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Chapter 1 – To kill the snow plough!!

The first thing you learn in ski school is how to put your skis on and start to ski. I rarely see people show someone how these very expensive pieces of equipment actually works. The ski is very simple at it’s basic level. Instead you are first taught the dreaded snow plough, put simply you point your skis in a knocked kneed fashion and slide down the hill, if you lean right your turn left (hurr?) and if you lean left you turn right (err?). This to me seems totally unnatural, when you look at an expert skier they seem to lean left when they turn left, a bit like a motorbike going round a corner. So why the difference. Well I’ll tell you, this is by far the quickest way to start skiing, when I say skiing I really mean moving on snow. This is how everybody learns to ski, well up to now. The snow plough is used to get large classes moving straight away so that people can enjoy their holiday. But it has one huge flaw it creates muscle memory that is hard to shake off later. I have taught so many people that have been snow ploughing for so long they just can’t shake it, so much so that they even rely on it as a comfort position when the going gets tough. Just the wrong thing at the wrong time ‘The dreaded plough’.

There are two ways to learn to ski and two graphs to illustrate your progress:

With the plough technique it all starts fine but each year you progress less than the previous year until you hit that intermediate rut, and stay there. This intermediate rut is so common that people have written books and made videos of how to get over it, but I’ve not seen any that teach you how to avoid it in the first place.

If you follow my alternative start you will be much slower after the first few days but each day you will improve and learn the craft of skiing until after a couple of years you will be cursing past your old plough rivals with your eyes closed. It doesn’t stop there when the snow gets tough, icy, heavy, steep, deep, you won’t be phased and drop back into that old plough position and twist a knee or strain you lower back but shriek with joy as these can become the best days to ski!

Ok you say so how do I start? Well like a snowboarder of course.

We start with learning how to stop, some will say, are but we learned how to stop with our snow plough. True but the snow plough stop is very weak, I only use it as an advanced technique (one you don’t need to learn), its only good if it’s to narrow for you to do a proper stop (like skiing to the bar through a crowed slope). So what kind of stop are we talking about, well we call it the hockey stop. This is the kind of stop you see the ski racers do at the end of the race, controlled and efficient. We will start our first lesson by finding an smooth easy green slope, maybe a little steeper than our plough rivals as our stop is so powerful you won’t be able to get going if it’s to shallow. Look for one where snowboarders are learning and that should be about right.

Put your skis on at the bottom (forget poles at this stage) and side step up the hill about twenty feet, note we already have our skis in the right position, across he hill just like the boarders. Once in position we need to adjust our body into the right position. We do this by crouching down and touching our ankles.

This is what I call 100%, totally compressed, we need to stand up with the weight over both skis to about 20% keeping the same body position and weight across our whole feet.

This is what I call your neutral position, and from this neutral position we need to rotate our upper body to face down the hill, arms, shoulders, belly button etc.

Imagine a beginner snowboarder facing down the hill with their board across the hill just like our skis, but because our boots are fastened at a different angle we have to rotate to get in the same position. In skiing and snowboarding we generally go (ski) in the direction that we are facing, so it makes sense that if we want to go straight down the hill we should face down the hill. From this position we are totally in control, if we want to slide sideways down the hill we just need to relax our edges a little until we start moving. The idea is to slide in a straight line down the hill and stop.

At this point a common mistake is to relax the body rotation and not face down the hill if you do this you will start to go across the hill.

 If this happens just dig you edges in and you should stop, if not because you have lost control just sit down on your bum. If you are going to fall this is the best way, both of your skis are pointing in the same direction with no strain on you knees, and you just simply sit down. Compare this with our plough friends, because their plough is a week position they can pick up speed really quickly, cross their skis and fall forwards, this is how you snap your ligaments. No thanks. But hopefully you have started to slide roughly straight, some people call this side slipping, I like to call it controlled stopping. So we slide a little way and then progressively dig our edges in to start to stop. Simple.

To refine this and add a little more control we need to know a little about how the ski works. In skiing we balance with our hands and ski with our feet, most average skiers ski with their shoulders and balance with their upper body. This is totally wrong and in order to qualify this we need to know how the ski works a little.

Take your skis off and look at the shape from underneath, what they call an hour glass shape. If you lay your ski on a flat bit of snow on it’s edge you will be able to see daylight under the middle, if you now apply pressure to the middle pushing your ski into the snow the ski will bend.

This is called adverse camber and is controlled by three factors, pressure, edge (how on it’s edge is it as opposed to flat on the snow) and weight distribution. Most people forget the weight distribution factor which is an equal element in turning the ski, and this is what we will learn first. We will come back to ski mechanics later but for now ‘weight distribution’. Weight distribution is the balance of weight across the length of the ski, it is controlled by the hands. Try standing on the flat in your skis in our neutral 20% position, your weight should be totally central, and your ankles will be quite bent, knees will be bent a little and your back should be almost straight. Your arms should be bent as if you are a goal keeper.

 If we want to move our weight forward we simply move our hands forward a little. This in turn puts a little more pressure on the front of our boots and in turn on the fronts of the skis. If we want to move our weight backwards move the hands back a little and you should feel some pressure on the backs of the boots, and then back to the centre.

Practice this a lot, even at home before you go, this is a very advanced move and one most people never discover, imagine never learning 30% of how to turn a ski?

Now side step up the hill again but this time if you feel you are going off center whilst sliding move your hands in the opposite direction to bring you weight back to the middle. If you think about what is going on between snow and ski, when you put more weight on the front of the ski it causes it to break away a little faster so the fronts of the skis start to go down the hill and the same for the tails. Using this technique you can butterfly down the slope a little forwards and a little backwards just like a snow boarder on their first lesson with one added advantage. You wont fall as often as you can balance on two skis instead of one edge, great! Remember keep your upper body facing down the hill if you want to go straight.

Just a little note on skis and boots, for a normal beginner it is usual to recommend a soft comfortable boot and a short soft ski. This again is all geared towards the snow plough, this position is so unnatural that it can make even the most comfortable boot seem like torture. As we are not going in to this contorted position and are learning to ski by feel and control I would recommend starting with a more advanced boot. After all this is what we are training for. More advanced intermediate boots are stiffer and often fit better, these will allow you to feel what your skis are doing and allow you to make the changes necessary for your balance. As for skis at this stage they are far less important than boots (the opposite to what you would think) go for a newer carving ski for a beginner, quite soft and about three quarters of your height. For even more fun try some snow blades, these are really short skis that are great to start on as you can almost skate around on them due to their short length.

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