Snow Skills

Compliment the balance of your body in skiing with the movement of your arms.

The movements of your arms will help to fine-tune the balance generated by your body. Stand in a balanced stance and place your forearms roughly parallel with the snow. Keeping your head facing straight ahead, explore the range to which you can move your hands without taking them out of your vision; these movements help balance. Then explore the movements that take your hands out of sight; these movements will not help balance.

Now, make some turns and try to keep your hands where you can see them. Each hand should move independently to assist any variation in your balance while moving. Add in a pole swing that meets these guidelines and the entire body will begin constantly moving to maintain balance. These arm movements will also help you in skiing terrain such as moguls and trees.

Want to become an expert skier? Use your pole swings all the time.

The motion of your poles can provide a significant boost to your skiing skills on diamond terrain. The ability to swing your outside pole to establish the beginning on a new turn will add timing and flow to your skiing and produce steadier balance and movements in higher-gravity areas. Focus on swinging the pole evenly out and back and let that swing be the result of wrist movements as opposed to a reaching motion by the arm. Skiing without a pole swing is like The Lone Ranger without Tonto: it’s really noticeable that something’s missing.

It’s probably the oldest skiing tip in the book; stay forward! Having trouble with control? Stay forward! Want to start parallel skiing? Stay forward! Want to ski faster? Stay forward! Fine, got it; can do it great in the living room. But just how does one stay forward on slick, uneven, steep snow at speed? Read the rest of this entry »

You can’t shake your tracks; they’re going to follow you everywhere you go in the snow. They can tell you a lot about your turns if you let them: find a stretch of relatively untracked snow and make a series of turns. How do they look? Is each turn a steady C-shape like a half a ball (that’s good) or do you see a J-shape like a fish hook?
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Cheers and hello to fellow Sugarloafers Jano and Crusher who are vacationing out in British Columbia. These two hard-corps free-heelers are driving cross-country in their camper for an extended vacation now that the snow’s leaving us here in the Northeast. Here’s a telemark tip for all of us, with them in mind: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the chicken or the egg question of skiing: do the hands time your turns or do your turns time the hands? In terrain and conditions such as moguls, steeps, trees, powder, and Spring snow, it really doesn’t matter which answer is right. Either way, a series of relatively short linked turns are best made by keeping the hands and legs working in concert. Key to those movements is the commitment to the turn that a good pole swing adds to your skiing.

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Steep terrain in itself is not necessarily difficult; it’s the combination of pitch, terrain, and snow conditions which combine to a degree of difficulty at any one moment. As brief examples, the White Nitro trail at Sugarloaf/USA in Maine has a 52 degree pitch, but is usually groomed smooth corderoy from edge to edge. The Broccoli Garden Glade at Sugarloaf/USA has about a 10 degree pitch, but contains endless trees at a 10 foot spacing, undulations in topography, and inconsistent snow conditions. Which trail is more difficult? As we say ‘herah’ in Maine, “Well, it depends.”

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Consider why a NASCAR stock car has a wider body than the family mini-van. The forces on a stock car in a high speed turn are better managed when the wheelbase is wider. You’ll find similar sensations making turns on steep terrain where the forces of gravity and turning are higher. Like the stock car, you’ll be more athletic and consequently have more control on the steeps if you use a wide stance.

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An earlier post discussed the importance of using hip angulation to create more effective edging on ice or hard snow. The use of hip angulation in the last half of the turn will improve your edge grip, especially in a longer turn. You can apply that hip angulation more efficiently if you think about your body representing the center of a clock face.

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