Snow Skills

An earlier post discussed the four basic styles of learning: doing, thinking, seeing, and feeling. This post explores the thinking learning style. and does so by explaining the same improvement focus as the previous post; isolate your upper body from your lower body.

To learn this concept from a thinking learning style, the tip for skiing or riding could be “To stay balanced on a pitched slope while moving, your legs need to constantly adjust to the conditions, just like the struts on a car are continually adjusting to the road surface. Those adjustments need a strong position to work from, similar to the way the car’s chassis supports the struts. Let your upper body from the hips up be the base of your leg movements such that the torso is quiet while the legs are busy flexing, extending, and twisting. The less your upper body twists, the more effective your balance will be.”

Thinkers are typically active to passive learners; they want to understand and experience as much as possible before establishing their own deductions. A successful approach to learning by thinking is to put the Thinker in many variations of the same movement with thorough explanations of what they’re doing and why. Thinkers learn partly by feeling and doing, but usually not seeing as they rely more on their own experiences than visual reinforcement of others. Thinkers are good candidates to take private lessons; they typically want to collect as much knowledge as possible and then work it through several times in their own manner to come to their own conclusions. For an instructor, the mantra for coaching a Thinker is to explain a movement in detail through both verbage and actions, encourage them to develop it in their own manner, and provide feedback and reinforcement to their conclusions. Help them to own the concepts!