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Chapter 2 – Your first advanced turn

Now we have mastered the controlled stopping lets take it a little further, our first turn. This is probably the hardest thing you will learn from this book, but that’s a good thing as it means it’s all down hill from this point (no pun intended). You are not alone in your quest as the lowly snowboarder has the same challenge.

In order to make this slightly easier we will start with the half turn and stop. Or should I say the quarter turn and stop. It is very important that you have mastered the hockey stop, if you haven’t yet you can use this next drill to help you feel the control. What we want to achieve is a relaxing of the edges to start a slide, then move your hands forward a little by rotating your upper body towards the front as if we are pointing where we want to go. Put in a different way we are starting in our stop position with the skis across the hill and our edges dug in and our upper body rotated and facing down the hill. Then a subtle relaxing of the edges and a little unwinding of the upper body with a little pressure on the fronts of you boots caused by you hands being slightly further forward. This will cause the front of the skis to break away and start to turn. Once your turn has started hold this body position and slide at 45 degrees across the slope.

Then move your hands back until the tails of your skis start to break away, hold this position for a few seconds, then try a firm hockey stop, and remember to face back down the hill during your stop. This will turn your skis across the slope. Work on this for about half an hour slowly increasing the amount you let your skis turn before you stop. Once you are confident at calling the hockey stop at your demand you can let your front tips slide all the way into the vertical and just stop at will. Try to feel as if you are lifting your heals a little (but you don’t actually lift them) and then rotate your ankles in your stop, this can help you come around quickly. This is a huge step forward as most intermediate skiers can’t do this even after a few years, this is due to an unnatural fear of having the skis pointing down the hill. As soon as their skis are pointing down the hill warning bells sound and guess what, out comes the snow plough. If only they could stop like we can, on demand with the hockey stop. Congratulations you have know learned the hardest part about skiing and are now on an equal pace with our snow boarder friends.

Next we need to learn how to finish our turn, this is relatively easy as it is just another hockey stop but in the other direction. Before we were letting our tips slide down the hill until they were pointing straight down the hill and then calling on our stop but in the same direction as we started. In order to complete our turn we need to learn to stop with our skis facing the other way. To do this we can just start with our skis pointing in the opposite direction on the hill and repeat what we learned earlier. Once you have learned to stop both ways you can put it together, once you are facing straight down the hill you are in the same position regardless of which way you started and therefore should be able to stop in ether direction. So just stop in the opposite direction and we have a complete 180 degree turn. Fantastic!

The great thing about this type of turn is that it is a real defensive turn, I call it linked stopping. Linked stopping is again an advanced turn that can help you out of all sorts of difficult situations, particularly, ice, steeps, narrow, or any combination. All of these conditions are dangerous with the snow plough as you have little control.

To recap what we have learned, how to stop with our skis across the hill and our upper body relaxed and facing down the hill, how to ease our weight forwards by relaxing our upper body and moving our hands a little forwards. During all of these exercises our skis have remained parallel and our body in a relaxed neutral position with our weight generally in the centre of the ski. Compare this to traditional technique where our skis point in a triangle wedge shape, weight way too far forwards with shins pushing hard against the front of the boots, and leaning side to side to turn but in the opposite direction?

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