Snow Skills

There are four basic styles of learning: doing, thinking, seeing, and feeling. Every person generally has one learning style which is most effective for them, with a combination of the other styles playing a part to various degrees. In skiing and riding instruction, these learning styles are the basis for almost every improvement suggestion. As an example, this post explores the doing learning style.

Let’s take an improvement focus and explain it in terms of a doing learning style. So, the skiing improvement focus is isolate your upper body from your lower body. To learn this concept from a doing style, the tip could be “Turn your legs more than you turn your body.” Or “Steer your skis with your legs from the hip down.” Those are ideal suggestions for someone who learns mostly by doing; they are brief, specific, and solely discuss what body part to move to reach the desired improvement.

The riding improvement focus is also isolate your upper body from your lower body. The tip could be “Move your legs such that your body doesn’t twist.” Or “Steer the board with your legs, not your body.”

Doers are active learners; they like to be told what the goal is, how to move their body to reach the goal, and then mostly left alone to work it out for themselves. Doers are partly visual as well, but rarely want to be told how it’s going to feel or have a concept explained in detail. Doers are good candidates to take private lessons; they generally can get the most out of a one-on-one situation with an instructor because they’ll probably take that intense dose of information and explore the motions at length later. Group lessons can work well for a Doer, too, as many folks working on the same movement provides great reinforcement. For an instructor, the mantra for coaching a Doer is to set them up and then get the heck out of their way!