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Introduction:
The key to being a great freeride skier is to steal some secrets from snowboarders, and ski more like a boarder! How can you ski like a boarder, that’s ridiculous. Boards and skis are totally different! Well the equipment might be a little different but the people standing on them aren’t.
As a skier, people are always coming up to me and saying have you tried boarding, they say it’s easier than skiing, you can go off piste after a few days, you know what I mean. Well I believe this to be true, but not because skiing is harder but because boarding is relatively new and young people worked out a good way of teaching it, without years of history paving the way, also you only have one board so you can only really start one way, across the slope.
What I have done is take some of the snow board theory and apply it to skiing, it really works and soon you will know my secrets to becoming an advanced skier with a smile on your face, after all that’s what it’s all about. What’s the point in spending a week, training, working hard ,trying to keep up with your class or even hurting yourself, if it’s not fun!
This book is written for all abilities from absolute beginners to advanced and should be read from beginning to end. Each chapter builds on the techniques from the previous one and should be followed in sequence.
I would suggest working through this book with one or two friends at home and on the mountain, this way you can make it fun and ski together!!
I haven’t met many people that really enjoy their ski lessons, one of the reasons is that you only spend about 25% of the time actually skiing. By the time you have all gathered, made it to the lift all waited at the top, crawled to somewhere quiet to start, and been talked to for five minuets, there’s not much time for skiing. Then you all snake down the hill wait at the bottom talk again and repeat. What I mean by ‘really’ ski is skiing when you are aware of what you are doing, the problem with following someone else is that you tend to focus on following rather than what your skis are doing. How many times have you got to the bottom of a run and thought, I just totally forgot to do what the instructor said. We’ve all done it!
We learn to ski by muscle memory, this is your body remembering the actions of hundreds of muscles in a complex sequence by doing the thing, skiing. If you tried walk and verbally tell each muscle to move you would probably fall over, the same with skiing it has to be an unconscious act or it wont work. The great thing is most of these complex movements we have already learned by walking jumping and running. We just have to learn how to put them together in a little different order.
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