception is something I'm always thinking about, when I have to walk somewhere I play with different ways to propel myself and different ways to land on each foot.

during the 8 months of non-ski season, I ride my MTBs on narrow, technically demanding singletrack. that activity requires incredible balance to do well, or no balance if you want to get hurt and fall a lot. while I do tend to get hurt a lot, it's usually one big fall and not frequent ones. but that's because I've been riding this stuff for 6 years now. the first year, I fell a lot and my balance felt awful. now, I'm learning to trust myself and be calm, enabling smoother micromovements and easier recovery.

Interesting spin on this topic, and quite correct. Balance and center, quite a bit of it is in the mind once a certain skill set is achieved. I will serve up an example. I coach girls softball, travel team stuff only the best local players....Pony (age 12 ) level. We brought in a new highly skilled 2nd baseman. Had to move current 2nd base to third. Well she was struggling today. Just couldn't get the throw over to first. Out of sorts, confused and upset. I told her, play a game with your mind, visualize the ball in the 1st baseman's mitt before your throw it.... then execute the throw like I know you can. On line with good technique. Bang! 5 crisp on the money throws to first in a row. She was smiling again. Am I a genius? Maybe, but more likely just a coach who understands how the human mind works. As Oboe says, where we think and look, we go. Maybe another thread here? Not at all unlike the "old point the headlight on your belly button down the hill" at all times trick to keep the upper body quiet and let the legs and skis turn under you(getting organized above your skis) It's all in the mind ya know.