Snow Skills

Moguls are a terrain feature that few folks can just conquer with little effort. It takes skill, mental toughness, athleticism, and experience to ski moguls with confidence. Great mogul skiing is built, not found, and there are some very effective exercises you can use to practice for moguls on groomed snow. One of those exercises focuses on making short turns that rely on quick and precise edging to get you in and out of a turn promptly: Hockey Stops.

Imagine how a hockey player stops after skating hard down the ice. The player turns their legs quickly across thier path of travel and tilt their skates to increase the degree of blade edge. The reaction is that the player grinds to a halt crisply, usually with a shower of ice chips. A hockey stop hones your ability to actively steer your feet across gravity while rapidly building up edging angles.

Well, those skills would be useful in mogul skiing and you can develop those movements in comfortable surroundings. Find a groomed, easy trail with a couple hundred yards of clear area directly down gravity. Set up in a wedge facing directly downhill and push off into a straight run. Count to thousand one-two-three and agressively twist your legs to swing the skis directly across gravity, dialing up your edge angles until you stop. Your skis started relatively flat on the snow, allowing them to be twisted and then brought onto edge. Your legs had to go from relatively long to relatively short by the end of the stop; your knees and ankles allowed that to happen by being soft, not stiff. Your weight must have been almost fully on the downhill ski by the stop, or you would have fallen backward up the hill. And when you stopped, your torso probably remained oriented down the hill, while your legs steered your skis until they were perpendicular to gravity. Nice job! Now do a set of 20, to each side, focusing on being as balanced as possible when you come to a stop.

The movements of an effective hockey stop will help you to redirect your skis with good balance and grip in a relatively short amount of time. Practice your short turns through hockey stops and you’ll find more success when skiing moguls.