Snow Skills

Here’s a suggestion for improving edging in your skiing. Traditionally, this is a child-centered learning (a.k.a. for the kids) type of tip, but it typically appeals to any skier of all ages due to its effectiveness and simplicity. To improve your edging, move your knees as if they were the headlights of your body.

For the moment, let’s look at this tip from a kid’s coaching perspective. When coaching a kid’s skiing, it’s a great tip to urge them to make their knees like the headlights of their family’s car. This is an excellent child-centered concept as it’s visual, familiar, and clear in its message. Kids can imitate the image of both knees going back and forth together easily and can see the resulting changes in the edges. From this thought, they can grasp that moving the knees over quickly will help make a short turn and also that the more they bend their legs, the more the skis will edge. Simple!

For the adults, here’s what’s going on. On a car, headlights stay the same distance apart, always move exactly in the same manner, and always point in the direction of the car. If you keep your knees the same distance apart, your stance width will be constant and your resulting balance steady through the turn. If your knees move exactly in the same manner, you’ll be applying a very similar amount of edging on both skis, also resulting in steady balance. And if your knees point in the direction of your movement, you’ll be directing your skis with edges and reducing the amount of effort needed to steer them, also adding more balance to the mix.

This tip was about edging, right? Yes, but almost every movement in skiing comes back to balance at some point, and applying your edging like the headlights of a car are movements which will promote excellent edge control and balance together.