Skiing Technique

Hey Steezy, I am a lifelong skier from a snow sports family. This will be my 4th year as a certified ski instructor in Canada. Retired Ski Patroller and satisfied volunteer with CADS ( https://cadsalberta.ca/) .
Few quick comments regarding your youtube vid.

First: you are already a better skier than most people, so GREAT START!
Second: Only so much improvement can be accomplished by watching a video, skiing is about muscle memory and practice practice practice. Hours with an instructor are well worth the cost!
Next: The people that improve the most, are the ones having the most fun. FUN is your first and last priority.

If you really want a critique, here it is:

• You already have great balance and confidence. That's 90% of the battle, keep it up.
• Finish your turns. The physics of skiing is all about speed control. We tell little kids, look at your turns, you should be making "oranges" not "bananas", it's almost more true for adults. strive for a full circle. Think of your turn: from 0 to 90 degrees you just lean over and enjoy the ride, at 90 degrees we introduce edge (google "separation" if you want) by the time you get to 180 you are at max edge and should have slowed down enough to initiate the next turn. Repeat. Skiing is nothing more than an exercise in speed control.
• You counter rotate (most people do), remember the circle (above) when you are at 0 (or 180) you have released max edge, your speed is controlled enough to make the next turn with confidence. Initiate your turn: first ankles, legs, never upper body. Feel the edge, let the skis do their work.

If you can address these two issues, your FUN level will go way up! Your effort level will go way down; you will not be working as hard!

Reading a forum won't make you a better skier, the advice above should be administered on the slope. But we all like talking about it, right?

Good luck this season!

Hi Steezy.
Youre indeed already a good skier.

From what I see, you share the same problem than a lot of other good skier (including a lot of ski instructor). You have the tendency to initiate your turn with your hip by creating an angle (what a lot of people call angulation). Without entering in the details, the high level skier try to concentrate more on inclination than angulation. Most of the time when we use to much the hips, it means that we don't move the feet enough.

So, for me the first thing to work for u is the action of your feet inside your shoes.
The second is the tilting in the begin of the turn.
The third would be the building of the pressure.

So, obviously a forum is not the easiest place to explain things about ski, but I'm gonna try.

First, I just wanna explain something that makes a lot of people going the wrong way. Skiing is a sport where the balance is build from the feet to the upper body (like almost every sports). So what happend on your shoulders and hip, is most of the time a consequence of the feets. If you want to learn somoene to walk, you never will start to learn him what he should do with his arms.
For a strange reason a lot of people does it for skiing. They learn to people how to place the shoulders, hip, etc. before actually working on the feets.

So to make it simple you have 3 very basic movement of the feet.
1. ankle flexion and extension
2. Eversion (often called pronation), inversion (often called supination) it's the tilting movement. You can turn your feet to be balanced on the side of the feet, flat or on the other side
3. Aduction (inside rotation), abduction (outside rotation)

So those 3 movements are very used for skiing. When you want to rotate by drifting, you can use the rotation of the feet. When you want to turn by cutting, you tilt the feet in the direction where you want to go. The ankle flexion and extion will help you to balance at the front or at the back of your ski and eventually initiate pressure change.

It's quite hard for me to explain all those stuff in english and by writing, so I propose you to watch this vidéo :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl0v0Nw8m60

It's in Italian but there are subtitles available. There are a lot of video of them where they explain how we use the feets, but this one is one of the most recent.

So I hope it help you, I just spoke about feets because all of the topics I open are very technical and long, so if you start with the feet, it give you already a lot of work.