Taking your skiing and riding to the next level
One of the driving forces of sports is the desire to get better. Skiers and snowboarders take that desire to the extreme, but even the beginner skier or rider yearns to improve — if only to ride the lift all the way to the top and not die of fright on the way down. Getting better in skiing and riding, then, is at the very core of the sport.
But it’s easy to get stuck at a certain comfort level, be that beginner, intermediate or advanced. To help get past those plateaus and move on to the next level, we asked several area pros for their tips and advice.
Here are their pointers, separated by ability levels:
Beginner to intermediate
Control through turning
If this is one of your first winters on skis or a board, a good way to measure your progress is if you’re able to control your speed by turning both ways. If you’re a snowboarder, that means being able to turn on both your heel and toe edges.
“For newer skiers, that wedge shape becomes their main way to control their speed,” says Chris Saylor, director of skiing and riding programs at Okemo Mountain Resort. “Our job is to get them to use turning to control their speed.”
Balance
“There’s no doubt that for a new skier or rider, the feeling of sliding with skis or a board on their feet is going to take some time to get used to,” says David Bowyer, director of the skiing and riding school at Stratton Mountain Resort. “Take some time to move around and get used to the full range of sensations that come with being on the snow.”
Avoid “sitting in the back seat”
Skiing demands you stay responsive and that means a forward stance in the front of your boots. The next time you’re skiing, focus on feeling your shin pressing into the tongue of your boot.
Develop your turning skills
When it comes to making a well-defined turn, your turn should involve your whole leg, Bowyer says. “Your ability to put the skis or board directly across the hill is where you’re going to get the most control,” he says. “If you’re skiing in a wedge or starting to make parallel turns, the ability to round out that turn is critical.”
Look down the hill
As you work on turns of different radiuses, where you look has a strong bearing.
“If your eyes are right on the tips of your skis, obviously you’re going to have a hard time staying responsive to the changes in the terrain,” Saylor says. “Depending on how fast you’re traveling, you should keep your vision a few turns ahead.”
Intermediate to advanced
Build up mileage
While the most basic skills of skiing and riding can be learned in a relatively short amount of time (a few days with instruction will move you from beginner to skiing blue slopes), you can expect to take more time to develop the skills you’ll use on steeper terrain.
“Most people when they start skiing and riding stick to what they know on green circle terrain,” Bowyer says. “But the way to improve is to start to vary your size of turn and speed on new terrain. That doesn’t necessarily mean steeper, but it can mean more undulating or different terrain from what they’ve been working on.”
Get comfortable with speed
When skiing on mostly flat terrain, the body is in a relatively static position, but that will change as you develop speed. While it’s important to test your abilities, Jeff Spring, operations director at Smugglers’ Notch, says selecting the correct terrain at this point is critical.
“When you’ve built up mileage and comfort, you’re going to be able to get into a position of neutral balance where you’re able to steer the skis,” he says. “That neutral position isn’t going to happen when fear gets in the way. You’ve got to replace it with fun.”
Try some ungroomed terrain
If you’re skiing at an intermediate level, consider seeking out trails that haven’t been touched by the groomers.
“When we talk about blue square terrain, it’s a little more static,” says Spring. “We’re trying to promote a dynamic lower body that’s flexing and extending, but sometimes you won’t experience it until you get into that ungroomed terrain.”
Snow of varying conditions is going to reinforce those fundamentals in a big way.
“If you hit that deep patch of snow or that bump and your weight isn’t forward, you might get bucked,” he adds, and that’s a reminder that proper stance really matters.
Develop your edging abilities
Your ability to use your edges isn’t an on-off switch. Instead, think of it as a dimmer control and you’ll use varying amounts depending on the terrain – more on the hard stuff, less in soft powder.
Once you get to that intermediate level, most people are comfortable on the edge and tend to ski that edge a little too long,” says Bowyer. “It’s getting them to release the edge and transition over to the other that becomes the focus for getting students to move to the next level.”
Keep a still upper body
While you’re skiing downhill, imagine you’re holding a camera in your hands that you’re using to film the lift line at the bottom. It’s a common game that many instructors use with students to emphasize separating the torso from the lower body.
“Your lower body is doing the work and your upper body stays still,” says Spring. “That upper-versus-lower body separation is a signature skill that takes you from an intermediate to the next step.”
Advanced to expert
We talked to extreme skier and Sugarbush Resort’s John Egan about teaching skiers how to go from an advanced level of skiing on up.
“At this level, Egan focuses less on movement and more on the fundamental principles to understand, and the most basic problem that lies at the core of every level of skiing — overcoming fear.
“The natural instinct in humans when they’re in a state of fear,” Egan says, “is to back off, to rear up and extend their bodies with arms up.” In skiing, that extended, back in the seat, off-balanced position can spell disaster and what all skiers at any level have to overcome before they can move to the next level.
Fear and the human instinct
At the advanced level, Egan says, “nine times out of ten the biggest problem facing skiers on steep or difficult terrain is not transferring their weight quickly from foot to foot, and in some cases they are not reaching down the hill, or not facing straight down the hill.”
In steeper terrain, Egan explains, “most people are worried about getting across the hill to slow down.” Even advanced skiers fall back into the trap of cutting horizontal to the fall line to cut speed. The cause of the breakdown in the skier’s ability is usually fear.
“If you break it down and watch them ski,” Egan says, “you’ll see the point at which the skier gets scared, and then they become human (and end up in the worst position possible for skiing)… If we were animals, we’d be better skiers; we’d ball up in a crouched position, be at the ready to spring one way or the other, and we’d coming out fighting aggressively if the danger increased. Instead, humans open up and fully extend our bodies and scream.”
To address the problem, Egan says, he first finds the point of fear. Then moves the skier to comfortable terrain where fear is not an issue and Egan and the skier work on technique. Then, Egan says, he takes them on tougher and tougher terrain until the skier is comfortable at each level.
It is important to remember, Egan says, that it is usually fear that stops everyone at whatever level they are stuck in… Fear also travels down the body. You can actually see part of their body not moving with the rest of it.” Egan noted that a lot of skiers have tired quads, for example, because while they can relax their upper body, they keep tension (rigidness) in their quads, rather than to flex their thighs to control speed and momentum. “When you can relax the mind and let the muscles react to the terrain without fear (or restraint), then you can progress to the next level.”
Egan’s law of perpendicularity
We mostly grow up playing in a flat world, Egan says. Think of football, baseball, tennis and most other sports. They are played on perfectly flat surfaces and the body naturally understands that it is balanced at 90 degrees to the playing field.
“In skiing, we start on a slope and that’s the first thing a beginner skier has to learn. At first, you don’t know how to move because gravity is pulling you downward, and your natural reaction is to back up in fear, putting us back on our skis or board and out of position. That’s why our sport is so much harder than others. We have to learn how to move with all these external forces pulling at us…Try to dribble a basketball leaning backwards, or playing tennis leaning back. It doesn’t work. It’s simple ergonomics. So, the first lesson to learn is to keep forward and find that point of balance on the slope.”
The physics of skiing:
If Egan weren’t a wizard on skis, it’s not hard to imagine him being an instructor of physics. When breaking down the fundamentals of the sport, you are effectively in his classroom:
“The thing that’s different in skiing is that we have free energy (rather than propelling ourselves); it’s just gravity pulling us down the hill. We have to learn how to control that energy to manage speed… The speed at which you travel is dictated by the speed by which you move. The basic principle is to ‘move fast, go slow; move slow, go fast.’ Think of the difference of a downhill skier and a slalom skier. The downhiller barely moves his or her body and goes 80 mph; the slalom skier is bouncing all over the place to kill speed (to be able to make the turns)… If you want to change your velocity, you have to change your body position; moving eats up the energy created by the forces of gravity and momentum.”
Got it?
The trick, of course, is to keep heading straight down steep terrain and be quick enough with your feet to check your speed without getting out of control. That takes practice and training.
Jumping:
One key in jumping is transferring weight from one foot to another, and using the jump to cut your speed and momentum, Egan explains. In running, you lead from one foot to the other and launch jumps in the same way. In skiing open terrain, we should think of it like running down a hill. Egan explained that when launching a jump he will often push off sharply on one foot at lift off to cut energy and speed. Then he uses the air as a turn setting up his legs to quickly extend at the last second with his opposite foot hitting slightly before the other. The leg extension absorbs some of the impact and energy, thus also cutting speed, while the landing is already heading against the grain rather than carrying the speed forward in a straight line.
“You need to think of the air as a turn that took place not on the ground,” Egan says.
There are exceptions. “I’m not a big fan of two-footed takeoffs or landings, but if you’re in a freestyle competition and you’re popping backflips off of man-made jumps, then obviously that’s different.”
“The difficulty (in getting air) is that most people see the beginning and end of the jump,” he said, “but they can’t visualize what’s happening in the middle of the jump. The transfer of weight from one foot to the other still happens in the air, which allows you to get set and stomp the landing to maintain control.”
Quick feet and weight transfer
Gravity and momentum never stop, Egan notes, which is why some skiers lose control and then have to react. In the learning phase, Egan advises, just stop. Start fresh, clear your head, and get it back together.
A really good skier can recover because they have quick feet, Egan explains. They can make the necessary weight transfer from foot to foot quickly enough to recover balance, kill speed and regain control.
As for how to move, or teaching specific techniques, Egan is straightforward. “You have to assume that the human body knows how to move. There is nothing new in movement I can teach you. You walk without thinking. You run without thinking. You get milk out of the refrigerator without thinking. If your brain starts trying to control muscle memory, it’ll just mess it up. You can’t think as fast as muscle memory should react, it just won’t happen.”
The task at hand, Egan says, is to relax the mind so the muscles react naturally.
One of the most helpful aids to accomplish that, Egan says, is to watch yourself ski or ride on a video with an instructor offering pointers. Without such aids, Egan said, it’s difficult for the average recreational skier to put in enough time skiing or riding to make the leap.
One answer, Egan said, is taking a half-day or day lessons with video instruction from instructors at that upper level of skiing. “I love working with people who are jazzed about getting better at the sport,” Egan says, “we end up learning a lot more about skiing than the person ever imagines, and correcting some bad habits, but mostly we build confidence through a better understanding of the forces at work and how to handle them. With less fear, it’s a lot more fun.”
